BioMedLib.com (bmlsearch.com) – Successor to ReleMed
Some may remember how impressed I was with ReleMed (and attempted to explain it on MEDLIB-L)- largely because I thought its relevance sorting was really quite good.
BioMedLib.com (found, confusingly at http://bmlsearch.com/)is a newer offering that Mir Said Siadaty made me aware of in September and that I’ve only just recently started to play with. These are, in my opinion, the major selling points of the tool:
Use BioMedLib to solve common MEDLINE® search issues
• Does it take a long time to screen your search results in order to locate relevant articles?
• Are you sure you have found all the relevant publications for your query?
• Do you need to monitor authors who are publishing on your topic?
• Do you wish your search engine could sort the results by their relevance and publication date?
• Do you want to have a PDF copy of the search results for your records?
• Are you tired of using special query syntax language for more relevant results?
The BioMedLib™ search engine provides easy solutions to all of the above, and more. BioMedLib is free of charge and open access. Seeking to help themselves and others to overcome their frustrations with the search process, a group of biomedical scientists used extensive research and their years of experience to build BioMedLib.
In short, these are the things I liked about ReleMed.
The customization of the interface through the “Theme” features is sort of neat, but not really my cup of tea. The “Who is Publishing in My Domain?” feature doesn’t do anything I’d want to pay a premium for because these things aren’t difficult to do with free tools.
And I’m not thrilled with the search results for simple searches. If I enter “Melissa Rethlefsen” into the PubMed search field (she has a unique name, so Melissa’s name is a great test), I get good results: items where she’s an author or co-author- 12 hits.
BioMedLib doesn’t return ANY results with the same search terms, but if you search for “Rethlefsen M,” it returns 17 hits….but those 5 extra hits are articles where Melissa is NOT an author.
So…meh.
Thoughts?
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February 14th, 2012 at 4:16 pm
This is Mir with BioMedLib (BML) David, thank you for expressing your opinion.
The monthly journal from BML, Who Is Publishing In My Domain; I agree you can use free tools to do many parts of it. Question: how do you find the related articles of a given publication which are published in the past 6 months?
For the health professionals who are not necessarily search experts, the journal is quite helpful and unique, their registration rate shows. And the Standard version is free of charge.
Yes I recall your positive view toward relevance ranking of Relemed.com and I assure that the relevance scoring of BML has improved significantly (both Precision and Recall).
The “Melissa Rethlefsen” search; NLM has included complete firstnames sporadically in Medline. Medline usually includes only the initial letter of first name, as your “Rethlefsen M” search shows. Pubmed uses conversion tables which are not exported as part of Medline or any other data source. Hence we don’t have access to such info to load to BML in the first place, no wonder it can not locate it.
The BML domain name; the BioMedLib.com is the higher level website which branches to several specific sites each for a specific product; for example the bmlsearch.com for the BML search engine. Currently BioMedLib.com redirects to bmlsearch.com so this might cause confusion in some users, I agree with you.