Library Notes

Over the last couple of months, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has made some changes to its MEDLINE interface, also known as PubMed. Here follows a brief summary of the major changes.

New tab feature

The PubMed screen has undergone a change. The Features bar (Limits, Preview/Index, History, Clipboard, and Details) is now in a file tab format. Navigation remains the same -- click on the word to move to that feature. A file tab format is also now used to display the search results. The total number of citations retrieved by the search will appear in an "All" tab. The number of items on the page, e.g., Items 1 - 20, will display below - on the same line as the page number indicator.

My NCBI Replaces the Cubby: Includes Automatic E-mailing of Search Updates and Filters

The PubMed ® Cubby has been replaced by My NCBI. My NCBI works similarly to the Cubby in that it retains user information in order to provide additional services. To use My NCBI you must be signed in. You can sign in using an existing Cubby account, or if you do not have an account, you can register for a My NCBI account.

My NCBI features:

Saved Searches: Similar to the Cubby stored search feature, you can save search strategies in order to generate updates - including automatic e-mail updates.
Filters: Group your retrieval by topics of interest to you. You can also add an icon to the filters with links to resources provided by outside organizations.

Clinical Queries

The PubMed Clinical Queries page has been redesigned to provide an improved interface to the specialized PubMed searches for clinicians. The new design retains the basic functionality currently used, and the search strategies for the queries will not change. The new design now has three search options:

Search by Clinical Study Category (old name: Clinical Queries using Research Methodology Filters)
Find Systematic Reviews

and a new option:

Medical Genetics Searches

The three are displayed as jump links at the top of the page and each has its own query box.

The Medical Genetics Searches were developed in conjunction with the staff of GeneReviews: Genetic Disease Online Reviews at GeneTests, University of Washington, Seattle.

Journal Name

To help users more easily identify the journal in their PubMed results, a mouseover of the MEDLINE journal abbreviation will display the full journal name. The mouseover feature will be available for the Summary, Abstract and Citation displays for most Web browsers.

Fcgi to txt

The default name for files created using PubMed's Send to File feature will be changed from query.fcgi to pubmed-result.txt. This change will alleviate difficulties users experience with the .fcgi extension. EndNote users will want to save their citations in MEDLINE format and as a text file for easy importing into their EndNote libraries.