Seek and ye shall maybe find 英文参考文献.docVIP

/2000/1/5/comment/1005.1 Comment Seek and ye shall maybe find Gregory A Petsko Address: Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham MA 02454-9110, USA. E-mail: petsko@ Published: 10 November 2000 GenomeBiology 2000, 1(5):comment1005.1–1005.2 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2000/1/5/comment/1005 ? GenomeB (Print ISSN 1465-6906; Online ISSN 1465-6914) The other day I became what George Orwell might have called an unperson. I was searching the US National Library of Medicine?s Medline database for an article that I wrote a number of years ago. I wanted to cite it in a paper I was writing (hardly anyone else cites it these days, so I like to; besides, it actually was relevant), and it was easier just to download the citation than to dig it out of my reference database since I was logged on to Medline anyway. But I couldn?t find it. Searching with my name, the names of my coauthors, the journal and year, the title keywords - all failed. Anyone who saw the classic, creepy 1960s television series The Twilight Zone will understand how I felt. I actu- ally went to my files and dug out the reprint so I could be certain I really had written the paper and wasn?t in the grip of some grotesque delusion. (At my age, it never hurts to check one?s memory.) Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the blind trust students - and, let?s face it, the rest of us - place in computerized literature searches. There is no denying their value. Assembling a collection of references for a research article or review is orders of magnitude faster using such tools than it would be by hand. But this efficiency comes with a hidden cost: many of the literature databases, espe- cially the free ones, limit their coverage in ways that are not obvious to the casual user.