Annals of Internal Medicine 100(6):914 June 1984
LETTERS AND CORRECTIONS"The power and the beauty of science do not rest upon infallibility, which it has not, but on corrigibility, without which it is nothing." -- Howard E. Gruber*
Letters submitted for possible publication must be identified as such and submitted with a signed transfer-of-copyright form (see Contents page for location of form). Text length must not exceed 400 words. No more than five references may be used; reference format must be that specified in "Information for Authors" (page 1-6). All portions of letters must be typed double-spaced, including references. Tables and figures will not be published. Acceptance of letters for publication depends on several factors: newness of information, relevance to current topics and recent content of this journal, clarity of statement, distribution of topics within this section, conformity to acceptable formats, space available. The Editor reserves the right to shorten letters and make changes to our style. Authors of letters to be published will be notified to their acceptance. Letters from U.S. correspondents not published will be returned if submitted with a stamped, addressed envelope; letters from persons outside the United States will be returned at our expense but without comment.
Review of Sci-Mate
To THE EDITOR: Thank you for an accurate and objective review of our Sci-Mate software package (1) We believe that the true test of a software product’s worth is in trials by users and reviewers. And, as we expected, Sci-Mate does well in such trials.
There are several points made in Wigton’s review we would like to clarify. First, we agree that Sci-Mate’s performance on the Apple personal computer is cumbersome. However, there has been so much demand for software to run on this machine that we feel we must support it. We strongly recommend use of a hard disk when running Sci-Mate on an Apple and we state this in our product literature. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do to speed up transmissions from online services: 1200 baud is standard in the industry and is independent of Sci-Mate.
There is one statement in your review, which I would like to correct: the Sci-Mate field limit is 1900 characters, not 255. The record limit also is 1900 characters. The reason these two limits are identical is that Sci-Mate features a variable field length and there is no requirement to predefine the field length. The length limit for a search statement in the Personal Data Manager is 255 characters. We recognize the need for improved bibliographic formatting capabilities in Sci-Mate and are developing a module that would do this.
Finally, although there are many new, user-friendly online systems such as Colleague (Bibliographic Retrieval Services) available, they do not offer the downloading ability of Sci-Mate. We believe that this ability to integrate online searching with offline processing makes Sci-Mate unique among microcomputer software products.
Eugene Garfield, Ph.D.
Catheryne Stout, M.S.I.S.
Institute for Scientific Information; Philadelphia, PA 19104• Gruber HE. The origin of the origin of species. Review of Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X: New Light on the Evolutionists. By: EISELEY L.
The New York Times Book Review. 1979 July 22:16.REFERENCE
1. back to text WIGTON RS. Review of Sci-Mate Universal Online Searcher and Sci-Mate Personal Data Manager. Ann Intern Med. 1984; 100:621-2.