Is it wise to call the title of this blog‘from Medline to PubMed’ which of course is the truth from a Data Structure perspective because the FIELD queries used for bibliographic searches are much more sophisticated than keyword search queries directly used in PubMed
PubMed is the FREE version of Medline which is maintained by US NLM (National Library of Medicine) and PubMed is the brain child of NCBI (National Centre of Biotechnology Information) in addition to Genbank and BLAST which I will cover at a later time.
• Point your browser to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed which launches the PubMed home page. Entering a string such as ‘Leukaemia’ yields a sizeable count with author name, related citations and most importantly PMID (PubMed Id) which can be used at a later time
• A classic case to use the Fields would be to search for Down which could result in both Down syndrome and an Address containing the word Down. Here we could leverage MedLine fields Down[AB] or Down[AD] for Abstract or Address as applicable which will restrict the count and have meaningful result set
• Click on the display settings to see all formats such as XML, MedLine, Abstract, Summary etc… The option MedLine is an area of interest which is nothing but a pool from which PubMed gathers its information
• The essence of this blog is to use PubMed and the free articles which can be filtered from the LIMITS option available near the RSS icon. The LIMITS\Text option displays check boxes to choose from ‘Links to Full Text’, ‘Links to Free Full Text’ and ‘Abstracts’. Free articles will directly take you to the publishers site and of course, one could purchase anything that is of importance after looking at the abstract
• There are some limitations with PubMed howeversuch as unavailability of Abstracts for references recorded prior to 1976 and no papers prior to 1965
I hope this simple primer will let the reader understand what PubMed is all about.
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