New Web Tools to Improve PubMed Searches for the Biomedical Community
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MEDICAL INFORMATION
Coccia, Gahtti, Gualtieri, Sora
brary of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Maryland, and by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) (2). It has been available on the web, free of charge, since June 26,1997, and constitutes the electronic version of Index Medicus, Index to Dental Literature, and International Nursing Index. PubMed is an irreplaceable tool for the scientific community. Recently, universities and research institutions have developed various instruments that use the NLM database, endeavoring to offer new and ingenious information retrieval interfaces, able to reorganize the content of the biomedical information and to present it in various and peculiar ways, including PubFocus (3), eTBlast (4), XplorMed (5), PubMed Assistant (6), PubFinder (7), Vivisimo (also called ClusterMed) (8), GoPubMed (9), HubMed (lo),SLIM (ll),Ali Baba (12), iHOP (13), Twease (14), JADE (15), PubCrawler (16), PubMatrix (17), Anne O’Tate (18), BiometaCluster (19), ReleMed (20), BabelMESH (21),and EBIMed (22).These tools’ aim is to optimize the response to queries by reducing search times, simplifying the search modalities, and ensuring high-quality replies to medical queries. Users need to be informed about these technologies and instructed in their use, to face problems of information overload and to raise today’s still low level of technology literacy.
METHOD In order to select the most popular third-party tools, we searched Google for PubMed aggregators. Results were analyzed. In addition, a PubMed search query PubMed [U] OR PubMed [MeSH] was performed and saved as a MyNCBl mail alert. The five most important and visited PubMed third-party tools currently available on the web were then analyzed on the basis of their function, accessibility, user friendliness, and timeliness. A natural-language standard query, thrombocytopenia AND human AND hepatitis, was performed; Medical Subject Heading (MeSH, the NLM’s thesaurus of medical terms used for indexing articles for MEDLINE/PubMed) terms were not allowed by some tools. Figure 1
shows the query results performed on each tool.
R E S U LTS Table 1 compares the tools’ utilities and their functionality with reference to PubMed searches.
SLIM Slider Interface for MEDLINE/PubMed searches, SLIM (23). is a research project of the NLM’s Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. Its aim is to develop an alternative interface for MEDLINE searches using Javascript slider bars. SLIM, which is already available in beta version, allows users to perform literature searches in a simple and immediate way, using sliding cursors and applying a series of predefined filters. The slider bars on the interface control the different search parameters: data limit, journals subset, age group, and MeSH terms. The scripts are intended to function the same way as in the automatic term mapping process of Entrez (the PubMed search engine). An Italian version of this tool has been realized in collaboration with the Lombardy Regional Health Authority’s Kno
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