Firstly, apologies. I've only just started doing my July updates (later than
usual), and have discovered exactly what the rest of you have been
suffering!
I've got some way following panic calls to DIALOG, whose CDROM we use. I
thought it might be worth passing on in case OVID or SilverPlatter can be
prevailed upon to do something too...?
I'm lobbying for DIALOG to include the NLM's 'entrez date' field as a search
option on the CD-ROM. Due to the complications of searching retrospectively,
DIALOG can't just slot this new field in now, but may be able to early next
year after they have done their own software review. Its one of the (many)
search fields which DIALOG have on the online version of the database. Since
they have got it in their data from the NLM, any other host could also get
this field. They may not be able to implement it straight away, but they
can't claim there is nothing they can do!
DIALOG's expert technical support person took a few days to reply me, so
they have been *particularly* helpful, but that's not relevant here.
I should also emphasise that I realise PubMed isnt perfect.. If I hadnt
sorted things out with DIALOG, I'd have had to find out the exact NLM entry
date range included in the CDROM from the host (since its often a month
behind online), and then do the search on PubMed (limited to Medline subset
or using tag[MeSH]), then add entrez date eg alcoholism[MeSH] AND
2001/06/01:2001/07/01[EDat] . Which would have been very laborious and given
me the wrong output formats for my word processing...
Fiona
Fiona McLean,
BL
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