Scientific Medical Database and Bibliographic Search Engines in French

Access to scientific medical journals is of para-mount importance for physicians or nurses who wish to keep their knowledge up to date, to document the management of a patient, or to engage in research. Beyond the Anglo-Saxon tools (PubMed, Google Scholar) that involve performing documentary research in English and mainly list English resources, there are tools that allow a search in French and cover resources in French much more comprehensively than the Anglo-Saxon tools. First of all, we present the CISMeF French portal (Catalogue et index des sites medicaux de lan-gue francaise) opening access to a database focusing on medi-cal Internet resources in French, and the French medical lite-rature database LiSSa (Litterature scientifique medicale francophone en sante), both using the search engine in French HeTOP (Health Terminology/Ontology Portal). Other data-base and search engines in French are then presented, either generalists (Summon, Wikipedia Medical) or dedicated to specialized topics (Recomedical, VIDAL, Orphanet, Terato-genicity). They are mostly interfaced and connected to Pub-Med. Their usefulness on a day-to-day basis seems indispu-table to us, both for the "cold" document search and directly for the management of patients in the office or hospital.