Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
by national plant pathology societies listed by the International Society for Plant
Pathology (ISPP) - www.isppweb.org - seeking to serve the needs of their
members. These sites could, via the ISPP, serve as a focus for the integration of
information technology resources in plant pathology. There are already efforts to
provide integrated access to multiple data resources. One example is Plant
Management Network International (PMNI) - www.plantmanagementnetwork.org -
which is a co-operative body, involving industry, universities and professional
bodies such as APS and the Canadian Phytopathological Society. The PMNI web
site offers, among other things, the capacity to search a database, dedicated to crop
science, constructed from the pooled resources of the partner organisations.
Simple searches are free to all users; more detailed searching and full access to the
site requires a subscription.
While using on-line search engines does not allow direct access to the primary
epidemiology literature, it will, of course, provide the IT-aware epidemiologist with
the web sites for journals where the literature can be found. In addition to the major
international plant pathology research journals such as
Australasian Plant
Pathology
,
European Journal of Plant Pathology, Journal of
Phytopathology,
Phytopathology, Plant Disease
and
Plant Pathology
, epidemiologists publish their
work in a wide range of other journals too numerous to list here. On-line resources
such as the ISI Web of Knowledge provide searchable databases of the primary
literature allowing information to be retrieved by using keywords independently of
the source of the publication. Having promoted the use of on-line databases, we
raise the point (often made and often ignored) that they do not generally include
information on literature that is more than, typically, 30 years old. Information
dating from more than 30 years ago must be obtained by more manual searches, and
in this context the final sentence of Samuel Johnson's words remains as true today
as when Boswell noted them down in 1775.
For those who may wonder exactly what such a manual search involves, and to
highlight the dispersed nature of information relevant to a particular topic, we offer
the following quotation, taken from a review of the genetics of horizontal resistance
carried out by the late Norman Simmonds (Simmonds, 1991):
“…it will be appreciated that the literature search needed for the present review
presented formidable problems. Some titles were available from reviews but my own
reading showed that some valuable papers went uncited. Trials with abstracting journals
were not encouraging because of the idiosyncratic and confused terminology adopted
and, sometimes, even the apparent failure of authors to understand just what they had
done. In the outcome I adopted what might be called a 'brute force' approach. I scanned
runs of journals back to about 1965 (about 300 volumes in all) and trusted to secondary
sources to identify papers I had failed to find. I might, with advantage, have scanned
runs back to the 1930s, but with a declining probability of identifying useful works.”
12.4 REAL WORLD DATA CAPTURE
The two crucial factors which initiated the explosion in use of IT are the wide
availability of powerful personal computers at very low cost and the growth of the
'internet'. All the IT developments above require standard computers, normally
