Nowadays you can just type in a few keywords or some other bit of info and search millions of papers for any similiarity to the subject you are looking for. How did people search scientific papers in the late 80s or anytime before the internet? Was it like the public library used to be, with a card catalog seperated by subject?
The fact that I am old enough to remember this strongly suggests its about time I finish my degree. At least for chemistry the standard was Chem Abstracts. Using a subject, a molecular formula, or an author, you could search through volumes and volumes of year after year citations. It could take two hours to search for something that we can now find in about five minutes. Nevertheless, most of the information you needed could be found.
Well, back when I was in grad school, the library had hard copies of a publication called Psychological Abstracts. In it were listings by authors, key words, and abstracts for all articles published in APA journals. You plopped yourself down in the library and spent the afternoon paging through all the big fat volumes.
Later Psych Abstracts became a computerized subscription service for libraries. It was still much too expensive for an individual to purchase. You filled out a form with the topic/keywords your were interested in and the reference librarian would provide you with a list of references that fit. Sometimes you needed to go through the process more than once to get everything.
Later, libraries were set up so that patrons could search Psych Abstracts (on CD-ROM) on their own. I spent many hours as a junior prof teaching my students how to formulate searches so that they did get a bunch of random stuff in return.
Not sure how it was it other disciplines, but that’s how it was in Psychology.
Abstracts. Journals. Conference papers. Personal correspondence. Interlibrary loans.
You used to spend a fortune on poor quality photocopies.
It was very tedious. There were, and still are, several journals such as Zoological Record or Biological Abstracts which would publish annual indexes of all reasearch published on particular topics. While comprehensive, these of course would have a time lag so the most recent research was not included. There wasn’t much recourse except to check through the most recent numbers of the most relevant journals.
In mathematics, Mathematical Reviews. AFAIK all scientific fields used basically the same principle: there were one or more standard periodicals that contained abstract and/or citation information indexed by standardized subject classification. You went to the library and looked in those periodicals till you found what you were after.
This type of classification and identification structure isn’t extinct, either. On the contrary, it’s one of the reasons scientific sources are so (comparatively) easy to research on-line today. Most of the citation periodicals have migrated to on-line databases, and the way they categorized topics and publications still forms the core of how the information is now organized electronically.
I think some of you are missing the simpler answer here… before the Internet, this is what libraries were for…
In Medicine, we used the Index Medicus. That was a huge set of volumes, published monthly (in 8 point!) with listings of all papers published in the last (collated) month. I tended to use the year-end compilation as much as possible which included the entire year’s publications.
IIRC, the Index Medicus did NOT have abstracts! Just publication data such as journal, volume, authors, etc.
How did we survive?
Any decent chemistry library had hardcover copies of the Beilstein database.
After about 1984, Bethesda research services (BRS) provided online (dialup) access to medical and biochemical abstracts. Most library’s didn’t carry it, so you had to cajole your advisor into signing up.
[Grumpy Old Man]And we liked it![/Grumpy Old Man]
That depends on your definition of the “Internet,” too.
There was a brief period (3-5 years) when most universities had access to what would eventually become The Internet, but it was controlled by the National Science Foundation, and was (presumably) accessible only for research/scholarly purposes, in the mid-80’s. However, the World Wide Web had not been invented yet–much less Google or other search engines!!
I was writing a dissertation at the time (at IU-B, BTW). For research purposes, I had the following options:
–Completely pre-digital journal indexes. There were many to choose from, and you would just look through the ones that pertained to your field of study. These generally gave you abstracts and references, so that you could find relevant articles, then go try to find the journal issue where it was actually printed in full. If the local library didn’t actually have the journal, you could request copies of specific articles via inter-library requests, often with a copying fee involved.
–The references lists of articles I had already found. Complete references would give you enough information to do the inter-library request thing, if necessary.
–Gopher, Archie and Veronica. These are obsolete and short-lived text-only search engines, where you could actually navigate to digitized text and download or print the text. You might still find a Gopher server here and there, but their usefulness was completely replaced by the WWW and Excite.
Chem Abstracts still gets searched, but the way to do it these days is SciFinder. Of course, there’s still no guarantee that the reference is either available online at all or that wherever you are gets it, but that’s what ILL is for, after all. It’s great. I look up something on SciFinder, put the interlibrary loan request in, and eventually get an email of a PDF file.
I have no idea how people managed even a decade ago. Well, I know how, but I just can’t imagine it.
Aside from the subject-specific abstract journals and the other methods mentioned above, you also had the Science Citation Index. Once upon a time, that was shelf upon shelf of the library taken upon with big volumes cross-referencing authors with the authors that cited them. You could take a particularly important, not-terribly-old paper you were interested in and wade through the volumes year-by-year to see who had cited it. If the topic was sufficiently narrow, you could reasonably efficiently pick up relevant papers, no matter how obscure.
Thorough review articles were that bit more important as well.
A companion to the Science Citation Index was Current Contents, listing recent publications in highly-cited journals.
For non-scientific publications (newsmagazines and such), there was the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Newspapers had their own indexes. And if you think searching scientific papers has been simplified by computers, try searching newspapers without using Nexis.
And in a similar vein, there was the Social Science Citation index as well. IIRC it was (is?) published by the same people.
In the 10 years or so before the Internet, most of the standard sources named above had “online” versions that generally would allow you to search by keywords or author names, and deliver a list of matching citations, and perhaps abstracts as well. Of course, since there was no internet for practical purposes, each such publisher maintained its own system. You would take a phone handset and shove it into two cup-like receptacles on a 300-baud modem, and dial the number on the phone, and then log to a prompt on a teletype machine. It was really stone knives and bearskins time.
The Citation Index turned up some really cool stuff. Finding something obscure was a heck of a thrill, especially since my advisor had read probably everything ever written in our field and was hard to surprise.
I feel like a crotchety old fussbudget when I say this, but the part of me that has been excited about new search technologies has been counterbalanced by the thought, “But where’s the challenge or bibliographic research, damnit? Things are going to be too easy for the new scholars coming up…”
For an informative and well-written description of the magnitude of the task go to the library and try to find a copy of The Sound of Panting by Isaac Asimov. It ought to be in a copy of one of his collections of essays. I tried narrowing it down via Google but had no success. Maybe you can do better.
I was a psych major from 85 to 89. A few sessions of your intro to Psych course was dedicated to learning how to use the library. Finding stuff was definitely a skill. You became friends with the nice (and knowledgeable) people down at the reference section.
The way that I used to find relevant research articles was to actually read books 
Yes, that is right, I would read (or skim) books on the subject, get an overall feel for the material, then write down the most important articles, the controversial articles, or articles written by the people that appear to be the big deals in the field that were mentioned in the book. I would then go and read the articles, photocopy them, and perhaps even look up the articles that the articles themselves mentioned. This process would take me 2 to 4 days.
I remember the first journal database that I used. It was ERIC (education). You had to go down to the library and I believe that they had it stored on some sort of media, I am not sure (was it on CD’s?). You had to ask the ref. staff permission and they had to set you up. I could get 50 hits for any subject that I wanted within a few seconds. I really didn’t use it that much at the time. At that stage of my edu-macation, I couldn’t tell the important from the unimportant by reading the abstracts. I would sometimes use it after I did my 4 day process to fill in any gaps that I might have.
I remember that. It was simply a compilation of photocopies of the table of contents pages from the journals each month. A quick scan could tell you if anything was up that was of interest to you.
I went to library school in the late 1980s, so I had to get familiar with everything everyone has mentioned in this thread so far, and more. Does this every take me back. I took a Science Reference class, and more than half our time was spent hunting through sources like these for answers to practice science reference questions. Those were the days of dedicated computer terminals—they were set up to use only one database, or one group of databases, nothing else. Remember those?
I did my dissertation, 1977 - 1980. I’ve done lots of research since. In CS and engineering, there weren’t a lot of abstracts. Current Contents was pretty useless.
The first thing you do is have a lot of journals and a good memory. Your remember where you read something, look it up, and follow the references in that paper to find others.
Second, you ask someone older than you with a good memory. I was always impressed by professors who could toss off a dozen good references off the top of their head. Now I can do that.
Third, look for survey papers. They have lists of good references. I wrote one in grad school, and found a few years later half the papers in our annual workshop referenced it. Authors loved survey papers, since it saved them a lot of work.
I must admit I did my dissertation in a relatively small area where everyone knew everyone else, and it was easy to know the entire output. I don’t know how this would work for fields with tens of journals.