Dermatoglyphics
Unverified trivia (from wikipedia, which means copied from somewhere else, only I don't know where):
Dermatoglyphics and uncopyrightable are the longest English words with no repeated letters.
This came up whilst preparing to meet with a forensic chemistry class. One of my favorite examples of controlled vocabulary is dermatoglyphics. Which are...?
Answer: fingerprints. Well, the study of fingerprints. It's easy to get lost in databases searching for research on fingerprints, because searching for that term will get you all variety of research about any identifying characteristic of
anything (e.g., magnetic fingerprints, chemical fingerprints denoting the presence of certain elements). But not necessarily information about the actual prints from the ends of human fingers.
One way to deal with this is some databases is to use the controlled vocabulary term
dermatoglyphics. I think this one's easy to remember because it's an interesting word and a good example of the benefit of using it versus the common term. Interchanging the terms in different databases provides different results. Web of Science will give you decent results searching for 'fingerprints' but better results for 'dermatoglyphics'. It's very clear what the advantage is within MEDLINE.
Posted at
02:33PM Mar 22, 2007
by WILSON, JOSHUA in Anecdotes |