Oh my goodness, everyone, according to PubMed New and Noteworthy, "PubMed now includes a relevance sort option under the "Display settings" menu." (The quote is from a feed alert--the link given by the post actually says that there will soon be a relevance sort option. However, the quote does not lie, because the option is indeed available now when I look.)
Relevance! In PubMed!
I mean, it's always been there in the "Related Citations," but as for PubMed itself, well, it was just part of the austere, patrician character of the database that you had your results sorted by date, and liked it.
Or, you know, you could re-sort by first author or journal title or something, but who really does that? Not me, and I'm pretty sure I represent everyone in the whole world.
Oh, wait, my mistake. Apparently I don't represent everyone in the whole world. Anyway, enjoy sorting by whatever criteria you prefer, everyone-who's-not-me! (It turns out an astonishing number of people are not me.)
Showing posts with label PubMed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PubMed. Show all posts
Friday, October 25, 2013
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
By Any Other Name
The Krafty Librarian highlights an NLM Technical Bulletin announcing that PubMed Central is changing its name to PMC (which is what we all called it for short anyway).
I agree with her that I don't think this is really going to solve the problem of people confusing PubMed Central with PubMed, to whatever extent this is a problem, since PMC on its own is unlikely to really mean anything to most people, but whatever.
The problem of me continuing to call it PubMed Central when talking about it in classes will also be a tough one to solve. Sorry, NLM. Old habits and all.
I agree with her that I don't think this is really going to solve the problem of people confusing PubMed Central with PubMed, to whatever extent this is a problem, since PMC on its own is unlikely to really mean anything to most people, but whatever.
The problem of me continuing to call it PubMed Central when talking about it in classes will also be a tough one to solve. Sorry, NLM. Old habits and all.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Never You Mind, PubMed
Sometimes an RSS feed reader can throw you off. For example, I saw that this new NLM blog, ReferencePoint, had posted a Fact Sheet sheet on the difference between PubMed and Medline.
I took notice, because this is a question that I think causes some confusion among the non-librarians among our patrons where I work (that is to say, pretty much all of our patrons), and that I usually brush over with something eloquent along the lines of "we use them pretty much interchangeably, but basically Medline is the database of citations, and PubMed is the search interface we use to access it, the way the internet is, you know, the internet, and Google is a specific interface to help you access it."
If the person seems to care at all, I might say something about the other interfaces for Medline, such as Ovid or the one in Web of Knowledge, and how they're kind of like other search interfaces such as Yahoo or Bing, and how some people prefer one or another of them for various reasons, but they all serve basically the same function.
In any case, I was interested to see how the experts at NLM would, no doubt much more clearly and accurately, explain the difference.
But then when I clicked to read more, there was no post! Removed for editing, perhaps, or updating, or because it incorrectly identified PubMed as "an especially rancorous panda." Who can say? Only the first few sentences linger, a ghostly remnant in my Reader.
Perhaps it will be reposted in the future. In the meantime, feel free to just substitute what I said here if anyone asks you about this topic.
I mean, the bit about PubMed being an especially rancorous panda. That'll get people's attention.
Edited to add that the post NLM blog post did go live, and you can see it here if you like.
I took notice, because this is a question that I think causes some confusion among the non-librarians among our patrons where I work (that is to say, pretty much all of our patrons), and that I usually brush over with something eloquent along the lines of "we use them pretty much interchangeably, but basically Medline is the database of citations, and PubMed is the search interface we use to access it, the way the internet is, you know, the internet, and Google is a specific interface to help you access it."
If the person seems to care at all, I might say something about the other interfaces for Medline, such as Ovid or the one in Web of Knowledge, and how they're kind of like other search interfaces such as Yahoo or Bing, and how some people prefer one or another of them for various reasons, but they all serve basically the same function.
In any case, I was interested to see how the experts at NLM would, no doubt much more clearly and accurately, explain the difference.
But then when I clicked to read more, there was no post! Removed for editing, perhaps, or updating, or because it incorrectly identified PubMed as "an especially rancorous panda." Who can say? Only the first few sentences linger, a ghostly remnant in my Reader.
Perhaps it will be reposted in the future. In the meantime, feel free to just substitute what I said here if anyone asks you about this topic.
I mean, the bit about PubMed being an especially rancorous panda. That'll get people's attention.
Edited to add that the post NLM blog post did go live, and you can see it here if you like.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Not PubMed Central!
Rachel at Our Bodies, Our Blog has info on HR 3699, and how it could potentially affect PubMed Central, everyone's favorite online repository of free full text journals articles.
If your eyes are already glazing over, just read Rachel's piece--it has bold text for the crucial bits, and everything! Basically, the rule that requires publishers to give free access to many of the articles in PubMed Central is being reconsidered. If you have feelings about PubMed Central, and whether the results of taxpayer-funded research should be made available there, you should perhaps care about HR 3699...even though it doesn't have an exciting name or anything.
If your eyes are already glazing over, just read Rachel's piece--it has bold text for the crucial bits, and everything! Basically, the rule that requires publishers to give free access to many of the articles in PubMed Central is being reconsidered. If you have feelings about PubMed Central, and whether the results of taxpayer-funded research should be made available there, you should perhaps care about HR 3699...even though it doesn't have an exciting name or anything.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Bold New Initiatives
I'm back!
And I'm all aflutter with the latest news from PubMed New and Noteworthy, which reads, in full, "PubMed search terms are now automatically displayed in bold in the search results."
Automatically! In bold!
This appears to be a substitute for the My NCBI option to have search terms highlighted (in your choice of exciting colors), since my search terms are highlighted when I'm signed into my account, but emboldened when I'm not.
I imagine it's probably helpful to searchers, especially those using keywords rather than MeSH terms, since being able to quickly spot the search terms may allow for speedier elimination of results in which they show up in other contexts than the one of interest.
Nice, PubMed.
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And I'm all aflutter with the latest news from PubMed New and Noteworthy, which reads, in full, "PubMed search terms are now automatically displayed in bold in the search results."
Automatically! In bold!
This appears to be a substitute for the My NCBI option to have search terms highlighted (in your choice of exciting colors), since my search terms are highlighted when I'm signed into my account, but emboldened when I'm not.
I imagine it's probably helpful to searchers, especially those using keywords rather than MeSH terms, since being able to quickly spot the search terms may allow for speedier elimination of results in which they show up in other contexts than the one of interest.
Nice, PubMed.
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Monday, March 28, 2011
Important News
PubMed New and Noteworthy informs us that there is now a CSV option under the 'send to' menu so you can save your results in comma-separated value form!
The better to make handy-dandy spreadsheets with! I may faint with enthusiasm.
In other news, Kate Harding made this nifty Wordle document with the top 50 novels 200 people told her she should read if she were going to read an English-language novel. It's a cool visual.
Many people seem to think highly of Middlemarch. Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, and Jane Eyre are also popular choices. People like the classics.
Word clouds are just kind of a fun idea, aren't they? You couldn't look around without stubbing your eye on one for a while, although I never think to do anything with them myself, but they often present information in an interesting way.
Certainly it's a lot more eye-catching than a simple list of the 50 titles.
That's it, my next report on something is going to include a word cloud.
"And these are all the journals we've added to the catalog in the past month."
Sadly, it turns out the effect is much less impressive when every piece of information in the cloud is the same size.
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The better to make handy-dandy spreadsheets with! I may faint with enthusiasm.
In other news, Kate Harding made this nifty Wordle document with the top 50 novels 200 people told her she should read if she were going to read an English-language novel. It's a cool visual.
Many people seem to think highly of Middlemarch. Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, and Jane Eyre are also popular choices. People like the classics.
Word clouds are just kind of a fun idea, aren't they? You couldn't look around without stubbing your eye on one for a while, although I never think to do anything with them myself, but they often present information in an interesting way.
Certainly it's a lot more eye-catching than a simple list of the 50 titles.
That's it, my next report on something is going to include a word cloud.
"And these are all the journals we've added to the catalog in the past month."
Sadly, it turns out the effect is much less impressive when every piece of information in the cloud is the same size.
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Monday, March 21, 2011
User Testimony
This post by genomicrepairman warms my PubMed-loving heart.
It explains why you should sign up for a MyNCBI account and have new results for your searches automatically emailed to you so you can keep up with what's going on in a subject in which you have interest.
Of course you should do this!
MyNCBI rocks. It's what I keep telling people.
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It explains why you should sign up for a MyNCBI account and have new results for your searches automatically emailed to you so you can keep up with what's going on in a subject in which you have interest.
Of course you should do this!
MyNCBI rocks. It's what I keep telling people.
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Sunday, March 20, 2011
Seating Arrangements
When we first got the PlayStation, I decided that rather than sit in a soft comfy chair to play, I would just sit on the floor in front of the TV.
I had this vague idea that maybe that would keep my playing time to a reasonable amount. I'll only play as long as I can sit on the floor, after all.
It turns out I can sit on the floor for a looooooong time.
I tried to find out if sitting on the floor was either good or bad for you, but couldn't find a MeSH term for 'sitting.' Apparently this is not a hot topic in PubMed.
However, using 'sitting' as a keyword with the MeSH "Floors and Floorcoverings" I found an article (PMID: 19790110) titled "Squatting, sitting on the floor, or cycling: are life-long daily activities risk factors for clinical knee osteoarthritis? Stage III results of a community-based study."
The abstract offers the following helpful information: "Prolonged standing, sitting on the floor, and walking up/downhill were not risks for knee osteoarthritis."
There's also this article (PMID: 17393761), "Effect of traditional floor sitting on postural control after standing," although I don't understand exactly what it's saying those effects are, or whether they're positive or negative.
Something about 'center of pressure sway,' which seems to be increased by sitting seiza (legs folded under you). Maybe you sway more after standing because your feet have fallen asleep or, as the abstract says, lost 'voluntary toe flexion strength'?
Anyway, as far as we can tell, no increased risk of knee osteoarthritis. Based on the extremely limited information available.
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I had this vague idea that maybe that would keep my playing time to a reasonable amount. I'll only play as long as I can sit on the floor, after all.
It turns out I can sit on the floor for a looooooong time.
I tried to find out if sitting on the floor was either good or bad for you, but couldn't find a MeSH term for 'sitting.' Apparently this is not a hot topic in PubMed.
However, using 'sitting' as a keyword with the MeSH "Floors and Floorcoverings" I found an article (PMID: 19790110) titled "Squatting, sitting on the floor, or cycling: are life-long daily activities risk factors for clinical knee osteoarthritis? Stage III results of a community-based study."
The abstract offers the following helpful information: "Prolonged standing, sitting on the floor, and walking up/downhill were not risks for knee osteoarthritis."
There's also this article (PMID: 17393761), "Effect of traditional floor sitting on postural control after standing," although I don't understand exactly what it's saying those effects are, or whether they're positive or negative.
Something about 'center of pressure sway,' which seems to be increased by sitting seiza (legs folded under you). Maybe you sway more after standing because your feet have fallen asleep or, as the abstract says, lost 'voluntary toe flexion strength'?
Anyway, as far as we can tell, no increased risk of knee osteoarthritis. Based on the extremely limited information available.
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Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Oh, Thank Goodness!
Rejoice!--at the following announcement from the PubMed New and Noteworthy feed:
That was a feature of the redesign that was bugging the heck out of me. If you had many pages of results you couldn't skip to, say, 5 of 10, but had to page through them one by one. Shudder.
Now you can type in the page number you want, hit enter, and there you are!
I am loving you today, PubMed. Even more than usual.
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The pager for PubMed and NLM Catalog has been modified to include the ability to jump to a specific results page.
That was a feature of the redesign that was bugging the heck out of me. If you had many pages of results you couldn't skip to, say, 5 of 10, but had to page through them one by one. Shudder.
Now you can type in the page number you want, hit enter, and there you are!
I am loving you today, PubMed. Even more than usual.
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Further Journals on PubMed
I had previously expressed my grudging acceptance of PubMed's new setup, admitting that it had refrained from completely wrecking my entire working life by messing up the journals information (thanks, NLM!).
Well, now I have to suddenly move from grudging acceptance to wholehearted and gleeful embrace of the new 'Journals in the NCBI databases' replacement for the old Journals Database, because guess what they do that they didn't use to do?
Hyperlink to continues and continued by titles! This is one of those simple things I always kind of wanted, but it was never there so I kind of forgot I wanted it.
I got used to just copying the alternate title and pasting it back into the search line, and then if it's a title for which there are several similar titles, to sorting through them to find out which was the correct relation to the original.
It took seconds, I tell you entire seconds out of my life every time I had to do it. And you know those add up.
Now, I can see the related titles in the record and click on them and get to the related journal record. It's revolutionary! So much so that I had to take the seconds I would have spent looking for Emergency Medicine to write this blog post about it.
Now if this would only work in DOCLINE someday...
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Well, now I have to suddenly move from grudging acceptance to wholehearted and gleeful embrace of the new 'Journals in the NCBI databases' replacement for the old Journals Database, because guess what they do that they didn't use to do?
Hyperlink to continues and continued by titles! This is one of those simple things I always kind of wanted, but it was never there so I kind of forgot I wanted it.
I got used to just copying the alternate title and pasting it back into the search line, and then if it's a title for which there are several similar titles, to sorting through them to find out which was the correct relation to the original.
It took seconds, I tell you entire seconds out of my life every time I had to do it. And you know those add up.
Now, I can see the related titles in the record and click on them and get to the related journal record. It's revolutionary! So much so that I had to take the seconds I would have spent looking for Emergency Medicine to write this blog post about it.
Now if this would only work in DOCLINE someday...
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Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Journals on PubMed
So I've been sitting here cataloging this afternoon, using the option that has replaced the just-retired Journals database on PubMed (an NLM catalog search limited to "Journals referenced in the NCBI databases"), and...it works fine.
All the information I used to look up in the Journals database--ISSN, title abbreviation, sometimes notes on continuation and years of publication--is still here and looks basically the same. My work can continue unhindered by the need to learn a new layout or find a new source for this precious information.
OK, PubMed. I am suspicious of change, but you have proved my doubts unfounded. This time.
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All the information I used to look up in the Journals database--ISSN, title abbreviation, sometimes notes on continuation and years of publication--is still here and looks basically the same. My work can continue unhindered by the need to learn a new layout or find a new source for this precious information.
OK, PubMed. I am suspicious of change, but you have proved my doubts unfounded. This time.
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Monday, December 13, 2010
Sex on PubMed
I note that on PubMed Limits today they've changed the heading of the binary Male/Female check boxes from 'Gender' to 'Sex.' I just noticed it today, I mean--I'm not sure exactly when they did it.
Interesting. It always kind of bugged me that they called that very useful limit 'gender', since in many (though not all) health-related contexts, I see 'gender' used to describe social roles, and 'sex' used to describe biological distinctions. And in most cases, I think the thing that's going to be most likely to be in play for biomedical literature searches is the biological distinctions.
Say, if you're purely interested in whether a biological male is more likely to get kidney stones than a biological female, you don't especially need to care about the person's gender identity. Obviously it would apply to how you provide sensitive care and so forth, but does it affect the biological likelihood of kidney stones?
Well honestly, I have no idea, not being a doctor, but I suspect possibly not.
I'm one of those irritating people who, when someone asks a pregnant woman "do you know the gender?" always thinks pedantically,'probably not, although you can hazard a guess if you know the sex.'
I'd be even more popular than I am if I actually said that out loud, right? I'll have to try it sometime.
Now if PubMed were more into psychology, I would expect them to be all about gender. I should look at PsycINFO and see if they actually are.
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Interesting. It always kind of bugged me that they called that very useful limit 'gender', since in many (though not all) health-related contexts, I see 'gender' used to describe social roles, and 'sex' used to describe biological distinctions. And in most cases, I think the thing that's going to be most likely to be in play for biomedical literature searches is the biological distinctions.
Say, if you're purely interested in whether a biological male is more likely to get kidney stones than a biological female, you don't especially need to care about the person's gender identity. Obviously it would apply to how you provide sensitive care and so forth, but does it affect the biological likelihood of kidney stones?
Well honestly, I have no idea, not being a doctor, but I suspect possibly not.
I'm one of those irritating people who, when someone asks a pregnant woman "do you know the gender?" always thinks pedantically,'probably not, although you can hazard a guess if you know the sex.'
I'd be even more popular than I am if I actually said that out loud, right? I'll have to try it sometime.
Now if PubMed were more into psychology, I would expect them to be all about gender. I should look at PsycINFO and see if they actually are.
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Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Items of Note
If any of my legions of followers were students to whom I've talked about PubMed, which I highly doubt any are, I would tell them "read this post over here from Scicurious."
I would tell them this as a means to prove that it's not just geeky librarians who think PubMed is awesome. No, PubMed can actually help you get stuff done in your actual career! Someone with a science career says so!
I'm filled with a feeling of warm fuzzy validation.
In other PubMed news, the Krafty Librarian passed on this NLM Technical Bulletin update reporting that the NCBI Journals database, currently closely linked to PubMed, is to be retired. I greet this news with some trepidation, because I use the Journals database all the time, mainly to look up ISSNs and journal abbreviations while I'm a-catalogin'. We like to have those abbreviated titles in the catalog, you know, since people tend to have citations with that format, and it's easier to be able to just copy the citation as written than try to figure out what the full title is.
Although I use the Journals database to find out what the full title is sometimes, too. I'm gonna miss you, Journals database! Sniff.
This information will now reportedly be available in the NLM Catalog, which I do not use all the time, but apparently will in future.
I look forward to getting to know you, NLM Catalog. I totally won't be judging you with against an astronomically high standard set by a departed love or anything, either.
In completely non-PubMed news, I completed 50,004 words on my National Novel Writing Month project last night, so, yeah, I think we can all agree that as someone who's been proven capable of typing a specified number of words within a defined period of time, I'm pretty much the absolute zenith of awesome right now.
The story, such as it is, isn't quite finished yet, so I'm continuing to work on it and hope to wrap it up by the end of the month with a few thousand more words and some additional dramatic fighting, wordy dialogue, and possibly some gratuitous nudity and cursing, because I didn't get around to that last time.
I may also throw in a reference to PubMed, just to tie things in with the other news items of the day.
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I would tell them this as a means to prove that it's not just geeky librarians who think PubMed is awesome. No, PubMed can actually help you get stuff done in your actual career! Someone with a science career says so!
I'm filled with a feeling of warm fuzzy validation.
In other PubMed news, the Krafty Librarian passed on this NLM Technical Bulletin update reporting that the NCBI Journals database, currently closely linked to PubMed, is to be retired. I greet this news with some trepidation, because I use the Journals database all the time, mainly to look up ISSNs and journal abbreviations while I'm a-catalogin'. We like to have those abbreviated titles in the catalog, you know, since people tend to have citations with that format, and it's easier to be able to just copy the citation as written than try to figure out what the full title is.
Although I use the Journals database to find out what the full title is sometimes, too. I'm gonna miss you, Journals database! Sniff.
This information will now reportedly be available in the NLM Catalog, which I do not use all the time, but apparently will in future.
I look forward to getting to know you, NLM Catalog. I totally won't be judging you with against an astronomically high standard set by a departed love or anything, either.
In completely non-PubMed news, I completed 50,004 words on my National Novel Writing Month project last night, so, yeah, I think we can all agree that as someone who's been proven capable of typing a specified number of words within a defined period of time, I'm pretty much the absolute zenith of awesome right now.
The story, such as it is, isn't quite finished yet, so I'm continuing to work on it and hope to wrap it up by the end of the month with a few thousand more words and some additional dramatic fighting, wordy dialogue, and possibly some gratuitous nudity and cursing, because I didn't get around to that last time.
I may also throw in a reference to PubMed, just to tie things in with the other news items of the day.
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Friday, November 12, 2010
Novels and Values
As promised, I am writing away on this National Novel Writing Month novel (cleverly titled NaNovel in my documents folder).
I have officially passed the halfway mark (en route to the official goal of 50,000 words), so I'm a bit ahead of the game so far, although I am getting to a sort of 'well, that's fine, but I've just spent 50 pages covering peoples' car trips,' and 'so how do I fill up the rest of the pages?' stage.
But, as a colleague pointed out, it could become a post-apocalyptic wasteland novel at any time and on any page, so I shall not give up hope of something interesting happening.
Meanwhile, I was interested to hear via an email to the MEDLIB-L list that one can now download PubMed search results in comma-separated value format for handy sorting in Excel and such, via FLink. You can do a search in PubMed, then go to FLink, select PubMed under 'choose a database to start,' and select 'input from Entrez history' to get a list of recent searches which can then be saved in CSV format.
I have to confess I'm not totally sure I need this for anything, but I save a lot of stuff in CSV format from queries of our OPAC, so I'm sort of preliminarily pleased that the option exists.
Now I have to get back to work. This novel, unfortunately, is not going to write itself.
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I have officially passed the halfway mark (en route to the official goal of 50,000 words), so I'm a bit ahead of the game so far, although I am getting to a sort of 'well, that's fine, but I've just spent 50 pages covering peoples' car trips,' and 'so how do I fill up the rest of the pages?' stage.
But, as a colleague pointed out, it could become a post-apocalyptic wasteland novel at any time and on any page, so I shall not give up hope of something interesting happening.
Meanwhile, I was interested to hear via an email to the MEDLIB-L list that one can now download PubMed search results in comma-separated value format for handy sorting in Excel and such, via FLink. You can do a search in PubMed, then go to FLink, select PubMed under 'choose a database to start,' and select 'input from Entrez history' to get a list of recent searches which can then be saved in CSV format.
I have to confess I'm not totally sure I need this for anything, but I save a lot of stuff in CSV format from queries of our OPAC, so I'm sort of preliminarily pleased that the option exists.
Now I have to get back to work. This novel, unfortunately, is not going to write itself.
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Sunday, March 28, 2010
More PubMedly Goodness
PubMed now goes back to 1947! I can't wait to filter my piles of retrospective search results into 15 easy categories using MyNCBI.
Seriously, I love this big lunkhead of a database. And not just because I have to, in order to properly infuse students with the joy of searching the biomedical literature.
Please! Let me talk to you about PubMed! It's going to be awesome!
The other thing they want to talk about lately is Zotero, about which I know much much less, so I guess I'm going to have to figure out how to use it. The University gives us access to RefWorks, so I can talk about that all day, but people also seem to be interested in Zotero. And if that's where the action is, that's where we'd better be.
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Seriously, I love this big lunkhead of a database. And not just because I have to, in order to properly infuse students with the joy of searching the biomedical literature.
Please! Let me talk to you about PubMed! It's going to be awesome!
The other thing they want to talk about lately is Zotero, about which I know much much less, so I guess I'm going to have to figure out how to use it. The University gives us access to RefWorks, so I can talk about that all day, but people also seem to be interested in Zotero. And if that's where the action is, that's where we'd better be.
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Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Available Vocabulary
Ooh! Ooh!
PubMed New and Noteworthy posts the worthy note that "MEDLINE citations and the MeSH database have been updated with 2010 MeSH vocabulary"!
[Swoons]
Yes, I can mock teenagers for swooning over New Moon (although I didn't, particularly), but are my own faint-inducing-situations any less peculiar? Many would say not.
A peculiar thing I notice is that while my RSS aggregator shows the quoted line above, when I actually click though to the post, it's different. So PubMed New and Noteworthy is like a citation to another page, with a brief commentary attached. Like a normal blog post, but visible only in a feed aggregator. Weird.
I'm probably the last person to notice this and think it's interesting. Fine, everyone else, move along.
But first, swoon with me over the fact that new vocabulary is now in the database.
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PubMed New and Noteworthy posts the worthy note that "MEDLINE citations and the MeSH database have been updated with 2010 MeSH vocabulary"!
[Swoons]
Yes, I can mock teenagers for swooning over New Moon (although I didn't, particularly), but are my own faint-inducing-situations any less peculiar? Many would say not.
A peculiar thing I notice is that while my RSS aggregator shows the quoted line above, when I actually click though to the post, it's different. So PubMed New and Noteworthy is like a citation to another page, with a brief commentary attached. Like a normal blog post, but visible only in a feed aggregator. Weird.
I'm probably the last person to notice this and think it's interesting. Fine, everyone else, move along.
But first, swoon with me over the fact that new vocabulary is now in the database.
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Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Latest Exciting News
PubMed is officially the new PubMed!
It's terribly exciting. Sadly, I got stood up today by the person I was supposed to meet for a discussion of how to make a smooth transition from Ovid to PubMed searching, so I didn't get to show it off.
It will be convenient not to have to keep telling people "now you probably want to click here, because even though this is what the site looks like right now, it's going to look like this sometime soon."
As I've been using the new design, I've quickly gotten used to it and I quite like it. It works well.
At this point I'm ready to say it: well done, NCBI!
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It's terribly exciting. Sadly, I got stood up today by the person I was supposed to meet for a discussion of how to make a smooth transition from Ovid to PubMed searching, so I didn't get to show it off.
It will be convenient not to have to keep telling people "now you probably want to click here, because even though this is what the site looks like right now, it's going to look like this sometime soon."
As I've been using the new design, I've quickly gotten used to it and I quite like it. It works well.
At this point I'm ready to say it: well done, NCBI!
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Thursday, October 15, 2009
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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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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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
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.
.
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.
.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
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.
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