It is now some 24 years ago that I discovered a way to file articles from the literature. You might say, or think, so what? What's the big deal about filling articles from the literature? Here's the big deal: you are, and will continue be, confronted with the problem of how to find and store literature articles you have copied or downloaded as PDF's. How do you go about that task?

When I trained in pathology in the early 1980's, everything -- I mean everything -- was in hard copy. If you wanted a copy of an article or book chapter, you either bought it from the publisher or you copied it from the source material and stuck it in some -- hopefully -- trusted way to find it again.

Most of my colleagues in that period, including me, were overwhelmed immediately by the process of separating and filing these articles.

On or around 1988, I had an idea about filing articles that I have used to this day. Here it is: it's called the “year-first page-first author method” (or YPA method for short). This method has advantages over the PubMed or Doi systems because it gives the user some real and useful information about the article or book (or book chapter) in question.

Let me give some examples:

Here's a journal reference:

[indent=1]Abdelmalek M, Loosemore MP, Hurt MA, Hruza G. Geometric staged excision for the treatment of lentigo maligna and lentigo maligna melanoma: a long-term experience with literature review. Arch Dermatol. 2012 May;148(5):599-604. doi: 10.1001/archdermatol.2011.2155. PubMed PMID: 22782151.[/indent]

In my system this becomes “20120599abde melanoma staged excision”

The first four numbers are the year of publication, the second four are the first page of the article, and the four letters are those of the first four letters of the first author's surname. It is is followed by keywords.

The advantage of this method is that it refers to something intrinsic in the given article, in contradistinction with the unrelated numbers provided by the PubMed and Doi classification schemes.

Here's an example from a book:

[indent=1]Mooi WJ, Krausz T. Malignant transformation of nevi; dysplastic nevi. Chapter 7 in: Pathology of melanocytic disorders, 2nd Ed. London UK: Hodder Arnold, 2007, pp 195-226.[/indent]

In my system, this becomes “20070195mooi dysplastic nevus”

The beauty of my method is that it ties the year and first page of the publication to the filing system, in contrast with PubMed and Doi. It also has the great advantage of creating placeholders for older material that might not have Pubmed or Doi numbers.

For instance, in this article by Norris in 1820 on a “case of fungoide disease” (familial melanoma):

[indent=1]Norris W. Case of Fungoid Disease, Edinburgh Med Surg J 1820; 16:562-565,[/indent]

The YPA number is: “18200562norr melanoma familial”

This kind of system has great advantages when sorting on file names in computers, as it autosorts alphanumerically. PubMed or Doi do not help on that score.

If one uses only a manual system, one need only to write the YPA code on the article and file it sequentially. About 10 years ago, I hired a secretary to go through all of my loose articles and file them with my system. Today, if I need an article from that physical file, I need only to know the year and first page of the article, and in a few seconds, I can discover whether I have the physical article.

In a computer system, I need only go to the file folder that contains the PDF of the article in question and search using the same criteria as in a manual file. I can even enter key words. If the article is there, I'll find it.

Additionally, when searching on PubMed or when looking at reference lists at the end of articles or books, one can identify the YPA codes just be looking at the reference itself; it's embedded in the reference.

Please let me know how you do it. If my system helps you, I'm glad. Happy hunting for those useful articles.