In two recent blogs Freestyle Tagging and Metadata for Masses I mentioned how the process of regular users tagging internet sites to categorize them for easier retrieval. Two sites del.icio.us and Flickr are popular tagging sites.

Well guess what. It was only a matter of time but regular users are now able to tag PubMed records through HubMed. HubMed's Tag Storage has incorporated tags for items of interest which can be shared in a folksonomy. According to the Library Clips blog it is "like having a version of del.icio.us specified and incorporated into a journal database."

According to Library Clips you can search by MeSH subject terms or by the folksonomy user-defined terms…take your pick.

Interesting, I would really like to see how this works and how users would use it. The strongest way to search for Medline records is to use the MeSH. There is a lot of potential for problems if your users abandon MeSH and just search using their own terms. Heck isn't that what a lot of them are already doing on PubMed. At least PubMed tries to out think them by automatically attempting to map it to the MeSH. However HubMed appears not to be that sophisticated in that it will automatically include possible MeSH terms with the folksonomy.

However, There are times when MeSH fails us (for new cutting edge terms, drugs, and procedures). NLM does a good job introducing new terms and freshening up or clarifying older ones, but there are times when you need to combine a key word search with your MeSH search. Looking on the bright side, perhaps this could be another way to find those unique articles for which the MeSH indexing doesn't quite always work. If HubMed Tag can search both the folksonomy and the MeSH simultaneosly or allow you to combine the two types of searches (comebine a folksonomy search with a MeSH search), then you could have a potentially powerful tool.

For more information on tagging in HubMed look at Library Clips.