Page 146 - How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, 8th Edition 8th Edition

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as being involved in your own or a related field. Should you respond to such requests? Probably, because you know
that the reprints will actually be used. Your main concern here is whether it might be better to prepare a mailing list,
so that you and some of your colleagues can exchange reprints without wasting time and expense with the requests.

Should you collect reprints? If so, how? That, of course, is up to you, but a few guidelines may be helpful.

You should realize, at the outset, that reprints are useful, if at all, as a convenience. Unlike books and journals, they
have absolutely no economic value. I have known of several prominent scientists who, upon retirement, were upset
because their vast reprint collections could not be sold, no institution would accept them as a gift, and even scrap
paper dealers refused them because of the staples.

How to File Reprints

So, if reprints are to be used for your personal convenience, what would be convenient? Consider arranging your
reprints alphabetically by author (cross-indexing additional authors). Most scientists seem to prefer a subject
arrangement, but, as the collection grows, as subjects and interests change, and as time passes, more and more of the
collection becomes inaccessible. As a former librarian, I assure you that every subject system ever devised will break
down in time, and I also assure you that there is nothing so maddening as to search fruitlessly for something that you
need and that you know you have somewhere.

Your reprint file may also be used to house the photocopies of journal articles that you obtain. If your library obtains
for you a photocopy of an article, via an interlibrary transaction, obviously that is exactly the kind of item that should
go in your collection (because it would be inconvenient to have to go through the interlibrary loan process again).

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If you have or expect to have a large reprint collection, no simple filing system will provide efficient retrievability.
Records must be established. The records (probably on 3 × 5 cards) can be kept in a number of ways. Cards may be
established in brief form for authors and co-authors and for any number of subject entries. All cards are maintained in
one dictionary catalog (shoebox?). The reprints themselves might be filed by accession number, with that number
being recorded on all relevant author and subject cards. Such record keeping is relatively easy and surprisingly
efficient.

Alternatively, you can record your reprints in a computer file. Various software programs are available for this kind of
record management.

What to Collect

What reprints should you collect? Let us get to the heart of the matter, or at least the aorta. Unless you are really a
collector by personality, you should limit your collection to those items that are convenient. Because you cannot
collect everything, the best rule is to collect the difficult. You should not collect reprints of papers published in
journals that you own, and you probably should not collect reprints from journals that are readily available in almost
all libraries. You should collect reprints of papers published in the small, especially foreign, journals or in conference
proceedings or other offbeat publications. And you should collect reprints of papers containing high-quality or color
illustrations, because they cannot be satisfactorily photocopied. Thus, measured in terms of convenience, your reprint
collection need not supplant the library down the hall, but it is a convenience to have access in your own files to
material that is not available in the library. Besides, the reprints are yours; you can mark them up, cut them up, and file
them in any way that you find useful.

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