Searching the literature: Difference between revisions
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===The Patent Literature=== | ===The Patent Literature=== | ||
The [http://www.uspto.gov US Patent Office] maintains an excellent search site for patents and published patent applicatons. One thing to know about this is that inventor names are listed in full, and that the wild-card character for the search is a dollar sign, rather than a star. Searches such as in/knight-t$ will find | The [http://www.uspto.gov US Patent Office] maintains an excellent search site for patents and published patent applicatons. One thing to know about this is that inventor names are listed in full, and that the wild-card character for the search is a dollar sign, rather than a star. Searches such as in/knight-t$ will find all of the inventions for Tom Knight, e.g. | ||
The result of the USPTO search will be HTML versions of the patent. The diagrams and scanned images are not easily available from USPTO. They can, however, be downloaded for free from the web site [http://www.freepatentsonline.com/ Free Patnets Online] as a PDF document. | |||
===Scirus and Google Academic Search=== | ===Scirus and Google Academic Search=== | ||
Revision as of 19:45, 12 November 2005
Searching the biological literature
Pubmed
Essentially all biologically relevant literature is indexed by the National Library of Medicine, and linked to the Pubmed database. The entry point of choice for a search is Entrez, which, in addition to searching in Pubmed also searches a wide variety of other databases, including Genbank.
Sophisticated searches are possible in Pubmed, using the advanced search page. See the Pubmed Tutorial.
Some literature is missing from Pubmed, notably agricultural data (See Agricola for this) and literature pre-1960 or so. The coverage varies with the journal indexed, so a given article may not be present. Other indices, such as Web of Science are more useful for very old references.
Web of Science
The Science Citation Index or Web of Science is an extremely useful tool for searching forward in time from a relevant article. The bibliography of a research paper provides excellent links backward in time to relevant prior work; the science citation index provides a similar mechanism forward in time. Each article, when published, is mined for its references. SCI allows users to search for future articles which reference the article in question. Access is limited, as this is a commercial service. MIT users can access SCI from the Vera home page, A Web of Science tutorial is available here.
Science Citation Index is also useful in finding titles and references to articles which are not otherwise indexed, including Ph.D. theses, book chapters, and web pages. Pubmed does not index these, while SCI does, since it indexes all references from indexed articles.
Using interlibrary loan
The Patent Literature
The US Patent Office maintains an excellent search site for patents and published patent applicatons. One thing to know about this is that inventor names are listed in full, and that the wild-card character for the search is a dollar sign, rather than a star. Searches such as in/knight-t$ will find all of the inventions for Tom Knight, e.g.
The result of the USPTO search will be HTML versions of the patent. The diagrams and scanned images are not easily available from USPTO. They can, however, be downloaded for free from the web site Free Patnets Online as a PDF document.
