American journal of hospital pharmacy
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Basic information describing online literature-retrieval systems is presented; the power of online searching is also discussed. The equipment, expense involved, and training necessary to perform online searching efficiently is described. An individual searcher needs only a computer terminal and a telephone; by telephone, the searcher connects with an online vendor's computer at another location. ⋯ Using the International Pharmaceutical Abstracts database as an example, 17 access points to locating an article via an online system are compared with only two (the subject and author index entry) of a printed service. By searching online, one can search the published literature on a specific topic in a matter of minutes. An online search is very useful when limited information is available or the search question contains a term that is not in a printed index.