Questions from PubMed Sessions
In late December and early January, I conducted two online sessions on recent PubMed changes for Network Members. I reviewed the Advanced Search page and showed how to cope with the Single Citation Matcher going away from the blue sidebar. We also discussed Limits, History, Preview/Index, and Details — features that are now on the Advanced Search page.
There were quite a number of questions, so I have reproduced them here with answers. Thank you to the participants who generated such good questions and who were patient with some of our technical glitches.
- Can you show us where NLM Technical Bulletin is without subscribing to the RSS Feed?
- From our homepage, http://nnlm.gov/psr, select NLM Technical Bulletin from the Quick Links. There you can get more information on RSS or E-mail Sign-Up. Most of the PubMed changes will be reflected in articles in the NLM Technical Bulletin!
- Can you show where Single Citation Matcher will be?
- In Advanced Search, you can select Click here! to Add More Citation Search Fields. This gives you Title, Volume, Issue, and Pagination as shown in the screen shot below. Author and Journal are part of the defaults. The drop down boxes will allow you to change any field. This is a substitute for the Single Citation Matcher.
- Is there a way to short cut to the new “Single Citation Matcher” and add it to your tool bar? Can you make it open to the advanced page?
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/advanced is the URL for the Advanced Search page.
- In Firefox Mozilla, open up the Advanced Search, click the add feature then you can drag the URL to the toolbar. Similarly in Internet Explorer, you can add the URL to your Links.
- …But can you do it with the links to your collection, etc?
- Laura Brown, from Loma Linda University Medical Center, checked after our session and the answer is yes. She was able to include both the Outside tool and the Shared My NCBI links in the URL.
- Will we have access to the MESH details with Advanced Search?
- Through the Search by Author, Journal, Publication Date, and more, you can select MeSH Terms. The Index will show you terms you can select. Details will also be available at the top right of the page.
- So the MESH Database option will remain in the redesigned search database?
- Yes. See the bottom of the Advanced Search page for links to Clinical Queries, Topic-Specific (Special Queries), the MeSH and Journals Databases.
- How can you select several items for Irritable Bowel Disease from the advanced search drop down list?
- I received clarification on this question after our sessions! You can select the Index of Fields and Field Values towards the bottom of the page. You can hold down the Control Key to select more terms with subheadings. Then you can send them to the search box.
- OK, so what is another way to select multiple MESH terms WITH subheadings?
- One way to select multiple MeSH terms with subheadings is to go through the MeSH Database, select your terms and subheadings. You can select more than one subheading from a MeSH term. Then send these to the search box (they will be OR’d), and continue to build your search via the MeSH database. When you are ready to run the search, just select, Search PubMed.
- Are the changes ready for interface with Endnote, Reference Manager, etc?
- The basic record structure of the citations in PubMed did not change, so you should be able to continue exporting citations to your bibliographic software program by saving them to a file in MEDLINE format.
- Advanced search is no longer Beta?
- Yes, Advanced Search is out of Beta!
We don’t know when the PubMed home page will change; Single Citation Matcher and the Features Bar will disappear. We will plan on presenting more sessions reviewing the changes at that time.
