PubMed – again (a.k.a. “lazy cross-posting”)

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Richard Wintle

While I continue to tee up my next Magnus Opus, this time about Shakespeare and genome assembly, I’ll indulge in a little lazy blogging cross-posting and point you to another of my haunts, the Life Science Tools of the Trade blog. Actually, “haunt” is a good term, because if you nose around enough over there you may well trip over the ghost of a certain Occam’s Typewriter personality, still wafting about in the wings.

I am whingeing again about NCBI’s venerable PubMed literature search engine, and how maybe, just maybe, Google Scholar is a better bet.

The post is here: PubMedically failing.

Teaser – contains an article you can’t find in PubMed, but ought to be able to, and another that is there but which PubMed does an effective job of hiding. Go have a look.

About Richard Wintle

I am Canadian by heritage, and a molecular biologist and human geneticist by training. My day job is Assistant Director of a large genome centre, where I do various things along the lines of "keeping the wheels on". In my spare time, I tend to run around with a camera, often chasing horses, race cars, musicians, and occasionally, wildlife.
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4 Responses to PubMed – again (a.k.a. “lazy cross-posting”)

  1. ricardipus says:
    December 16, 2010 at 3:24 pm

    …and in case you’re wondering, LSTOTT is currently down. Stay tuned.

    EDIT – ok, it’s up again.

  2. Steve Caplan says:
    December 26, 2010 at 12:13 am

    Ricardipus,

    I too have noticed that certain papers (or more more likely authors) simply do not show up on PubMed–for no valid reason (albeit this is quite rare). Being in science pre-PubMed, and still remembering library searches, “Silver Platter” searches and “Index Medicus”, I feel so grateful to PubMed that I’ve felt unable to bring myself to complain.

    One more point–another nice search engine is HighWire Press: http://highwire.stanford.edu/
    If one goes to the advanced search, it is possible to search through entire PDFs of papers. While it doesn’t cover all the journals, for those of us searching for a reliable antibody, for example, to “protein X”, this is a wonderful resource (whereas PubMed will be essentially useless).

  3. ricardipus says:
    December 26, 2010 at 4:05 am

    Steve – thanks for that. I too remember the evil pre-PubMed days… I’d forgotten there was something called “Silver Platter” though!

    And yes, I do feel *slightly* churlish dumping on PubMed – but there are clearly some holes in it, and things it could do better.

    Highwire sounds definitely worth a look. Many of the journals I download via my (legitimate) local institutional login are held in Highwire collection(s?) so I imagine this could be very useful indeed. Thanks for the tip.

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