🚀 go-pugleaf

Reference Update is a weekly service that is available on diskette or it
can be sold in bulk quantities for storing on a campus mainframe as is
done here at the University of Michigan. Each week (Each faculty member
using this must pay a subscription fee) I download that week's issues to
the local hard drive so that a faculty member in Anatomy and Cell Biology
can run searches and choose the citations most relevant to her research
needs. It is considerably faster than MEDLINE in getting cites to
literature. There is a hierarchical priority list that the National
Library of Medicine follows for getting materials online. Heavily cited
stuff like Nature and Science and top medical journals get online within
3-4 weeks. However, I have cites from the August issues of Development
which are still not on MEDLINE. One caveat: not every item in Reference
Update has an abstract; while not every item in MEDLINE has an abstract it
has more than Reference Update. What is critical in the sciences however
is speed of dissemination of research results especially since pre-prints
are often in the hands of researchers before the journals themselves are
even in the mail. An individual subscription fee to MEDLINE is not
necessary as one can type in a password after logging on and access is
automatically given to staff and students at the University. However, for
premium service such as we get with Reference Update, then we pay extra
but feel it is worth it.

However, I take the selected items from Reference Update and save them in
"library format" (Reference Update's term for tagged files) and upload
them into EndNote with EndLink with no problems.

However, since Reference Update is owned by ISI (Institute for Scientific
Information -- the same publishers of Science Citation Index, Current
Contents, etc.) they have ready access to a HUGE database. Other software
vendors are much smaller.

On Fri, 19 Nov 1993, Dr Jim Cummins wrote:

> Now here's a juicy item for the EndNote wish list.  What a great
> marketing idea!

>
> >In article <1993Nov17.164609.6378@nrcnet0.nrc.ca> phi@nrcbsa.bio.nrc.ca (Dr.
> >Barry Phipps) writes:
> >>Subject: Reference management software
> >>From: phi@nrcbsa.bio.nrc.ca (Dr. Barry Phipps)
> >>Date: Wed, 17 Nov 93 16:46:09 GMT
> >
> >>I would like to buy a software package for management of literature
> >>references, to be used by a small group of people.  I would appreciate knowi
ng
> >>what other peoples' experiences are with the different packages available, e
g.
> >>Reference Manager, Pro Cite, EndNote, etc..
> >
     [original author then describes how valuable Reference Update is and
      how it is used for literature searches]


    (tear off here and redeem for valuable prizes)
******************************************************
*    Steve Wooldridge                                *
*    Doctoral Student at the Univ. of Michigan       *
*    School of Information and Library Studies       *
*    Telephone: 313.763.1366                         *
*    Snail-mail: P.O. Box 4381                       *
*                Ann Arbor, MI 48106                 *
*    E-mail: swooldri@umich.edu                      *
*                                                    *
*    Quotation corner:                               *
*                                                    *
*         [\..........]     Aha! Thought so....      *
*         Reality-ometer                             *
*                                                    *
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