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Amoebaweb: www.vanguard.edu/faculty/ddegelman/amoebaweb Classics in the History of Psychology: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca
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  1. J Stone
  1. Research Fellow in Neurology, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Edinburgh, Western General Hospital, Crewe Road, Edinburgh EH4 2XU; email: jstone{at}skull.dcn.ed.ac.uk

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    A good web directory is a valuable site that can lead you to places even “Google” may not take you. Amoebaweb must be commended as a vast directory of psychology links, maintained by Douglas Degelman, a professor of psychology at Vanguard University of Southern California. It has a simple, no frills interface, is mercifully free of advertising, covers a huge range of topics within psychology, psychiatry, and neuropsychology, and is well worth a look.

    It led me to Classics in the History of Psychology, where full text versions of articles by Broca, Darwin, Freud, Galton, and Janet are available. Whole books, for example William James’ The principles of psychology, are also here and because they are digital can be searched by any textword. A search using the word “volition”, for example, obtained 95 hits among the articles available.

    It would be satisfying to see a similar website devoted to neurology and neurosurgery articles that are now past their copyright date. The internet has the ability to resurrect old scientific material that currently lies out of sight— in particular books and journals written before Medline’s 1966 cut off. Some encouraging steps forward in this direction have been made by Oldmedline (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/databases_oldmedline.html),

    which covers journal articles from 1958–1965, PsycINFO (http://www.apa.org/psycinfo), which has abstracts of some articles going back to 1887 and some books to 1938, and the 100 years of Brain archive (http://brain.oupjournals.org), which has a searchable table of contents

    (but no abstracts until 1981) of all issues of Brain going back to the first in 1878.

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