Category Archives: Searching

A new development in scientific integrity

Posted on April 1, 2025 by Frank Norman

This is a 1st April post, I won’t call it April Fool’s as there’s only one set of fools mentioned here. Rest assured that CrapMed does not (yet) exist. ———————————- Recent changes in US scientific research are very worrying. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Research tools, Searching | Comments Off on A new development in scientific integrity

Search engines – out with the old, in with the new

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Frank Norman

Back in the summer Yahoo announced that it was to close the search engine AltaVista, and that duly happened in July. I suspect that most people’s reaction would be either “what on earth is Alta Vista?”  or “Blimey! Is that … Continue reading →

Posted in Searching | 9 Comments

Answering searching questions

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Frank Norman

For twenty years we have had some sort of desktop access to the scientific literature. At first we only had abstracts of articles, and accessed them through fairly clunky interfaces (anyone remember BIDS?). The introduction of PubMed in 1997 improved … Continue reading →

Posted in Searching | Tagged , | 9 Comments

Google: how to un-personalise your search

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Frank Norman

Google never stands still. It is forever seeking to improve the way it tries to match your search request to its database, and then to show you potentially useful websites. Mostly we are not aware of how it does this, … Continue reading →

Posted in Searching | Tagged , | 4 Comments

The challenge of going beyond

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Frank Norman

Change is a natural part of life so resisting it has always seemed futile to me. My hair falls out and turns grey and I prefer to just accept that it has happened rather than to wear a wig or … Continue reading →

Posted in Information skills, Journal publishing, Scientific literature, Searching | 21 Comments

Ethical retrieval

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Frank Norman

It may surprise you to know that librarians have codes of professional ethics. The main  UK membership organisation for librarians,  CILIP, requires its members to follow its ethical code; the American Library Association have something similar.  Subject classification and indexing … Continue reading →

Posted in Ethics, Searching | 5 Comments

Google

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Frank Norman

The first Internet search engine I used, back in about 1990, was Archie. This was an index of content hosted across the internet on ftp servers; mostly software but there were documents and databases too.  Archie didn’t feel much like … Continue reading →

Posted in Searching | 11 Comments