Your PubMed will be changing and getting a new look. Nicole Dittmar over at the eagle dawg blog links to Kay Deeney's (National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Southwest Region) question & answer session about recent and upcoming changes in PubMed. Many of the questions revolve around the Single Citation Matcher and MeSH.

According to Kay, "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." Thankfully Nicole has posted the dates for these sessions on her blog.


"Most of the NN/LM regions have already or are soon scheduled to give PubMed updates via free web conferencing."

• South Central Region - Done earlier this month


• MidContinental Region - Done January 28th


• MidAtlantic Region - February 11th


• Pacific Northwest Region - March 25th (hopefully changes will be live)


• Pacific Southwest Region - Done, more scheduled when changes are live

Whether you are big PubMed or an Ovid Medline user it would probably be a good idea to attend one of these web conferences.


As Nikki mentions in another post, the official method of communication for feedback to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) about PubMed is to 'Write to the Help Desk' at the bottom of each PubMed page or via email to custserv@nlm.nih.gov. While this method is helpful for NLM to track data, it isn't too helpful to users or librarians because this "format doesn't allow for others to see what insights and challenges their colleagues are having."

One way for users and librarians to share PubMed thoughts and problems is to Twitter about them. People who already have a Twitter account merely add #pubmed to their tweet so that people can follow the PubMed discussion on http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23pubmed.


I really enjoy the eagle dawg blog, she often has good stuff on PubMed as well as what is new at the National Network of Libraries of Medicine. It will be interesting to see how the #pubmed endeavor works out.

Labels: Medline Database, PubMed