A study of searching the eye research literature

The paper is a report of most of the major findings of a study in searching the periodical eye research literature. Questions were collected from eye researchers and a selected group of these were searched in nine different secondary sources. Articles thought to be relevant were Xeroxed and sent to the eye researchers who subsequently rated the articles. Articles of eye research interest are found in a wide variety of journals, but a small number of journals carry a large proportion of the articles judged valuable by the eye researchers. Approximately a fourth of eye research articles are in foreign languages. Translations are not readily available. Despite a delay of more than 15 months between the original appearance of articles in journals and the mailing of photocopies, about half of the articles of interest to the researchers were not known to them previously. For extensive retrospective searches more than one secondary service must be used. Index Medicus and Excerpta Medica (Section 12) or Ophthalmic Literature would be good sources. MEDLARS demand searches were not shown to be clearly superior to manual searches of Index Medicus. Titles, abstracts, and full text were shown to be equally effective in permitting searchers to retrieve references that were subsequently rated as relevant by the researchers. A searcher with a background in ophthalmology was able to retrieve more articles of research interest than other non‐ophthalmologist searchers.