Finding a Specific Paper

Neer's Classification of Shoulder Fractures

A classic paper of this sort presents a number of difficult problems in location, but the exercise of finding it may use all your knowledge of the PubMed system. The main problems are that the authors of classic papers are often very prolific and have dozens or hundreds of papers to their credit. The second problem is that many of the classic papers were written long enough ago that abstracts of the papers are not available for review. A third problem is that some classic papers appeared in journals which were not in the Medline list. Before I picked this topic I was unsuccessful in tracing Gustilo's original paper classifying compound fractures and the introduction of the Harris Hip Score. You can get a good idea of which papers are involved but because the subject doesn't appear in the title and there is no abstract you cannot be sure. Spelling the name right and finding out the correct initials are other challenges. A search for "Gustillo and compound fractures" confusingly yields 6 citations to papers where the Gustilo classification is misspelled!

PubMed has a facility which it calls "Single Citation Matcher" which is designed to help with this problem. Click on the link to this facility

The Citation Matcher page is opened and offers options for Journal, Date of Publication, reference, authors name and words in the title. Type Neer in the Author box and click on Search

Nearly 300 articles were written by someone called Neer. Note that the search string is Neer[auth] (for author). If you searched for just Neer you would get nearly 600 articles because of all the papers that refer to Neer arthroplasty etc.

293 papers is a lot to go through but we have a lucky break with the first paper in this list. I felt it was highly unlikely that there were two Neers writing JBJS Classic papers! So it seems reasonable to use the initials CS

Return to the Citation Matcher page and add the initials to the author box. Then click on Search

More than 22 papers were authored by CS Neer. This is a small enough number to go through by hand but I actually used the search engine to narrow it down

Add AND classification to the search string and click Go

This paper was reprinted in Clinical Orthopaedics in 1987 so it appears twice. This is the original publication.

Summary

• The reason you forgot the reference to the article is the reason why it may be difficult to find it again!
• The single citations matcher is useful for defining the features of the paper you are looking for
• Once you have an inclusive list you may have to use the techniques of narrowing it down which are such a common feature of PubMed searches

Myles Clough mylesclough@shaw.ca
Clinical Instructor, Department of Orthopaedics, University of British Columbia
B.C. Canada
Feedback, Comments and Questions welcome.