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Author Name Suffix Data in PubMed

N/A

April 10, 2001 [posted]

For the period, February 2, 2001 through March 28, 2001, author name suffix data such as "Jr," "3rd" and "2nd" were missing from some PubMed citations (approximately 200,000). These data were inadvertently not completely converted to the new system in which MEDLINE journal citations are created and maintained. The same is true for the Personal Name as Subject field and this condition still exists.

In PubMed, personal names, whether in the Author or Personal Name as Subject fields, are truncated automatically, so the absence of the suffix data would not have affected most author name searches. However, if you searched for authors during this period and specifically included the suffix in your strategy (e.g., Smith AB 3rd), your retrieval may have been incomplete.

Corrections for the Author Name field were sent to PubMed and NLM's licensees last week. NLM is in the process of recovering the suffix data for the Personal Name as Subject field. Remaining corrections will be made soon.

Note to Cubby Users:

The corrected citations were unfortunately restamped with a new MHDA value in PubMed. The MHDA is a date field used by the Cubby Stored Search service. As a result, these citations may be repulled by a Cubby Stored search. We do apologize for this.