My NCBI Redesign

PubMed has revealed a long-promised redesign of My NCBI, the super-delightful search-saving, citation-organizing, source-sharing, bibliography-compiling tool whose praises I am always singing. (Listen hard, you'll hear my tuneless warbling in the distance.)

It looks very...clean. I like how all the major components--saved searches, collections, filters, bibliography, recent activity and a handy-dandy search bar to run queries directly from My NCBI--are all right there on one page.

I don't notice any missing or significantly altered functionality, so at least based on a first look, this is pretty much an aesthetic redesign rather than a change in how the tool works.

I also like that you can customize the page so that various things will or will not show up there. This is a very nice, interactive touch that makes the site feel contemporary and modern and hip to what the kids these days like to do online.

It's like customizing what shows up on your blog page!

Although My NCBI does not appear to offer the option to show your Twitter feed.

It's traded the pastel tones of the last redesign for a spare blue and white layout. I was OK with the pastels, but this does come across as a little more professional.

Observe a tiny screen cap:

I think I can get behind it. Rock on, NCBI.

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NCBI, All Mine

I meant to express glee about this a week ago when I first heard, but it slipped my mind until I was spending some quality time with MyNCBI prior to a PubMed class.

Then, gloriously, it returned unto me: you can now include up to 15 filters for your PubMed results, rather than the previous five!

Five really was not very many. I don't know if I need 15, but I think somewhere in the middle I'll find a comfortable number.

Just look at my filters now! So many! So delicious! (For demonstration purposes, I've included more than I probably need for most searches.)

I'd also like to give a shout out to the option to make custom filters, as I've done here at the bottom (no articles in this particular results set, alas). That's not super new, but it's still super cool.

Track Your Awesomeness

Ooh...Bibliography in My NCBI becomes more useful!

This from PubMed New and Noteworthy advises that you can now add citations from "books, meetings, presentations, and patents" as well as journal articles.

Nice.

Now if only I had a book, meeting, presentation or patent to my name. So when I say "becomes more useful," I mean "in theory, for someone."

It's still not much use to a non-published loser like me. Although I did amuse myself by creating a bibliography of people with my last name, who I can pretend are my various relatives. Naturally I take credit for everything my relatives have ever done, too, on account of I'm just so good at supporting and encouraging people to achieve.

Hey! You! Go achieve something!

See?

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Whither MyNCBI?

Catching up on the latest news about the long-promised PubMed redesign, I was caught up short by the following info from the question and answer list:

• Is “Preferences” replacing “MyNCBI”? Undecided.

Well, for pity's sake. I was just working on a tutorial for MyNCBI, which I personally have long loved and wished to introduce to the eager masses of students.

Now it might not even exist under that name!

Guess I better put that project on hold. No point in recording detailed, throat-hoarsening Captivate tutorials if the thing I'm talking about could look different in a month (the current proposed launch date is mid-September).

If only I had a huge and ever-growing collection of other projects to work on instead.

Thanks to the Krafty Librarian for the tip.

NCBI Totally Loves Me

Oh, My NCBI, always coming up with new ways to impress me!

I like the (relatively new, I think) option to make public and share a collection, either by emailing a link to someone, or by just pasting it into your page like so:

View my collection, "Honey and wounds" from NCBI

I should note that "View my collection" is their default language for this link. I might also like to edit it to read:

Check out the awesome collection I've put together from NCBI--it's the best thing you'll see all day about honey and wounds!

Alternatively, and a little less dramatic with the colorful underlined link-y look, I might go with something like:

I found a few articles from NCBI, collected here as "Honey and wounds".

I could see this being handy if you're working with someone else on research, and want an easy way to say "here, this is what I found." Or if you wanted to share the results of some searches with your adoring legions. Heck, you could just do little collections of articles all the time to illustrate points you're talking about: "see here for suggested reading."

I like it.

I guess I can now never delete that semi-random collection I put together for demo purposes, lest my links go bad. Well, it couldn't have happened to a nicer set of articles about honey and wounds.

My New NCBI

So the new My NCBI is up! 

It's a bit smoother looking, a little less utilitarian and grey and business-like, more pastel and polished.

It's got a new 'home' page that shows a summary of saved searches and collections, preferences, and the databases for which you've established filters. See this tiny screen cap for a view.

There's a new 'bibliographies' feature that lets you save citations for papers (where were you when I was in school?!) I'm going to have to play around with that one and see how it works.

There's also a new search feature in 'filters' that seems pretty handy. You can quickly pull up a specific library to add to your results tab list, rather than scanning down the whole list, for example. And there are links to the various libraries' websites right there, although I did notice that occasionally these link back to the PubMed front page instead.

You have to save a search now before you choose whether or not you want to get email updates, but this is a pretty minor detail.

Basically the new My NCBI looks good to me--some useful additions, and no loss of functionality that I've noticed so far. Users who were familiar with the old one should have no issues with the new, since everything is in the same general place it was.

We're definitely going to have to adjust the specific things we say to students, though, 'cause it does look different. Nevertheless, my geek love of NLM remains as strong as ever.

My NCBI

I am wildly excited by the news that My NCBI, which allows us to do more handy dandy stuff in PubMed than we can shake sticks at, is going to be updated on Thursday.

I can hardly wait to see the new version! I hope it includes a way to collect points that can be redeemed for free abstracts or something. (Just trying to think outside the box here.)

Meanwhile, this fab tutorial I did in the spring will be immediately out of date (I think it's actually somewhat out of date already), so I'm posting it while it still has a fragment of relevance. Quick, everyone! Learn to use this version right away, while you still can! Then forget it.

I'm hoping it doesn't change too much, or that student I showed how to use it yesterday will come back on Friday, sign in, and think, "that librarian is such a liar! This doesn't work anything like she said it would!"

That's NCBI: always keeping us on our toes.