The NLM Technical Bulletin continues to be a primary resource to keep up-to-date with PubMed. Here are some recent examples:

New and Improved Entrez PubMed and New URL

NCBI began a phased transition to a new version of the Entrez system on May 23, 2007. This transition is described in a recent NLM Technical Bulletin article. The new system offers more flexibility and will serve as the foundation for creating the next generation of features and capabilities for Entrez databases. Features of the new system were described in an article that announced the beta version of the new interface. In addition, the web address has changed slightly, but the old address still works at this time.

Veterinary Search in PubMed Special Query

PubMed Special Queries now includes a veterinary medicine search capability and a special page designed to assist you with veterinary medicine topics. Navigate to Special Queries in the left blue sidebar and scroll down to find it. This page includes links to free-access databases of veterinary information, animal health organizations, and relevant pages in MedlinePlus. You can also search the veterinary medicine subset of PubMed by including ‘veterinary [sb]’ in your search string. This subset is created using a complex “hedge” of terms including almost 700 MeSH terms, text words, and journal title abbreviations. Historical citations from PubMed Central will also be retrieved using this subset; the oldest article currently retrieved dates from 1867. For a complete description, see the article in the NLM Technical Bulletin.

Skill Kits in the NLM Technical Bulletin

For several years now, the NLM Technical Bulletin has highlighted articles as “skill kits” and added a special icon at the beginning of the title. These articles cover search hints, system features, and data and indexing topics for PubMed and other NLM databases. Topics to date cover basic features of PubMed that are of interested not just to librarians, but to any “power searcher”. You may wish to share these articles with your library’s users either by sending them email notices or by linking them on your website. Here is a list of available PubMed Skill Kits:

• Skill Kit: Using History to Combine Searches in PubMed® from the May – June 2007 issue
• Skill Kit: Keeping Up with What’s New @ NLM ® from the May – June 2007 issue
• Skill Kit: Truncation in PubMed® from the January – February 2006 issue
• Skill Kit: Retrieving Citations from a Journal Issue in PubMed® from the November – December 2005 issue

Sign up for the NLM Technical Bulletin RSS feed to learn about new Skill Kits as they become available. (Hint: see the Keeping Up Skill Kit above!)

PubMed continues to grow – both in numbers and capability

As of April 26, 2007, the number of articles in PubMed surpassed 17 million. That’s quite a milestone! Even more interesting is the power of Shared My NCBI. Using this feature, a library can help its users identify which of those 17 million articles it owns or to which it provides access. Now that’s the power of technology to customize PubMed! Complete instructions are given in LinkOut help.