Publications

As originally published in The Physiologist
Volume 46, Number 1, February 2003, pages 12

“Citation Search”: Type Just Three Numbers to Get Any Article

    This article is fifth in a series highlighting tools or features of the HighWire Library of the Sciences and Medicine (HWLSM) site, which is a portal to all of Medline plus over 330 journals’ full-text, including all the APS journals. The site is at http://highwire.stanford.edu.

    One of the most frequent tasks the designers of the HWLSM saw researchers doing was also the most obvious one: looking up an article based on a reference citation. The design of the HWLSM makes this as fast as it can possibly be: you type three numbers and click.
    
    If you have the publication year, the volume, and the first page for any article in the 4,500 journals covered by Medline and HWLSM’s full-text journals, you can retrieve an article. You don’t even have to type the journal name, and you don’t have to first click your way to the journal’s own online site. 

    The result when you enter those three numbers will be a full article citation, accompanied by a link to the abstract and—in most cases for recent articles—a link to the full-text. For HighWire-hosted journals, the citation will also show if you have access to the full-text, and, if not, whether and for what fee you can purchase the full-text. Since over 420,000 full-text articles are free at the HighWire site, there is a good chance you’ll have full-text access. 
    
    From the HWLSM home page at http://highwire.stanford.edu, just enter the year, volume, and page in the search entry boxes in the center of the home page—no need to enter author or any other text. (See Quick Search at top center of the home page shown here.) If your article is in one of the 330+ HighWire-hosted journals, click on the appropriate radio button below the year; if not, or if you don’t know whether the journal is a HighWire-hosted journal, just click on the “HighWire + Medline” radio button. 

    You might wonder why you don’t have to give a journal name. In most cases, the year, volume and first page information is enough to limit a search result—even in 12 million entries!—to just one to five possible citations. So the search result you will see when you type in those three numbers will be small enough that you can pick out the right article much faster than you could type in a journal name or go to a journal’s home page to search. In fact, if you don’t have all three of the numbers—perhaps a citation you were given wasn’t complete—typing even two of them will typically get you a result that is just a page or two of search results to scan.

    Past issues of The Physiologist have covered these topics about the HWLSM:
February 2002: “Creating a Better Mousetrap”-An Introduction to the HW Portal
August 2002: Finding Full Text Articles, Free and Fast
October 2002: “Have it Your Way”: Tailoring Search Results to Suit Your Needs
December 2002: Search and Track your Favorite Journals Easily
February 2003: Citation Search: Type Just Three Numbers to Get To Any Article

    Next issue we’ll look at Advanced Searching capabilities in the new portal.

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