LLRXBuzz – December 11, 2000

Tara Calishain is the co-author of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd Edition, and author or co-author of four other books. She is the owner of CopperSky Writing & Research.



In This Issue:

More Info on Site Search Engines

IDEAL Launches Pay-Per-View Service

New Pharmaceutical Site For Healthcare Professionals

Fourth Quarter Update on the Oil and Gas Industry On the Internet

Population Reference Bureau — Count the World

Google Adds Title Syntax (Finally) And URL Syntax

Infotrieve Offers Pre-Release of Article Finder

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More Info on Site Search Engines

Some folks e-mailed after last week’s column and complained that there wasn’t enough information on how to put a search engine on an individual site. Okay, we can expand on that a little bit. http://www.searchtools.com/ , put together and maintained by Avi Rappoport, provides tons of information on search tools you can put on your site.

There are also some software packages that will search individual sites. I didn’t mention those because I’ve never used them myself, didn’t want to force you to install massive amounts of software, and wanted to give you solutions you can use even if you’re not using your own computer. With that in mind, you can check out SelfSeek (http://www.selfseek.com/selfseek.htm ) for a software-based site search solution.

IDEAL Launches Pay-Per-View Service

IDEALOnDemand is a pay-per- view service that allows the user to access all articles in Academic Press and Harcourt Health Services journals on IDEAL. The user must select an article, agree to its terms of use, and pay for the use by credit card.

The site is available at http://www.idealibrary.com/. If you don’t have cookies turned on the first thing you’ll get is a “cookie error” page telling you to turn cookies on. Feh. You can browse a (long) list of all the journals available here .

It starts with Advances in Applied Mathematics and ends with the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Browsing is not required, however; you may do a search of all the journals on the front page. Subsonic found 66 results.

Results are giving in slightly-difficult-to-read list. From the results page, you can view an abstract of the article, see related articles, or see the PDF. If you decide to see the PDF, you’re given the price of the article (the first subsonic article was $35.00) and the option to purchase 24-hour access to it. (That means you may access it for 24 hours, not that it’s accessible 24 hours a day indefinitely.) If you’re not sure that the article will be appropriate, you can view a sample issue of the journal from which the article comes. Worth a look.

New Pharmaceutical Site For Healthcare Professionals

Facts and Comparisons has launched DRUGFACTS.com, a new pharmacy reference site. The site’s content is available on a free and subscription model basis to registered users.

The site offers free access to the printed content of numerous Facts & Comparisons titles including A-Z Drug Facts, Medfacts, and The Guide to Popular Natural Products. On a subscription basis Drug Facts and Comparisons, Drug Interaction Facts, and the Review of Natural Products are available.

The library is available from the “library” tab at the top of http://www.drugfacts.com. In the case of resources like A-Z Drug Facts, you may search the materials or browse the drug listings by name. The drug facts include actions, dosage, adverse reactions, precautions, and lab test interferences. The other resources look solid, what I could see of them.

The Guide to Popular Natural Products only lists 125 products, but my attempts to stump it failed. Drug Interaction Facts requires registration and subscription. Medfacts (for patient education information — it looks like the printouts you may or may not get from the pharmacy when you pick up a p re scription.)

This site also has a lot of other material, including FDA news and information, several communities, and adverse drug reaction news. I was pleasantly surprised at how much material was available for free (not even requiring registration.) Worth a look.

Fourth Quarter Update On The Oil And Gas Industry On The Internet

The number of CATSites for the Oil and Gas industries have grown to more than 5,321. All the databases have been updated and verified for the Q4 2000. The Upstream database has grown by 40% and the Downstream by 39%. The new database is available at http://www.catsites.com/publications.html . Prices for it range from around $75 to over $575 depending on what you want (upstream, downstream, or both) and whether you want a single issue or subscription.

Population Reference Bureau — Count the World

If you want to know how many and how much, check out the Population Reference Bureau at http://www.prb.org/ . The Bureau contains lots of information, including a world population data sheet (with information on infant mortality and projected populations in the next 25 and 50 years), a U . S . population data sheet, and population “quick facts” (what does it cost to raise a child to age 17, how many humans have lived total, what are the most crowded countries, etc.)

There’s also topical news, related sites, and a list of topics on the right side of the screen. Lots of stuff here; worth a look.

Google Adds Title Syntax (Finally) And URL Syntax

So Google last week sent out this big braggy press release about how everyone adores them. They skipped the REAL news: Google now partially supports title and URL special syntaxes.

The title special syntax is allintitle: . So if you want to find ResearchBuzz in a title, the query looks like this:

allintitle:researchbuzz

However, once you’ve used that special syntax, you can’t use anything else. For example, if I tried this query:

researchbuzz allintitle:researchbuzz

it wouldn’t work. Now, this query would work:

allintitle:researchbuzz news

But if you look carefully at the results, you’ll see why –Google is finding both the words researchbuzz AND news in the title of the pages returned.

Now, there IS one exception to this. You can use a NOT with this syntax. For example, if you try this query:

allintitle:researchbuzz -news

You’ll only get a few results. This comes in more handy when y ou’re restricting your research to an URL. If you want to r estrict your search to an URL, you do it this way:

allinurl:

That finds your word only in the URL of a page. so you could do:

allinurl:neruda

If you wanted to restrict the kinds of sites you get, you could do this:

allinurl:neruda -com -net -org

That will give you far fewer results.

Infotrieve Offers Pre-Release of Article Finder

The official release is the first quarter of next year, but if you’re a periodical research junkie you might want to check out the pre-release version of Infotrieve’s new article finder — you can get to it at http://www4.infotrieve.com/search/ArticleFinder.asp .

The press release mentions that the full release will have over 500 e-journal publications in its database, but I don’t know what the pre-release version has. Searching for hypothyroid and adrenal found 4 results (hypothyroid search found almost 900 results.) One twist; phrases are denoted with single quotes or the syntax ADJ, not double quotes. So synthetic ADJ hormone or ‘synthetic hormone’ will each find only a few results. “synthetic hormone”, on the other hand, will ignore the double quotes and act like the query synthetic OR hormone (you’ll get over 30,000 results) so watch your step.

Once you’ve found appropriate results, you can link to a bibliographic record, the table of contents of the journal in which an article is featured, and a link to the entry at PubList! Unfortunately I can’t tell you how the ordering procedure went. Every time I tried to order an article I got a “the parameter is incorrect” error. Well, I suppose it’s not the official release for a reason. The search facility works fine, anyway, so you can get an idea of what materials are available from ArticleFinder.

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