HARPER@finuh.bitnet ("ROBERT HARPER, FINLAND") (06/06/89)
8888888888 888 8888888888 8888888888 888 8888888888888
8888888888 8888888888 8888888888 888
888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888
888888888 888 888 888 888888888 888 888
888888888 888 888 888 888888888 888 888
888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888
8888888888 888 8888888888 8888888888 888 888
8888888888 888 8888888888 8888888888 888 888
No 8
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
INDEPENDANT NEWSLETTER PRODUCED AT HELSINKI UNIVERSITY, FINLAND
<< EDITED BY ROBERT HARPER >>
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
It would appear that in recent months there has been a genuine interest
in the new Bboard on BIONET which deals with the tables of contents
from various scientific journals. I have spoken to many scientists in
Finland who are very grateful for this service since it gives them a
three month heads start on the battle for requesting reprints from the
original author. Since this is rather a topical subject I have decided
to do a review of Current Contents on Disk. I have just installed it at
our laboratory so I thought it might be good to give my impressions of
this commercial product (Ed. Easy up there Rob this is BITNET/EARN you
know.....)
For some time our laboratory has been subscribing to Current Contents
for the life sciences, so when it was recently announced that it was
now available on diskette, we thought it might be a worthwhile
proposition to investigate. We ordered it on a 3" diskette for a PC
but it is also available in the larger 5" format and also for the MAC.
The price was about $253. If the disks come once a week, and there are
52- 70 disk in the year, then a quick calculation reveals that you
would be hard pressed to buy the disk themselves for that price, let
alone the information. (Ed. Looks like a bargain)
About a couple of weeks after we placed our order the first disks
arrived. We soon discovered that we needed a programme disk to make the
package work. It arrived about one week later. The programme package
contains a easy to use USERS GUIDE which takes you through the basics
of installing the programme on your computer, the programme itself, and
batch of REQUEST-A-PRINT forms for your dot matrix printer.
Installation is completely automatic and is taken care of by a BAT file
thoughtfully provided. This creates a directory on your hard disk
called CCOD (Current Contents on Disk). There are 5 main files.
1) CC.EXE the main programme
2) CC.HLP help files for the main programme
3) PKUNPAK.EXE decompresses data from the weekly diskettes
4) SETUP.EXE Customization according to hardware
5) INSTALL.BAT A batch file for getting the system on your hard
disk.
As you can imagine the whole Current Contents on disk might be expected
to take up considerable space so if you want to look at a lot of issues
at one session then make sure you have a hard disk big enough to handle
the job. A typical diskette has about 600-700K of info on it, and a
couple of times the issue has been so big that TWO diskettes arrived in
the post. The information on the disks are archived to save space. If
we have a look inside the 89052221.ARC, which is CC issue 21 for 22nd
of May 1989, we can see what its contents are like.
Searching Archive: 89052221.ARC
Filename Length Method Size Ratio Date Time
-------- ------ ------ ------ ----- ---- ----
ADDRESS.DIC 55564 Crunched 33130 41% 05-11-89 16:43:10
ARTICLE.DAT 362765 Unknown 333122 9% 05-11-89 16:48:38
ARTICLE.IDX 10228 Squeezed 8575 17% 05-11-89 16:48:40
ARTICLE.PTR 153392 Squeezed 126895 18% 05-11-89 16:48:00
AUTHOR.DIC 107233 Unknown 58596 46% 05-11-89 16:39:58
DICTION.IDX 2394 Crunched 1928 20% 05-11-89 16:50:16
DISCIPL.DIC 340 Crunched 274 20% 05-11-89 16:47:20
DOCUMENT.DIC 189 Crunched 171 10% 05-11-89 16:35:18
GAPAGE.DIC 24555 Crunched 11565 53% 05-11-89 16:48:00
ISSUE.DAT 9747 Crunched 5040 49% 05-11-89 16:32:04
LANGUAGE.DIC 37 Crunched 35 6% 05-11-89 16:34:02
SOURCE.DIC 2357 Crunched 1661 30% 05-11-89 16:44:30
TITLE.DIC 101715 Unknown 58795 43% 05-11-89 16:38:58
---- ------ ------ -----
0013 830516 639787 23%
Luckily the user does not need to worry about ARCING since the main
programme is designed to take care of that. You simply start up the
programme with CC and place the current week's diskette in the A drive
and ask CC to load it for you. The files are then decompressed and
copied onto a separate directory on your hard disk from where you can
get down to the real business of looking for the information that you
want.
The main programme presents you with a pull down menu with the
following options.
CC Issue Browse Search Articles Orders
CC ISSUE
Under the first option you can LOAD, OPEN, DELETE CC files on your hard
disk, or visit DOS or quit to DOS. We are keeping the current month on
hard disk, but the back issues are kept by the side of the computer so
they can be loaded and searched at any time when anybody needs them.
BROWSE
The browse option allows you to look at the data by ISSUE, DISCIPLINE
or JOURNAL. In each CC ISSUE the journals are grouped by discipline,
and the disciplines are ordered alphabetically
DISCIPLINE CONTENTS
Animal & Plant Science
Biochemistry & Biophysics
Chemistry
Clinical Medicine
Experimental Biology & Medicine
Immunology
Microbiology & Cell Biology
Molecular Biology & Genetics
Multidisciplinary
Neurosciences & Behavior
Pharmacology
Physiology
If your discipline of interest is MOLECULAR BIOLOGY & GENETICS the
programme will automatically select those journals that deal with that
area. If you are interested in looking at individual JOURNALS then
there are about 100 different ones to choose from.
SEARCH
The third option is the SEARCH option, and this is were the programme
shows what it can do. We have it on a PS/80 with a 80386 processor and
there is no hanging around and waiting for the machine to do work. The
queries are answered very fast. One of the nicest features of the
programme is that it allows you to define a PROFILE which you can use
at every session to search for KEYWORDS that are of interest to you.
For example lets say you are interested in NUCLEOTIDE SEQUENCES you
simply enter the SEARCH STATEMENT "nucleotide sequenc*", which would
look for the occurrence of those words in the title of any article
published that week, and give you more information about it.
The * wildcard will pick up words like "sequence", "sequences", or
"sequencing". If you have a favourite author you can also make a
profile up for him so that any time he writes an article the search
will find out which journal he has published it in and tell you about
it.
ARTICLES & ORDERS
For example if I give the search string NUC* SEQ* in the TITLE then for
CC Issue 21 May 22 1989 in about a couple of seconds the programme will
discover 7 hits. By being very specific about the search strings, you
can select just those topics that are of interest to you.
Author-Title : Search Results (Set #1)
Pevzner, PA Linguistics of Nucleotide Sequences .1. The Significance...
Pevzner, PA Linguistics of Nucleotide Sequences .2. Stationary Words...
Danner, DJ Construction and Nucleotide Sequence of a cDNA Encoding it...
Srinivasan, A Molecular Characterization of HIV-1 Isolated from a Serum...
Sodeinde, OA Nucleotide Sequence of the Plasminogen Activator Gene of...
Nanney, DL Shifting Ditypic Site Analysis - Heuristics for Expanding...
Berdichevskii, Determination of the Nucleotide Sequence of the Son3 Frag...
Once the hits have been displayed you can view them as Author/Title or
as the Full Record. In this case if we want to look at the Danner
article in more detail it is just a matter of highlighting it and
selecting the Full Record option.
Full record : Search Results (Set #1)
Author DJ Danner, S Litwer, WJ Herring, J Pruckler
Title Construction and Nucleotide Sequence of a cDNA Encoding the Full-
Length Preprotein for Human Branched Chain Acyltransferase
Journal Journal of Biological Chemistry 264: 13 (MAY 5 1989)
Page(s) 7742-7746
GenArt U3266
Discipl. Biochemistry & Biophysics
Document Article
Language English
Address DJ Danner, Emory Univ, Sch Med, Dept Pediat, Div Med Genet,
Atlanta, GA 30322
When you are within the ARTICLES option you are presented with extra
options at the bottom of the screen which are as follows:
Contents View PIC GA R-A-R MarkAll File Print
Briefly the options that were most useful for us were PIC (Personal
Interest Checklist) which allows you to keep a special list that is of
interest to you. R-A-P (Request a print) which allows you to load some
specially prepared labels into your printer.
With the ORDERS option all those articles marked with R-A-P, can be
selected. The programme then prints out the author's address, and the
title of the article that you want. It also prints out your return
address on a removable sticky label, so that all that the author has to
do is put his article is an envelope and affix the label with your
address on it and post it off. This is a very thoughtful and convenient
concept.
Finally there is the possibility to extract the articles into straight
ascii files which can then be worked on with a wordprocessor to make up
your own literature reference database. Both Dialog and Medline styles
are supported. (Ed. No more... the tedious job of writing out references)
CONCLUSIONS.
When introducing new software to scientists at our department there is
always a period of trouble shooting and user education. With CCOD, I
have been pleasantly surprised that the usual "hand holding" has been
minimal, and that the software is so intuitive that it has been easy
for PC users to learn. (Ed. Expect they will have a field day on the
MAC)
Disclaimer: Personal views of satisfied customer.
Rob "What you want... baby we got it" Harperhrmbdkc@UUNET.UU.NET (06/08/89)
Has anyone tried REFERENCE UPDATE ,which is similar to te Current Contents facility described in Biobit 8? How do they compare ? We plan to buy a current awareness package something like one of the above and cannot decide which to get. End users opinions are much better than the marketing companies! Kathy Cheah thanks for replies