A new version of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Drug Information Portal was released in October.  The portal now covers over 16,000 drugs.

http://druginfo.nlm.nih.gov

The update includes:

1. Direct searching of drug categories, which are derived from the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH®) Pharmacological Action field
2. Name and category suggestions, to eliminate common spelling errors.
3. Phrase parser that assists users in finding drug names within phrases
4. The addition of the MeSH notes, when available, to spell checker results to make selection of a possible answer easier
5. Searches retrieving multiple results now sorted by frequency of citation in PubMed®, from highest to lowest. This tends to show the most commonly used drugs first.

The Drug Information Portal is a free Web resource from the NLM that provides an informative, user friendly entry-way to current drug information for over 16,000 drugs. Links to sources span the breadth of NLM, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other government agencies. Current information regarding consumer health, clinical trials, AIDS–related drug information, MeSH pharmacological actions, PubMed biomedical literature, and physical properties and structure is easily retrieved by searching on a drug name. A varied selection of focused topics in medicine and drug–related information is also available from displayed subject headings.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Consumer Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.