PubMed and beyond

They are many alternative interfaces to PubMed offering different search and retrieval methods currently not available within PubMed. This free article PubMed and beyond: a survey of web tools for searching biomedical literature looks at and reviews 28 web tools for searching the biomedical literature and compares them to PubMed and each other and has a website dedicated to tracking existing tools and future advances in the area of biomedical literature search tools. Not only does the article look at these 28 interfaces but it also looks at the recent changes to PubMed that were often influenced by these and other outside interfaces.

Search PubMed & get the full text on your handheld

Click on this link to Pubmed for Handhelds. When it opens in your browser save it to your home sceen or to your bookmarks. It works fine on the iPhone and iPad. I didn't test it on androids or Blackberry but it should work on those platforms too. You can do a PICO search or a natural language search also knowns as google type search, or a Medline/PubMed search. It automatically invokes the familiar Unikey login screen so even if you are not connected via the Usyd wireless network you would still be able to get to the fulltext.

New look Medline with new features

Ovid is going to switch to the new interface by the end of June 2010. Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University have just released a New features of OvidSP video tutorial. It runs for about 14 minutes and gives a good overview of the features in the latest release. Well worth taking a look at.

New Medline online tutorials

Kathy Thorncraft at the Medical Library has produced six short online tutorials exploring the key features of Medline via OvidSP. The tutorials, which begin with getting started witth the new Basic Search, as well as setting up Personal Accounts and Auto-Alerts, focus on using Medline's advanced search feature.

The six tutorials are:

1. Basic Search [2 Mins 28 secs]
2. Personal Account/Creating Auto-Alerts [3 Mins 24 secs]
3. Medline Advanced Search: Introduction [2 Mins 12 secs]
4. Medline Advanced Search: Searching using MeSH [2 Mins 27 secs]
5. Medline Advanced Search: Explode, Focus, and Subheadings [3 Mins 23 secs]
6. Medline Advanced Search: Combining Searches and Limiting [4 Mins 8 secs]

The tutorials are ideal for those getting to grips with searching Medline, or are seeking to refresh there search skills after a long period away.

New interface for Medline: OvidSP

OvidSP is the name of the new Medline database interface release by Wolters Kluwer Health back at the begining of February. The interface builds upon an already excellent product, streamlining many features whilst retaining the excellent subject search functionality.
New features include:

• New basic search using natural language processing
• Search aid box for greater search transperancy
• Enhanced personalisation - provision of RSS feeds for database auto-alerts and a new annotations feature which will allow you to add notes to individual references.
• And much more...

Kathy Thorncraft from the Medical Sciences Libraries has produced two short online tutorials explaining the use of the basic search and the setting up of personal accounts and autoalerts:

1. Basic Search [2 mins 28 secs]
2. Personal Account/ Creating Auto Alerts [3 mins 24 secs]

Have a look at let us know what you think!