Desperately Seeing xml

As the sub-title of this endeavor makes clear: I've no use for hierarchy. While I've long lost the cite, and many hours trying to find it again..., "there are more hierarchies in software than in the real world". Today offers up another tale of woe.

You can see from all this that linking retraction notices with the associated retracted articles is not easy. And if you want to do interesting analyses such as time to retraction - well, don't even get me started on PubMed dates...

All hierarchical datastores are limited to making one access path easy, and all others difficult or impossible. Or, to quote Talking Heads, "Same as it ever was".