New PubMed interface to roll out… today!

Apparently the new PubMed interface went live just a couple of hours ago. I used PubMed this morning and they hadn’t transitioned the site. So, check out the video tutorial I posted earlier to get a handle on the new redesign.

New PubMed Interface video

Those of you who missed our new Pubmed Interface workshop should check out this excellent video from the University of Manitoba:

Swine Flu Info on PubMed

PubMed is offering up-to-date Swine Flu information on their main page. They also link to several credible sources: Center for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization, and PandemicFlu.gov.

Historically significant journal added to PubMed Central

From the National Library of Medicine:

The National Medical Association (NMA), established in 1895, is the largest and oldest national organization representing African American physicians and allied health professionals in the United States. The JNMA was published quarterly from 1909 to 1938, bimonthly from 1940 to 1977, and monthly since 1978. The archive currently represents over 77,000 digitized pages of issues, cover to cover, through 2007. Current content will be coming at a later date.

To browse PubMed Central journals, please visit PubMed Central HomePage.

2009 version of PubMed to launch mid-December

The National Library of Medicine has released information about the new PubMed system that will be launched in mid-December:

The 2009 PubMed system will be brought up in mid-December. In addition to the new field, Create Date (see Create Date — New Field to Indicate When Records Added to PubMed), here are some additional notes of interest.

• The auto-complete feature will be added to First Author, Last Author, and Full Author Name on the search-by-field section of Advanced Search.
• The old “tab” version of Limits will not be updated. Future changes will be made only to the limit feature on the Advanced Search screen.
• A new field, PubMed Central Release, will be added to the MEDLINE® format with the field tag PMCR. This is the embargo date associated with the availability of the published article in PMC. This date, if present, already displays on the AbstractPlus format (see: PubMed Central® IDs Display in PubMed® AbstractPlus Format). It will display in the XML format in the PubMedPubDate element with the PubStatus attribute, “pmc-release.”
• The Publishing Model field will be removed from the MEDLINE format (field tag: PUBM) as it is no longer needed there.
• The new MeSH® heading, Young Adult, will not be added to the limits Age Group options. In the future, we will consider including it. Items indexed with Young Adult will be retrieved if either Adult: 19-44 years or All Adult: 19+ years are selected as limits. The term can be searched directly as young adult [mh].
• Changes to the Grant Number, as explained in MEDLINE® Data Changes — 2009, may be delayed on the Citation format. The MEDLINE format will be updated when the new system is available.
• The Recent Activity feature is being added to the AbstractPlus display.
• When the addition of MEDLINE records to PubMed resumes, the next automatic e-mail updates will likely be larger than usual (see Annual MEDLINE®/PubMed® Year-End Processing (YEP): Impact on Searching During Fall 2008).

Finding full text in PubMed

Finding Full Text Articles in PubMed has never been simpler! When you use the PubMed link from the library’s website to do a search, the Talbot Research Library’s holdings will appear as a tab in the results screen. Select that tab, and your results will be limited to articles from library subscriptions – most of which are available online.

Tips for title searching in PubMed

Searchers often copy an article title from another source then paste it into PubMed for a search. If a phrase in the title matches with an author name it can cause the search to fail. To improve title searching, PubMed now ignores phrases that match with author/investigator names that are made up only of stopwords (e.g., During A, May BE, Just BY). For example, in the search for the title, Prediction of performance level during a cognitive task from ongoing EEG oscillatory activities, the phrase, during a, is ignored and the search retrieves the expected citation. This special effect occurs when the phrase is part of a string of other words, none of which have search tags. When a name is entered by itself, e.g., just by, it is interpreted as a name search. To search for an author name (that matches with stop words) plus other terms, use an author search tag, e.g., just by [au] AND seizure.

A list of stopwords is available in Help. Be aware that “pasted in” title searches can still fail when a phrase in the title matches a name that is not made up of stopwords as these are not ignored. The field searching capability of the Advanced Search screen is a recommended alternative.

By Annette M. Nahin
MEDLARS Management Section

from the NLM Technical Bulletin

Drug Sensor Added to PubMed Results Page

From the NLM Technical Bulletin:

The PubMed Summary results page [now shows] results from other high-quality resources in a column to the right of the PubMed search results.

The first example of this new feature will be the Drug Sensor developed at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). This sensor detects whether a drug name is present in a user’s search, and if so, presents exerpts of information from other resources that you can link to to read more. The summary consists of a title (created from the drug name in the search query), some content from the linked resource, and an attribution line. At this time, about 200 drug names are included.

Source: NLM Tech Bulletin