The online paper chase

Standing in the library ploughing through the tables of contents of journals has never been much fun, so it’s no surprise that electronic searching of the titles and abstracts of papers has become the norm. Medline is the usual source of bibliographic data for biomedical scientists (see Curr Biol 1997, 7:R208), offering citation information from more than 7300 publications, both well-known and obscure. It used to be that the data were provided only on CD ROMs, a somewhat cumbersome medium. Now, access to Medline records on the web allows fast and convenient searching of the records — of which there are 8–9 million (and more than 8 gigabytes of data). This information can be obtained through many different service providers, and although all are based on Medline records, the features and costs vary wildly. In three cases, searching of the records can lead directly to the full electronic text of some journals, cutting out the second part of the literature search — standing in the library and photocopying papers. Other providers offer ‘document delivery’: they will send, fax or courier an article to you, for a fee. Most of the providers that charge for their services include several databases, of which Medline is only one — good for institutions, but pricey for the individual user. The NCBI PubMed project has all the Medline data plus preMedline records (before the MeSH indexing key words have been added) and links to abstracts of related articles. BioMedNet Evaluated Medline, as its name suggests, offers not only Medline records, but links to evaluations of papers in the Current Opinions journals. It is also the only service that allows you to browse through the tables of contents of journals.