Keeping up with the Research Literature through Reprint Requests

In active research fields, knowledge grows exponentially.1 As a consequence, researchers and clinicians rapidly fall behind their fields of expertise if they do not constantly absorb new developments. Although attendance to professional conferences can provide a general awareness of recent developments, one can acquire detailed knowledge of new material only by reading full research reports in the published literature. Since my graduate-school days in the early 1980s, I have monitored the literature in my field (thermal physiology and circadian biology) through computerized literature searches. Since 1992, I have used a professional literature awareness service to help me keep up with the burgeoning research literature. The service I use is Personal Alert, which is provided by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia, but many other services are available from ISI and from various other companies. ISI searches an average of 24,000 research articles each week based on search terms that I deemed to be optimal and provides me with a list (containing abstracts and authors' addresses) of about 20 potential articles each week. Usually, two or three of these 20 articles are of actual relevance to me. As a result, I send out an average of 114 reprint requests each year. Based on my own research on literature search outcomes, I estimate that my reprint requests cover 50 percent of the literature in my field.2,3 Although missing half of the literature may sound like a poor outcome, I should point out that this is an excellent outcome when compared to that of noncomputerized approaches. I estimate that a scientist or clinician who only reads articles that he or she comes upon by simply browsing a few major publications in the field will reach less than 5 percent of the existing literature. Also, the half of the literature missed in computerized literature searches corresponds in great part to articles published in journals of lower scientific prestige. The number of reprints I received as a percentage of those I requested remained fairly constant at 85 percent from 1992 to 1998. Because of the strength of American science, 41 percent of all reprint requests were addressed to researchers in the United States, leaving only 59 percent for the rest of the world. For the years 1993 to 1996, I kept information about the addresses to which the reprint requests were mailed, and was able to determine that the return rate of 85 percent applies to foreign addresses to the same extent as to U.S. addresses. Regarding the 15 percent of the reprint requests that are not honored, it would be unreasonable to expect even 1 percent to be due to loss of request cards or the reprints themselves in the mail. Most likely, the authors are unable or unwilling to send their reprints. As a matter of fact, only about half of the 85 percent of authors who do send their reprints do it in a timely fashion. Of course, delays in foreign mail could account for receipt delays of a week or two. Worthy of special mention are two reprints, one from the U.S. and the other from Canada, that arrived 48 weeks (a whole year) and 68 weeks (17 months) after I requested them, respectively. With a return rate of 85 percent, half of which arrive within a month, reprint requests seem to still be an effective way to keep up with the literature. Missing reprints can be photocopied at the local library (if the library owns the particular journal) or ordered from a variety of professional reprint suppliers such as ISI and UnCover. In terms of costs, reprint request cards require 20 cents postage within the United States and 50 cents postage for foreign mail. This compares to about $10 per reprint (plus delivery charges) when purchased through a professional reprint supplier. Roberto Refinetti, Ph.D. (refinetti@circadian.org), is a research scientist at the Circadian Rhythm Laboratory, 504 Lake Colony Drive, Birmingham, AL 35242. He is author of more than 100 articles in professional journals. D.J.S. Price, Little Science, Big Science, and Beyond, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986. (This book may be purchased from Amazon.com) R. Refinetti, "Online coverage of the literature on thermal physiology," International Journal of Biomedical Computing, 24:127- 131, 1989. R. Refinetti, "Retrieval performance in online search in thermal physiology," Computers and Biomedical Research, 23:32-36, 1990.

Keeping up with the Research Literature through Reprint Requests

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