PUBs Publications or Perish

Publication is at the core of every scientific endeavor. It is the common process whereby scientific information is reviewed, evaluated, distributed, and entered into the permanent record of scientific progress. Publications serve as vital links between factual databases of different structures or content domains (e.g., a record in a sequence database and a record in a genetic database may cite the same article). They serve as valuable entry points into factual databases ( I have read an article about this, now I want to see the primary data ). 

Publications also act as essential aimotation of function and context to records in factual databases. One reason for this is that factual databases have a structure that is essential for efficient use of the database but may not have the representational capacity to set forward the full biological, experimental, or historical context of a particular record. In contrast, the published paper is limited only by language and contains much fuller and more detailed explanatory information than will ever be in a record in a factual database. Perhaps more importantly, authors are evaluated by 

Author affiliations (i.e., authors institutional addresses) are even more complicated. As with author names, there is the problem of supporting both structured forms and unparsed strings. However, even sources with reasonably consistent author name conventions often produce affiliation information that caimot be parsed from text into a structured format. In addition, there may be an affiliation associated with the whole 

The most commonly cited bibliographic entity in biological science is an article in a jomnal therefore, the citation formats of most biological databases are defined with that type in mind. However, articles can also appear in books, manuscripts, theses, and now in electroiuc jornmals as well. The data model defines the fields necessary to cite a book, a jomnal, or a manuscript. An article citation occupies one field other fields display additional information necessary to imiquely identify the article in the book, journal, or manuscript—the author(s) of the article (as opposed to the author or editor of the book), the title of the article, page numbers, and so on. 

In NCBFs view, the main purpose of listing patented sequences in GenBank is to be able to retrieve sequences by similarity searches that may serve to locate patents related to a given sequence. To make a legal determination in the case, however, one would still have to examine the full text of the patent. To evaluate the biology of the sequence, one generally must locate information other than that contained in the patent. Thus, the critical linkage is between the sequence and its patent number. 

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