if the article title contains a colon (perhaps other special chars with meaning in the search URL) the URL generated results in an error message from pubmed
example: ppat.0010003 reference #2
in the above case the search works, but sometimes results in failure
if the author names are marked up as <collab> instead of <person-group>, findArticle.action fails to pull the author name. then it constructs a pubmed search URL with an empty author name field, which leads to an error on the pubmed side.
ideally findArticle would grab the author name successfully. however, it should construct a valid search URL even in cases when it cannot find an article (eg, search on title only instead of title and name)
example: ppat.0010003 reference #13
