If you are big PubMed user you probably already know that My NCBI has changed. The biggest change you will notice upon login is the display. The My NCBI homepage for your account displays your preferences, filters, saved searches, collections and bibliography.

My Bibliography is new. It is designed to "make it easier for authors to search and collection citations for their publications." Using a template, an author can create a saved search and when it is updated the new citations are added to the bibliography. The search strategies are based on either an author's name or a list of PMIDs. Each bibliography can hold up to 1500 citations.
To learn more about these and other My NCBI changes go to : McGhee M. Coming Soon to My NCBI: New Features, New Navigation, and My Bibliography. In the NLM Technical Bulletin.

The bibliography feature is interesting. I am curious to see how it will be used, especially how those who use RefMan, EndNote, or Refworks might use it.

While some PubMed changes like My NCBI were a little more obvious to the naked eye, there were other things happening that you may not be aware of. A few months ago the folks at PubMed poked a stick at the hornet's nest by implementing Automatic Term Mapping (ATM). Well there have been some changes with that as well as citation censor. I heard about these changes from a librarian with the GMR while I was at the Ohio Health Sciences Library Association meeting Friday.

ATM has changed. For example if you type in the term multiple sclerosis then click on the Details tab you will see:

"multiple sclerosis"[MeSH Terms] OR ("multiple"[All Fields] AND "sclerosis"[All
Fields]) OR "multiple sclerosis"[All Fields]

Notice how multiple sclerosis is split apart and you are searching for any article where multiple can be found in any field with any article where sclerosis is found in any field.

In previous examples they use factor b as a search term to illustrate that it won't be split up like multiple sclerosis. However, when I did a search in PubMed typing brain ct in the search box I got four results, so I clicked on the Details tab I saw this:

brain ct[Author]

Hmm, not what I would normally want if I was searching brain ct. You have to type "brain ct" with the quotation marks for it to search it in all fields and to treat it as one word. Of course using quotations prevents PubMed from searching MeSH as you can see if you type "multiple sclerosis" in the search box and click Details.

What normal searcher is going to type brain ct in the search box and expect to get the four articles by Dr. C. T. Brain (yes there is one) instead of articles on Brain Computed Tomography!??

The folks in charge of PubMed want it to be more user friendly, I certainly don't see how that is user friendly. I absolutely LOVE Ovid's mapping. When I searched for brain ct, Ovid's mapping was at least smart enough to map me to something appropriate, it did not try and connect me with Dr. Brain's articles which have nothing to do with computer tomography what so ever.

Labels: Medline Database, PubMed