Study participant characteristics.

Characteristics of the study participants, including their professional status and their fields of specialization. The study included 20 bioscientists (6 graduate students, 6 postdocs, 1 faculty, 7 other). Participants were asked to estimate how often they search the research literature and which tools they prefer to use. 7 participants said they search the literature daily; 10 said they search one to several times a week and 3 said they search monthly or rarely.
The final (right-hand) column shows literature search tools used regularly; tools whose use was indicated to be only occasional or rare are shown in parentheses, otherwise no distinction was made about frequency of use. All participants use PubMed, and for 16 participants, it is their primary literature searching source. 6 participants also use Google web search, 3 use Google Scholar and another 2 use the Web of Science. Email alerts from journals and myNCBI were also mentioned as well as searching in journal sites, Wikipedia and other specialized sources (e.g., Saccharomyces Genome Database and Pathfinder).