Changes to PubMed SOON
There are going to be some big changes to PubMed happening very soon. Actually some of the changes are happening already. They are going live with changes as they come about. In January I blogged about some upcoming changes and the updates that many of the NN/LM regions scheduled to help inform us of the new look and searching methods.
For those of you who missed the updates, the MidContinental Region (MCR) has a recording of one of their sessions at https://webmeeting.nih.gov/p67806081/
For people who need a good video for patrons to show them the changes and how to search PubMed, check out Melissa Rethlefsen's tutorial at Mayo Clinic. http://liblog.mayo.edu/2009/03/04/pubmed-advanced-search-an-introduction/
Some of the big changes:
- The Single Citation Matcher will be gone! -They are no longer maintaining this link and it will go away in the future. You can do a citation search right within PubMed's search box and it will realize that you are looking for a citation and display the citations of up to three articles in a light yellow box that appears above the search results..
- The tabs (Limit, Preview/Index, Clipboard, History, etc.) will be gone. These functions will be available on Advanced Search.
- Full text icons are already gone. Remember the little icon of a green page (indicating free full text)? That has been replaced by a link at the bottom of the citation indicating full text ability.
- Term Young Adult has been added as an age term for articles 2009 onward. This term represents 19-24 year olds and will be available as an age limit when more articles are added that fit within this limit.
- Citation display is slightly different. The title is now displayed first instead of the authors.
- Gene Senors. Operates similar to the new Citation Sensor. The example the MCR used was braC1. When that is typed into the search box, it displays gene information in a yellow box just above the citations results.
- The Drug Sensor detects whether a drug name is present in your search, and if it detects the drug then it gives information from the NCBI bookshelf. But don't get too excited about this sensor because it currently only detects about 200 drug names. MCR's example was lovastatin, if you type that in you will notice lovastatin results on the right hand side of the search page.
- The Patient Sensor provides patient level information for drugs on the right hand side of the search page, title Patient Drug Information and is from 2 million citations
- Automatic Term Mapping (ATM) -Basically this is just Googlizing the search process. PubMed used to have a specific search process for mapping search terms. It went first to MeSH and if it found a MeSH term then it would stop. The ATM still searches the terms as a MeSH but then also searches for the term in All Fields and if it is a multiple word term such as gene therapy, it will break up the term and search each word in All Fields. Personally that is a big pain in the neck and another reason why I am sticking with Ovid Medline.
- My NCBI will have changes. You can change your password and email. Additional highlighting features have been added. PubMed Preferences will be where you turn on your filters for full text and free full text results (as well as other typical limits such as English and Humans).
- My Bibliography is meant for authors to bring all of their publications into one place. You can only create one bibliography and is really only meant to be a save citation search place. It isn't meant to work with or as a citation manager.
In summary, Advanced Search is the way librarians are going to want to search. Librarians should bookmark this page. Librarians will have to determine what page they want their patrons to use and select that one for their recommended links.
There are a lot of other changes happening and unfortunately after watching the webinar, I have more questions regarding the changes rather than answers.
My questions and thoughts:
- For institutions that don't use filters but use a special URL to show their holdings, how will the institutional icons be displayed in this new style.
- I am not a big fan of Automatic Term Mapping (ATM). It just makes a big mess and adds way more citations to the results than you really need to deal with. But since we are in a Google world and people expect Google results, I guess we are stuck with ATM.
- I am not quite sure why My Bibliography is useful. Most authors would want to have more than one bibliography and they would want something that works with or as a citation manager. Perhaps I am missing why this is an enhancement.
Why doesn't PubMed create the changes and show us the new version AHEAD of time while simultaneously running the old version? That way we can get used to it and test it ahead of time? That would make sense. Ovid did it with OvidSP, Ebsco did it with their new version. It isn't that hard and it gives users time to figure out the changes BEFORE they officially go live. Remember when the institutional icons displayed at the bottom of citations? That whole uproar could have been prevented if they had beta trialed it first along side the old version. It boggles my mind that we are supposed to imagine the changes that will be coming and we don't get to try them out before hand. I think is an unprofessional way to do updates and I don't know why PubMed does this. The librarian community would scream to heaven and hell if Ovid or Ebsco just all of a sudden made changes without first showing and offering the beta version first. Just because PubMed is free doesn't mean they shouldn't be held to many of the same operating standards as the pay database companies.
Anybody have any more changes to add or answers to some of the questions I have?
Labels: Medline Database, PubMed
posted by The Krafty Librarian @ 8:43 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Single citation matcher is the part of PubMed I find the most useful. I can't believe they will get rid of it. I have next to no faith that using the regular search field for single citation searching will be in anyway easy or effective.
There is already an icon in Single Citation Matcher sending you to the Advanced Search where you can now already use the new equivalent of Single Citation Matcher. After clicking on the brown icon you get to Advanced Search and then have to scroll down and click again on the brown icon. It works just the same.
Pamela Ben-Eliezer
Jerusalem, Israel
I agree that it is unacceptable that PubMed does not release the beta version of the new changes ahead of time. For many of us, teaching, searching and preparing help materials for PubMed comprises what we do. Without the ability to test and prepare for the "new PubMed," we are left wondering how the new PubMed will work, how we will teach and provide support for it, and, since they refuse to provide a firm date for the change, we even wonder if PubMed will change in the middle of a session.
I have additional concerns about the new PubMed that go beyond the timing and politics:
1. The single citation matcher is our number one way to verify citations in interlibrary loan and reference. Patrons (from staff assistants, who are often grinding through a long list of references for which they need full text, to clinicians who want to find a known item quickly) sing its praises whenever we teach it. We will be deeply saddened when this goes away. A section on the advanced search form containing drop down menus is not the same thing as a form on a separate page that can be linked to directly using a customized URL.
2. The new PubMed promotes poor searching. I am 100% in support of making searching easier for patrons who grew up in a Google world and are used to natural language queries. In fact, I consider myself one of them. However, a number of the new features push lazy or bad search strategies. For example:
* Checking Details will take an extra click. Checking Details is the very first step for our patrons after conducting a search. We teach that this is one of the most important things to know about PubMed so that you know what you actually searched for. From the Advanced Search page, this will now take two steps - type in a query, click Go. Then click back on Advanced Search and then click Details. Not only is this unintuitive, it's burdensome. Patrons will likely drop this step and never know that their searches were off base. If the automatic term mapping were better, this would be less of a problem. But there are countless searches that do not map well.
* "Also try" pushes bad searches to patrons. I recently conducted a search for health care workers and the influenza vaccine. This is an example of one of those poor mappings, as health care workers maps you to delivery of health care and manpower[subheading], NOT to health personnel, the appropriate MeSH term for this concept. "Also try" recommended a search that began with "requiring health care workers..." This search not only features the same bad mapping for health care workers, but uses the term "requiring," which will exclude most relevant articles. If "Also try" is a feature that will stay, it would be better to have it pull from expert (or at least correct) searches on the topic, not just other users' searches containing similar terms. Or let us turn off "Also try" on an institutional level (through customized URLs or MyNCBI share preferences)
I do appreciate that links to Clinical Queries and MeSH have been added to the Advanced Search page so that our patrons can easily get to these pages once the blue navigation bar goes away. I only wish that the next generation of PubMed would find a way to incorporate these features to create better searches, rather than provide cursory links to them at the bottom of the page.
I've sent these same thoughts to PubMed and have heard nothing back. I do wish that they would be more responsive to librarians, as we are part of their user base, too.
Megan von Isenburg
Durham NC
I have to chime in about the removal of Single Citation Matcher. I just tried it out, using Advanced Search, and right away I notice that all of the fields aren't there. I need to click "Add More Citation Search Fields" to reveal the Volume, Issue, Page and Title fields. However, when I come back to this Advanced Search page, those preferences are forgotten. Once again, I have to click that "Add More" link to reveal the fields that I often find most helpful when using Single Citation Matcher. So . . . two clicks every time instead of one. Also, the other nice thing about Single Citation Matcher is that it is a focused tool. You don't have any other fields, don't confuse it with limits or anything else. It provides advanced functionality while remaining modular and simple. I'm sure our users will get used to this, but I just wonder why they would bother removing something that works (other than to force people to use Advanced Search).
I'm amazed that PubMed2009 does not include check boxes on the history page for boolean combinations. I can't believe that we're still expected to type "AND", "OR" and "NOT" without being able to use a simple (I mean, 1994-HTML simple) check box interface for combinations.
Otherwise, I think they've been making great changes in the last year or so, particularly for a resource that is so widely accessible. While the "send to" terminology is still weird, it's great that you can send directly to Collections.
Thanks for the heads-up about these upcoming changes!
Jim Brucker
Chicago
Thanks for the review. I use PubMed frequently and had not heard of these changes. I too am a fan of single citation matcher and use it as great hidden gem to teach medical students and residents.
Guess i will have to come up with a new one.
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