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Fall 2002 |
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Archive of Newsletters |
SSPD DATABASE NEWS AND DEVELOPMENTSFirst the good news: NIDA has funded the application for renewal of the drug discrimination database for 5 years from July 2002. Therefore the functionality of the database should be safe until 2008. For those of you who can remember that far back, I first published a database in 1982; NIDA support began a couple of years later, and so it now in the 16th year of grant-supported activity. Jonathan Kamien will continue to maintain the website and my assistant Lisa de Smet will continue in post. Now the less good news: the database indicates that the number of publications fell in 2001, the third successive year that the number declined. Although there have always been substantial annual fluctuations, this is unusual. Perhaps you can help to suggest reasons for this situation (please email to i.stolerman@iop.kcl.ac.uk). I don't believe it is due to a failure on our part to identify publications as we use the same methods as before. However, we may have missed some, especially book chapters and abstracts that are hard to find by systematic searches. Papers where DD plays a small role are also difficult to find, but should be in the database. Therefore, it would be very helpful if you could take a few moments to search the online database (www.dd-database.org) and check that all your publications for 2001 are listed. If any are missing please email me details, or just send the relevant pages from your c.v. and we will check that everything is included. As well as updating the database we have some changes planned. The most obvious will be a redesign of the cosmetics of the website to give it a more up-to-date look that will also be in greater harmony with the SSPD site. We have not changed the cosmetics significantly since the site was introduced around 1995. Jonathan has been developing the new site and we hope to have it available for public access by the time you receive this newsletter, or soon afterwards. As well as cosmetic improvements, we plan some important changes in functionality. The major one will be an increased ability to do complex searches combining AND, OR and NOT operators in one search statement. Then you would be able to search for citations in the following format: (Kamien OR Stolerman) AND (nicotine training OR cocaine training), to give a not-too-complex example. At the moment this would require two separate searches. There will also be a simple search option on the Home Page of the site (and lots, lots more, as PR people would say). Some little-used features of the website will most likely be dropped. Among these is the provision of database files for downloading in old Reference Manager formats. We use Reference Manager to maintain the master database and it is now up to version 10. On the present website we offer downloads in formats going back as far as version 5. In future we intend to provide only for version 8 and higher. The main reason is that the older versions are no longer supported and are not fully compatible with Windows XP. Our intention is to introduce this change early in 2003. If this will cause a major problem for you, please let us know (i.stolerman@iop.kcl.ac.uk). Most users of downloads may wish to keep their version of Reference Manager up to date. Another notion under consideration is to expand the database to include studies of the reinstatement of drug self-administration because such drug effects are often interpreted as due to discriminative stimulus properties. We know this is a speculative and arguable position, and we would be interested in knowing if you would welcome the idea or not. Such citations would of course have a unique key word. That seems to be all for now. Please do let us know of any problems with the database and any extra features you would like to see included (but falling short of a button to generate grants). Ian Stolerman |
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Summer 2004