A student, academician or a practitioner of any health sciences stream often needs to search the literature. An ideal researcher should spend a small percentage of time in this activity, and much more on the main research and writing. What is the profile of an ideal researcher in this context?  Someone who has the "information needs", clearly laid out.  Before searching the literature, one has to document the information need clearly. We need to identify literature to reference in the a) introduction and discussion areas, and b) literature that would be closest to our main area of work. The literature…

Around 20 years ago, the "Indian Express" had a special publication called "Web Vision". In the January 1998 issue, they had featured me in a column called "Web Spirit", in an article - "Internet throws up new job definitions". I had a copy of this issue, but it had at some time got misplaced in office. In our quest to find something else, it unexpectedly surfaced. I read the article again and I share my observations and feelings. The article described how as an independent consultant (that was what I was then), I helped doctors and companies search Medline. (At…