The references come from two sources:
The International Filariasis Association's "Bibliography of Filariasis", an unpublished collection of 15,000 references from 1634 to 1980. The database, originally on filecards, was computerised by Ralf Muller and colleagues in the 1970's and was made available to us as an archived database on computer file tape. The tape and the operating system were obsolete, and there was a deal of file transformation to be done before the database was available in a 1990's standard ascii-style format. The references were then handled using PERL scripts to transform the particular format used by the IFA into the "universal" BibIX/Refer format. This format was then read into Endnote and various error checks performed. These references have all the failings of the human operators (different spellings of Author names, misspellings, non-harmonisation of Journal titles and a sometimes liberal translation from non-english languages), but are unique and valuable: where else is there a collection of such breadth and depth? There are no abstracts in the database, but each IFA reference contains a note as to where the reference was abstracted, or where it was found.
In these databases, we have assigned a unique bibliofil number to each reference (stored under the LABEL tag).
Some of these references were abstracted as the "Bibliography on Onchocerciasis" published by CABI Press in the UK. We were not able to access this updated and error-checked subset of the IFA database.
Online Reference Databases were then scanned for references from circa 1966 to the present. The 1980-1997 dataset is almost entirely derived from the Medline database, and includes abstracts where available. The Medline identification number is attached to these records.
The two datasets overlapped through the years ~1966 to 1979. The IFA database contains many references not available in the online databases such as Medline. However, there are many references which due to the non-harmonisation of journal titles, etc, are effectively duplicated in the set downloaded from online sources. We have spent some considerable time attempting to eliminate these duplicates from the databases, but undoubtedly some will remain.
There are two sorts of outstanding "unfixed errors":
References without dates Some of the IFA references have no date of publication. It may be that this is real, ie they are pamphlets or reports published without a date, but many are undoubtedly just data entry errors. We will attempt to locate and date these in the future.
References without authors Some of the IFA references have no author field attached. This is undoubtedly a data corruption problem, and these references are tagged with a "?" in the author field. Again, we are going to search out these and provide updates in the future. Many references are the (anonymous) reports of committees and organisations, and these have not got an author assigned (ie the author field is left blank).
Comments and queries on the databases should be directed to Mark.Blaxter@ed.ac.uk.
We want to hear of any errors you find: please email me.