Howdy fellow Net-Nerds
(Face it, the lab computer is a far cry from Mondo 2000)
But on the note of bibliographic software, I did some research about 2 years
ago, and found only 2 realistic choices for my needs (based on descriptions
on paper and price). Those were Pro-Cite 1.4 (Version 2.0 is now available)
and Papyrus 6.0 (Version 7.0 is now available). I purchased Pro-Cite because
it seemed much more powerfull and more expandable (to grow with me over the
years). I also purchased the BRS and Medline import translaters. I should
note here that Papyrus comes with all available translaters built in. One
problem with this is that as new services become available, you cannot add
them on to Papyrus, but the ones you get come free. Anyway, I found Pro-Cite
1.4 to be full of little bugs that made it VERY user unfriendly. The company
tech support were very friendly, but quite incompetent. I eventually had to
figure out the meaning of some of the codes myself and change them (to allow
printing on a HP-IIP printer) and explain it back to them! Not very reasuring.
In addition, the references I imported from BRS and Medline did not come in
clean. Oh yes, they went into the Pro-Cite database fine, but when I tried
to get Pro-Cite to print in a particular journal format, everything was quite
random. I have not been bothering to use the program lately due to these
problems. Our department recently bought Papyrus 7.0 and I am looking
foreward to trying it out. I have no idea what the deal is on Pro-Cite 2.0,
but I'm certainly not going to shell out the $100- for the upgrade that I
was offered to find out. Good luck, and please post a summary when you
conclude your search.
Dr. Leonard N. Bloksberg
PreissJ at clvax1.cl.msu.edu
Dept. of Biochemistry
Michigan State University
