A personal on-line reference retrieval program for microcomputers

Abstract

An on-line system for retrieving bibliographic references has been developed for the use of research workers at St. Thomas' Hospital, London. It is designed to be compatible with several types of hardware, and is linked to a word process ing program to facilitate input and to allow reformatting of references if necessary. References may be added and searching undertaken by individuals with little or no computing knowl edge. In effect the system can replace personal manual files of references. It is in use in four departments in the hospital so far, and has been shown to be flexible enough to cater both for small personal reference files of a few hundred references and for department files of several thousand. References are retri eved by means of two-letter key codes (up to 12 may be assigned to each reference). A large controlled language thesaurus of about 1000 key-codes has been designed for universal use in one department, but for smaller, more special ised collections of references, users are developing personal key code lists on an ad hoc basis as references are added.