Resource of the Week: PILOTS (Published International Literature On Traumatic Stress)
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

This excellent database is one that almost got away. We failed to include it in our round-up of free resources from information vendors a couple of weeks ago — because we were not aware of it. So we’re grateful that Tom Dalic, area sales manager with ProQuest in the UK, brought it to our attention.

PILOTS — “an electronic index to the worldwide literature on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental-health consequences of exposure to traumatic events — is produced by the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Although sponsored by the VA, its scope is not limited to PSTD among veterans. And anyone can use it freely; no account or password is necessary.

Because the “plumbing” for this database is provided by ProQuest’s CSA Illumina, it offers elegant search interfaces for both novices and experienced information professionals. The simple search form features a familiar keyword search box and a dropdown menu that allows you to restrict your search to a particular date range. A Search Tips link under the keyword box quickly links you to help.

Click the Advanced Search tab (green), and you’ll suddenly have many more options, including field and boolean searching, customizable date ranges, and more.

The purple Search Tools tab is for the serious info pro, offering options to utilize search history, “command” searching using field codes, access to the PILOTS thesaurus, and to a variety of indexes (i.e., author, journal, publication type, tests and measurements). (Note: If your institution subscribes to CSA’s proprietary databases, you’ll be able to hop to any of these from search forms.)

Though registration is not required to use PILOTS, as mentioned earlier, if you want to set up a profile here, you can create “alerts” — e.g., saved searches that will automatically run for you every week, with results forwarded by e-mail.

Subject coverage here, according to CSA:

• post-traumatic stress disorder or acute stress disorder (with or without reference to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)
• the assessment, description, prevention, or treatment of any psychiatric disorder, especially dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple personality disorder), other dissociative disorders, or borderline personality disorder, associated etiologically or epidemiologically with exposure to a traumatic event, or to an event experienced as traumatic by the population under discussion
• the preparation or provision of mental health services to a traumatized population or a population at risk of experiencing traumatic events
• issues of professional ethics, scientific methodology, or public policy relating to traumatized populations.

Updated monthly, the database contains almost 33,000 records as of October 2007.

PILOTS is part of the PTSD Information Center, which contains a wealth of information in addition to the database. If this is a topic of interest to you, you’ll want to spend some time browsing here.

And you also may be interested in a new report from the Institute of Medicine, which we posted on DocuTicker earlier this week: Gulf War and Health: Volume 6. Physiologic, Psychologic, and Psychosocial Effects of Deployment-Related Stress

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Databases, Directories, and Guides, Resource of the Week, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.