PubMed News Roundup

Posted by Alison Aldrich on November 29th, 2010 Posted in: News from NLM

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It’s been a busy fall at the National Library of Medicine. NLM and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) have implemented or are working on several enhancements to PubMed and related databases. Some of the highlights are listed below. Details about any of these enhancements can be found in the NLM Technical Bulletin.

Images Database

Figures, graphs, charts and other illustrations from PubMed Central articles are now searchable thanks to a new Images Database. This database will be expanded over time to include images from other NCBI full-text sources.

When a PubMed search retrieves citations for articles with indexed images, thumbnail-sized versions of those images will appear on the abstract screen and link out to the Images database.

MeSH 2011

The latest updates to the Medical Subject Headings can be found here:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/introduction.html

New descriptors of possible interest include: doulas, bullying, carbon footprint, epigenomics, food safety, food – organic, quality improvement, and social stigma.

NLM’s year-end processing is going on right now and will be completed in mid-December. This means that no new MeSH indexing is being applied to PubMed citations between now and then (new in-process and publisher-supplied citations are still added daily, though). When processing is complete, PubMed citations will be updated to reflect 2011 MeSH.

PubMed Author ID Project

NLM is working on a project to disambiguate common names. This will make it easier to perform precise searches by author when the author’s name is, say, John Smith. This project is expected to launch in mid-2011. In the meantime, you can help by encouraging authors within your institutions to create lists of their own articles using the MyBibliography feature in MyNCBI.

New Subsets on the Limits page

New subsets for Veterinary Science and Dietary Supplements are now listed on PubMed’s Limits page. These new subsets offer a convenient way to restrict search results to these fields of study.

Journals Database Merging with NLM Catalog

The Journals Database will soon be merged with the NLM Catalog and retired. Refer to this NLM Technical Bulletin article for information about how to construct journal searches in the Catalog, then send those searches to the PubMed Search Builder.