Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!bionet!cms.am.cc.reading.ac.uk!SASSKIDM
From: SASSKIDM@cms.am.cc.reading.ac.uk ("SASSKIDM")
Newsgroups: bionet.software
Subject: Reference Update
Message-ID: <09.Jun.89.09:23:04.BST.SASSKIDM@UK.AC.RDG.AM.CMS>
Date: 9 Jun 89 08:30:23 GMT
Sender: daemon@NET.BIO.NET
Lines: 38


Kathy Cheah wrote recently:

Has anyone tried REFERENCE UPDATE ,which is similar to te Current Contents
facility described in Biobit 8? How do they compare ?
We plan to buy a current awareness package something like one of the above
and cannot decide which to get. End users opinions are much better than the
marketing companies!
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We have been using Reference Update at Reading now for about a year.
Users seem very happy with it and even our undergraduate students seem
to pick it up with only the minimum of instruction.  Disks arrive once
a week and are very simply loaded onto the hard disk.

The program itself is menu driven and allows searching by phrase, authors
name or journal title.  Phrases can be connected by logical operators (AND
OR and NOT).  Both authors names and journal names can be scanned easily
in a window and selected into the search strategy.  Search strategies are
easily saved on disc.  With 512K and average issue can be searched in 5-10
sec, faster if larger RAM is available.

The major disadvantage is that Reference Update contains only a subset of the
journals available in  Current Contents (approx 400, mainly baiassed towards
medicine).  Our users have not found this a major problem.

A major advantage is that, as well as being able to print out marked
references and export them to a word processing program, a reference       
database program called Reference Manager is also provided.  This allows
users to construct their         own bibliographies using the same commands
and menus as are available in Reference Update.

Although the Current Contents updates sound interesting, we are very
happy with Refence update and would recommend it to anybody.

Chris Skidmore
SASSKIDM@UK.AC.READING.AM.CMS
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