Track down articles your colleagues can’t find

When I was new to searching, I sometimes had the habit of deleting seemingly meaningless document identifier numbers out of literature abstracts I found.  Now I know that these numbers play an important role in locating the print and/or full text version of those documents, and I always save them.

It’s good practice to keep a record of these numbers, especially if the non-patent literature was found through an abstract-only database like Compendex or Inspec.   Read on to learn more about document identifiers, and how they can give you the edge in document retrieval.