0. Start Telnet.
1. From the File menu, choose Open Connection.
2. In the blank, enter melvyl.ucop.edu.
3. When asked for your terminal type, enter VT100.
4. After the screen clears and you see the prompt (->), enter
start med.
5. When prompted for your password, enter the password supplied by your
instructor.
You now have several types of searches available. Any of these can be specified using the find command.
To find information on a particular subject, use the kw qualifier. For example, if you're interested in the effect of fluoxetine on the electroencephalogram, try find kw fluoxetine and (EEG or electroencephalogram). This will return a list of all articles in the database whose descriptions use the word fluoxetine and either the word electroencephalogram or its abbreviation, EEG. Words can be abbreviated with the # sign. For example, the term electroenceph# will match not only electroencephalogram, but also electroencephalography, electroencephalographer, or electroencephalographic.
To find articles that mention your search terms in their titles, use tw in place of kw.
To find articles by a particular author, use the pa qualifier. For example, to find articles by Stuart Zola, use find pa zola s.
Qualifiers can be combined. For example, to find everything that Stuart Zola has written on the subject of memory, use find pa zola s and kw memory. To find everything that Stuart Zola has written on subjects other than memory, use find pa zola s and not kw memory. You get the idea.
To display the titles that your search retrieved, enter the letter d at the prompt. To display the titles and summaries, enter d short abs. When viewing the abstracts, write down the numbers of the articles in which you're interested. When done with your display, type mail short abs followed by a list of the numbers of the articles whose summaries you'd like to see in printed form, followed by to YourInstructor@host.edu topic YourFirstName (where YourFirstName is your first name, and YourInstructor@host.edu is your instructor's email address). For example, if you've just done a search and decided that you'd like to save the summaries of articles 6, 9, and 42, your name is Matthew, and your instructor's address is belmonte@cns.nyu.edu, enter mail short abs 6 9 42 to belmonte@cns.nyu.edu topic Matthew.
When you're finished with your session, enter end, and then quit Telnet.
The default database contains summaries of articles published since 1 January 1992. Other databases contain summaries from earlier periods. To switch databases, type start followed by the name of the database, and then enter the password when prompted. Here are the names of all the available databases and the periods that they cover:
med90 1990-1991 med85 1985-1989 med80 1980-1984 med75 1975-1979 med66 1966-1974