Two Unrelated Items

Well, first, everyone is all over the PubMed redesign (announced, with info on the specific changes, on PubMed New and Noteworthy, and noted by lots of people).

I'm all over it too, of course. It's big news in my world.

Now we can start making our Captivate tutorials to inform our students about how to switch over to PubMed once Ovid Medline is gone! We've been champing at the bit for this.

Having spent a little time poking around the new site, I am basically cool with it, as the kids said about 50 years ago. Things look a little different, but I think I can find what I need, and I haven't found that anything I loved is totally gone. The cool tricks we try to teach students to use (do any students use them? we can dream) are still there.

I like that you can now see the MeSH terms on an article by just clicking a little plus sign at the bottom of the abstract. It was never much fun to explain to people that they had to change the dropdown 'display' from Abstract Plus to Citation to see them: not that that's difficult, but it's not intuitive, or likely to be easily remembered by someone who doesn't use PubMed a lot.

When you're just trying to give someone a handy tip ("looking at the MeSH terms assigned to an article that's good can give you ideas about search terms to use to locate more articles!"), it's nice if the tip is actually going to be easy for the person to apply later.

I imagine we'll pretty much immediately start teaching this (sorry, class who got the PubMed presentation yesterday--that's old news!), and I anticipate getting to know it much better. For now the new PubMed and I are on cordial but still distant terms, but I hope to grow to love it in time.

Ideally, about 20 minutes of time. I'm a busy person, you know.


Second, as if it weren't enough that not sleeping well might incline one to be more susceptible to catching colds, now Genetics and Health presents the suggestion that poor sleep may be associated with Alzheimer's Disease.

Well, that's it, I'm going to bed. Perhaps I'll dream of biomedical information searches in wondrous new interfaces.

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