NCBI Bookshelf: Inside a Book

Explore book features including navigating chapters, defining terms, exploring references, searching within a text, citing a book, and using the pdf. In this example, we explore the GeneReview for HFE-hemochromatosis.
NCBI Bookshelf: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/
To learn more about National Library of Medicine resources, see learn.nlm.nih.gov/.
Transcript:
Let’s look inside a book and explore some features of the Bookshelf.
We’re going to use the browse function to find a book we’re familiar with.
Click on the Browse Titles link.
Let’s say we want to read the GeneReview for hemochromatosis.
We’ll use the Browse filter to find:
GeneReviews
The results show a list of books that have the term in the order the books were published.
There is only one result for GeneReviews
Let’s look inside by clicking on the title.
The introductory page to the book includes citation, publishing, and copyright information, and then a summary of the book.
Scrolling down, you’ll find a table of contents and links to each chapter.
We’ll click H to look for a chapter about hemochromatosis.
We see listed HFE-Related Hemochromatosis.
Click on the chapter title to view this chapter.
On the left side of the page there is a Summary.
On the right side of the page there are links to the different sections of the GeneReview.
There is also a Go to dropdown to jump to different sections of the page.
Let’s follow the link to Genetic Counseling.
Linked terms in the text will pop up definitions from the glossary.
Linked references in the text will pop up the full citation and links to PubMed Central and PubMed.
If you want to search for a specific word or phrase in the book, there is a special search box to search within the book you’re reading at the top of each chapter or Bookshelf page.
For example, let’s search for iron absorption.
Click Search GeneReviews to find any instances of this term within the book.
Our results show which chapters in the book have the term, iron absorption.
If we click “Show details” we can see the section of the chapter that contains the search terms.
Let’s click on Summary to go back to our chapter on HFE-Related Hemochromatosis.
Note that our search terms are bolded in the chapter.
A couple of other handy Bookshelf features can be found at the top right of every chapter or page.
You can Cite this Page.
A properly formatted citation will appear that you can copy and paste.
Also at the top right of the page is a link to a PDF version of this page or chapter.
The pdf version is useful for downloading or annotating your own copy.