Managing Your References

Having successfully formulated and performed a search it is essential that you can then save the results of the search. The Clipboard is a useful feature in Pubmed that allows you to select certain papers from a search or indeed from several different searches and to save them in one place. Up to 500 citations can be saved on the Clipboard at a time. How do you then save the citations to your office? There are different ways to do this, some of them electronic and some more old-fashioned.

The most efficient way to save the results of a search is to use specialist software designed for storing large numbers of citations. Examples of these programs are Reference Manager, Endnote and Procite. These programs allow you to save the data (including abstracts, keywords and all other information in each citation) in a large off-line database that can be searched and customised. One of the greatest advantages of these programs is their ability to generate automatically a bibliography for an article that you are writing in your word processor from the data that you have downloaded into the program directly from the internet. This removes the need for painstaking typing and checking of individual references.

The results can also be saved electronically without using proprietary software. You can do this using the "Save" button on the Pubmed site or the "Save as" command on your browser (make sure to type ".html" at the end of the file name so that you can reopen the file in your browser at a later date). You can also store the results of a search using the "URL" button on Pubmed. When you click on this button you are prompted to bookmark the page using the Favorites or Bookmarks function of your browser. A unique URL (web page address) is generated by Pubmed for the page you are viewing. Later when you click on this bookmark the page will reappear. The problem with this type of data storage is that searching the citations you have downloaded is difficult and subsequent insertion of the references into a document can only be performed with individual copy and paste commands.

It is also possible to print the results of a search if you prefer reading from paper rather that from a screen. The best way to do this is to display all of the citations on one web page (by clicking on Clipboard with the number of citations per page option set to a high number) and then click the "Text" button. In this format the information is better suited to printing than in its native web format.