Reprints and literature searches before Pubmed
NPG still sells reprints (link). Seems anachronistic, doesn’t it? If you got into science after the year 2000, you might not be fully aware of the sea change that occurred just before you got into science. I’m not fully aware of it either, but I have a taste of what it was like before then, and I can share.
What are reprints? It’s just the article pages, as they appeared in the journal (mostly).
Why would people have these? It’s how people shared their work before PDFs. In the days before PDFs and journal websites, people would buy reprints, and then mail them to people who requested them. People who were at an institution that didn’t subscribe to a particular journal would write to authors and request reprints (some people even had preprinted postcards for just such requests). Then the authors would mail them a copy. Super slow, expensive, and old fashioned. I remember interviewing for grad school and many profs had big stacks of reprints around their offices, and they’d often give me one or two to read to learn about their work.
My PhD advisor had a filing cabinet full of reprints. Now people just have collections of PDFs, or maybe not even that anymore since it’s so easy to find and access the literature.
How did people do literature searches prior to Pubmed? They used big hardcopy books like the Index Medicus. Here’s an example, an edition from 1995. You can flip through it online (ironically).
Looking up by keyword:
Looking up by author:
Short background: I got into neuroscience after seeing a talk by Freeman Dyson. A friend of mine told me he was giving a talk about 2 hours away, and we met up for it. We had both read his books and we were excited to see his talk. I was an undergraduate in physics and mathematics and I wasn’t sure what direction I wanted to go into for a career. Dyson gave his talk in four vignettes, and one was on neuroscience. I emailed him afterwards and he sent me the references he had discussed.
Searching: It got me reading the literature and I used these huge hardcopy books to find the original papers Dyson had cited, and other neuroscience papers. It was the mid 1990s, and there were computers in the library that had CDROMs with this same information, but they were slow and clumsy. I found it quicker to use the hardcopy books. I only did this for a matter of months. Pubmed went online in 1996 and that helped tremendously. But I started with these big books and spending a lot of time with a small number of papers. I was hooked.
Neuroscience was, and continues to be, a wild frontier of experiments and theory with fascinating implications for humankind. I followed up with Dyson later and told him how his talk and correspondence had helped direct me to pursue a career in neuroscience. He responded, as he consistently did, with warm and encouraging messages. It was huge for me that he bothered to answer email from a nobody student like me. Later, I was delighted to learn that he was like that with everyone!
Finding the actual papers: Even after Pubmed became available for easy online searching, I still had to spend a lot of time in the library looking up the actual papers and reading them. Shortly thereafter, journals digitized their back catalogs and PDFs became widespread. (nota bene: Pubmed still has a bias towards more recent papers– the coverage of literature prior to the 1960s is incomplete.)
The twilight of hardcopies: My first publications and fellowships were all submitted in hardcopy via Fedex (maybe 1999 or 2000). Then everything moved online pretty quickly. For some years I would get people emailing me asking for PDFs of my articles that they didn’t have access to. That is pretty rare these days, but even I still do it sometimes.
(credit: top photo from this nice blog entry on the same topic)