Bibliographies Question Answered at Last!

OK, here's something I learned about PubMed yesterday.

You know Bibliographies in MyNCBI? When they were first added, I was all intrigued and wishing they'd been there earlier, because I thought maybe they would manage references for you and let you arrange them for citations or something, like RefWorks or EndNote.

But they don't do that, they just store article citations, so I sort of lost interest. From time to time, however, I would wonder, "just what is the deal with Bibliographies? What are they for?"

Well, it seems that the correct way (or, not to be prescriptive in case someone else has another idea, "a useful way") to think of Bibliographies is as a variation on another MyNCBI feature, Collections.

It's not that Bibliographies does anything fancy with the citations, it's just a place to store them (the same as Collections), but it facilitates searching by author from within the utility in order to compile lists of works by a specific person.

Collections, on the other hand, is a more general feature offering a way to save items compiled from PubMed itself based on any old search you may do.

I might say that Bibliographies addresses the part of Cutter's objectives related to "by a given author" or "in which the title is known," while Collections handles results of subject searches. But I might be making that up.

In any case, it was reassuring to know that there was not some crucial, fascinating twist to the feature that I was missing out on. It is what it is, and it's all right there.

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