Tools And Technology

Software Author: Franklin Hoke, pp.18 Date:June 27,1994 Researchers increasingly are discovering the virtues of personal bibliographic-database software pack- ages-- programs that can help them cut long, tedious hours from the process of preparing the often-extensive bibliographies accompanying their scientific manuscripts. AND SOFTWARE The following companies produce online and CD-ROM bibliographic- reference databases or software products to create and manage personal bibliographic databases of references obtained from such sources. Please contact the companies directly for more information concerning specific products. Balboa Software 61 Lorraine Dr. Willowdale, Ontario M2N 2E3 Canada Tel: (416) 730-8980 Fax: (416) 730-9715 Circle No. 226 on Reader Service Card BIOSIS 2100 Arch St. Philadelphia, Pa. 19103 Tel: (215) 587-4800 Fax: (215) 587-2041 Circle No. 228 on Reader Service Card Biosoft P.O. Box 10938 Ferguson, Mo. 63135 Tel: (314) 524-8029 Fax: (314) 524-8129 Circle No. 229 on Reader Service Card CD-Plus Inc. 333 Seventh Ave. Fourth Floor New York, N.Y. 10001 Tel: (800) 950-2035 Fax: (212) 563-3784 Circle No. 230 on Reader Service Card Chemical Abstracts Service STN International 2540 Olentangy River Rd. Columbus, Ohio 43210 Tel: (614) 447-3600 Fax: (614) 447-3713 Circle No. 001 on Reader Service Card Compact Cambridge Division of Cambridge Scientific Abstracts 7200 Wisconsin Ave. Bethesda, Md. 20814 Tel: (800) 843-7751 Fax: (301) 961-6720 Circle No. 002 on Reader Service Card DataChip Corp. 11736 Raleigh Dr. Omaha, Neb. 68164 Tel: (402) 496-9662 Fax: (402) 496-9662 Circle No. 003 on Reader Service Card Dialog Information Services Inc. 3460 Hillview Ave. Palo Alto, Calif. 94304 Tel: (415) 858-2700 Fax: (415) 858-7069 Circle No. 004 on Reader Service Card Institute for Scientific Information 3501 Market St. Philadelphia, Pa. 19104 Tel: (800) 523-1850 Fax: (215) 386-6362 Circle No. 227 on Reader Service Card Niles & Associates Inc. 800 Jones St. Berkeley, Calif. 94710 Tel: (510) 559-8592 Fax: (510) 559-8683 Circle No. 005 on Reader Service Card Oberon Resources 147 E. Oakland Ave. Columbus, Ohio 43201 Tel: (800) 243-3833 (US, CAN, MEX) All other countries: (614) 294-0718 Fax: (614) 294-7980 Circle No. 006 on Reader Service Card Personal Bibliographic Software Inc. 525 Avis Dr., Suite 10 Ann Arbor, Mich. 48108 Tel: (313) 996-1580 Fax: (313) 996-4672 Circle No. 007 on Reader Service Card Pro Tem Software Inc. 3790 El Camino Real Suite 389 Palo Alto, Calif. 94306 Tel: (800) 533-6922 Fax: (415) 323-0611 Circle No. 008 on Reader Service Card REFMENU 940 Contra Costa Dr. El Cerrito, Calif. 94530 Tel: (510) 642-2286 Fax: (510) 643-6264 Circle No. 009 on Reader Service Card Research Information Systems Inc. Camino Corporate Center 2355 Camino Vida Roble Carlsbad, Calif. 92009-1572 Tel: (619) 438-5526 Fax: (619) 438-5573 Circle No. 010 on Reader Service Card Research Software Design 2718 S.W. Kelly St. Suite 181 Portland, Ore. 97201 Tel: (503) 796-1368 Fax: (503) 241-4260 Circle No. 011 on Reader Service Card Sidereal Technologies Inc. P.O. Box 30 263 Center Ave. Westwood, N.J. 07675 Tel: (201) 666-6262 Fax: (201) 666-8119 Circle No. 012 on Reader Service Card SilverPlatter Information Inc. 100 River Ridge Dr. Norwood, Mass. 02062-5043 Tel: (800) 343-0064 Fax: (617) 769-8763 Circle No. 013 on Reader Service Card Trinity Software P.O. Box 960 Main Street Campton, N.H. 03223 Tel: (603) 726-4641 Fax: (603) 726-3781 Circle No. 014 on Reader Service Card Westing Software 2960 Paradise Dr. Tiburon, Calif. 94920 Tel: (415) 435-9343 Fax: (415) 435-6286 Circle No. 015 on Reader Service Card Introduced in the early 1980s, these programs allow an investigator to maintain a sophisticated reference database specific to his or her studies. Once assembled, such a database can be turned to many different research purposes. Among the most useful of these, scientists say, is automatically generating properly formatted manuscript bibliographies. The task of building a thorough bibliographic database in the first place, however, can be quite time-consuming in itself, especially if each reference must initially be keyed in. The answer to this problem, for a growing number of scientists, is improved bibliographic-database software designed to import references from electronic sources-- including online databases, CD-ROM data-bases, and subscriptions to reference research services--directly into their personal databases. "That's how lots of people are using [this] software--and those that aren't, should be," says library automation consultant Pamela R. Cibbarelli, who heads her own firm, Cibbarelli's, in Huntington Beach, Calif. She is also editor of the Directory of Library Automation Software, Systems, and Services (Medford, N.J., Learned Information Inc., 1994). Ideally, importing references should be as automatic a process as printing out a bibliography. Historically, however, attempts to import references from electronic databases have met with varied levels of success and frustration, because the databases use widely differing entry formats that can cause the computerized process to stumble. Producers of bibliographic-database software have worked hard on the problem, and today the process of electronic reference importation--although still not infallible--is much smoother. The new ease with which references can be brought into personal databases dovetails well with the continuing growth in use of the Internet among scientists and the increasing presence of CD-ROM and electronic databases in libraries and on campus networks, information professionals say. "There's an enormous amount of interest in importing references, especially with the advent of free and low-cost searching," says Sue Stigleman, a former librarian at the Health Sciences Library of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of a recent review of bibliography- formatting software (Database, 16:24-38, February 1993). "As people can do more and more of that right from their own personal computers--just capture references and dump them into their database--importing is going to become even more important than it is now." Once bibliographic references are imported and integrated into the database, the leading programs then allow a scientist to search individual database fields, such as author, title, and user-selected key words. Some programs include the ability to create or import fully searchable abstracts. Such a personal database can serve as an extremely valuable research tool, pulling together, in a moment, a sharply focused group of references relevant to whatever question the researcher may be currently at work on. Perhaps the most sought-after feature of these programs, however, is their ability to help a prospective author automatically generate bibliographies of virtually any length, in the required formats of leading scientific publications. And if the paper is rejected by one journal, a few keystrokes at the computer will generate a new version of the paper with the bibliography properly formatted for the next journal. Among such programs are: Bookends Pro from Westing Software, Tiburon, Calif.; EndNote from Niles and Associates Inc., Berkeley, Calif.; Library Master from Balboa Software, Willowdale, Ontario, Canada; Papyrus from Research Software Design, Portland, Ore.; Pro-Cite from Personal Bibliographic Software Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Reference Manager, from Research Information Systems Inc., Carlsbad, Calif. Citation from Oberon Resources, Columbus, Ohio, is another, similar program that runs exclusively as a utility program within WordPerfect for Windows, a popular word-processing program from WordPerfect Corp., Orem, Utah. Prices range from $99 for the total Papyrus package to $590 for the Pro-Cite system, including importation software. Translation Tactics Producers of personal bibliographic-database programs take two main approaches to the task of importing references. The most common is to provide users with specific file- conversion modules, or filters, designed to translate references from a given set of widely used databases into the format used by the personal-database program. The other is to allow the user to design or customize file-conversion routines to import from whatever database he or she is using. The second approach, although more complex and demanding of the user, is growing in popularity. Some programs offer a combination of these approaches. "The general trend is toward more customizability by the user," says Stigleman. "The major programs are taking a much broader view and recognizing that people go out and get information from all sorts of places and want to bring it in [to their databases] without having to retype it." Stigleman adds, however, that users should think twice before abandoning the set of file conversions provided by the software producer. Customizing a conversion "is picky, tedious work for the user," she says. Some of the programs using the pre-formatted conversions require the user to buy the filters bundled separately from the main bibliographic-database program. For example, EndNote offers EndLink, Pro-Cite has Biblio-Link II, and Reference Manager markets Capture. Papyrus, on the other hand, includes its conversion software in its main program, as does Bookends Pro. Among the commercial vendors of databases from which references can be imported using these conversion packages are: BIOSIS, based in Philadelphia; BRS Information Technologies of McLean, Va.; CD-Plus Inc. of New York; Chemical Abstracts Service/STN International in Columbus; Dialog Information Services Inc., located in Palo Alto, Calif.; the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia; and SilverPlatter Information Inc. of Norwood, Mass. Several databases of particular importance to biomedical researchers--Medline, most prominently--are produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Md., and are available directly from NLM via the Internet or CD-ROM. But they are also offered by many major commercial database suppliers, and each supplier's version requires its own file-conversion routine. "We support 31 different Med-line versions," says Alison Cevolani, a product marketing representative for Reference Manager. "The data is all the same. It's just how it looks that's different." The list of Medline versions supported by Reference Manager even includes the one available on the University of Southern California campus network, Cevolani says. Counting the Medline versions, Reference Manager supports more than 100 database sources. A new version of EndNote's EndLink module, scheduled for release for the Macintosh in the fall, provides an extensive selection of filters for major databases but also allows users to customize file filters when necessary, says Emanuel Rosen, Niles and Associates' vice president for marketing. Other programs that allow their users to customize importation routines, according to Stigleman, include Library Master and Pro-Cite. Papyrus has long allowed users to customize their importation routines. Papyrus also provides a large library of database filters--more than 100 at last count. "When there is a change by an online service, some of our more savvy users can just change the format on their own," says Dave Goldman, president of Research Software Design and the author of Papyrus. "Others will just call us and we give them instructions as to what to type in Papyrus to update their format." A nearly foolproof way to import electronic references, for those who can afford the expense, is to subscribe to one of the diskette reference services specifically coordinated with a database program. These services search the literature relevant to a researcher's discipline and provide sets of new bibliographic references on diskettes weekly. One of these services, Current Contents on Diskette from ISI, for example, permits records to be directly imported into EndNote, Pro-Cite, and Reference Manager data-bases. Reference Up- date, from Research Information Systems, is a similar service, and its records can be painlessly integrated into Reference Manager. In addition, Reference Update is now available via the Internet, so that subscribers can receive new references in their fields in an even more timely way. Plain text, or ASCII, files also can be transferred from electronic sources to a personal database, although difficulties with Greek and other special characters may emerge. Eric A. Jaffe, a professor of medicine at Cornell University Medical College in New York, says his Reference Update subscription, which includes abstracts, costs about $500 per year. To help defray the costs, he and several other faculty members with related interests share a subscription. Jaffe researches endothelial cells, and colleagues work with platelets, adhesion factors, and lipid biochemistry, he says. However one chooses to build his or her bibliographic- reference database, its value, once compiled, is great, Jaffe says. To be freed of laboriously producing the bibliographies to accompany manuscripts and other papers makes it worth the trouble, even if one has to enter the records individually, he says. "To write a paper with 10 citations is not a big deal," Jaffe says. "To write a paper with 20 citations is no longer so easy. To write a paper with 30 citations--let's say, you want to reverse the order of the citations in the introduction, or add a three-line paragraph in the methods section with a citation--suddenly, you've got to renumber all your citations. Who wants to do that? Why should anybody waste their time? And imagine if you do a thesis, where there are 80, 150, or 200 references. It becomes totally out of hand. "Nobody should do that kind of work without one of these products. I happen to like Reference Manager, but if somebody said to me, 'Should I do it by hand or should I use the competition?' I would say 'Use something, but, God, don't do it by hand.'"

Tools And Technology

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