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?

[Other posts on 3rd-Party PubMed/MEDLINE tools]

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My last visit was for an annual checkup a few weeks ago and we were talking about point-of-care tools and integration with his EMR.  It turns out that their EMR has no useful functionality to help find or produce patient education handouts he can quickly sent to a printer

I told him it would not be difficult to make a tool that would enable him to find authoritative handouts quickly and easily from the paid resources his practice has available, and he expressed interest in that idea.

He hasn’t followed up, but I found the idea interesting, so I started thinking about what sort of tool could be built for this purpose that could be integrated into any EMR using only patient handouts that are available at no cost on the Web.

With that in mind, I came up with a Google Custom Search Engine for use by providers at our hospital, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be used by any institution or practice.

The idea behind this is that any search result is not only authoritative, but that it is within a click of a “print” button.

There are built-in refinements for large print, pediatrics, Spanish language, Seniors, and low literacy.

Please give it a try here.

Internists and medical libraryfolk: I’d be grateful for your feedback!

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My friend (and LibWorm co-creator) Frankie Dolan spoke at Health 2.0 in Paris about MedWorm and I haven’t even posted the video of her talk until now. BAD David. Video is embedded below.

Frankie’s bit starts at about 10m 25s if you’d like to skip up to it.

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Q: Will NextBio do away with PubMed?
A: Absolutely not. In order to even have a chance at making PubMed irrelevant, a 3rd-party tool would have to be free. I believe I have played with the vast majority of 3rd-party PubMed/MEDLINE tools available (see this post category for details).

Q: …will Pubget do away with PubMed?
A: In some libraries for some users, PubGet will be a the preferred option. Will it make PubMed irrelevant? Good lord, no.

K adds:

Suspect they use PubMed to get their lit content, esp since they say they include all the full text from PubMed Central.

K is absolutely right. Both PubGet and NextBio get their data through NCBI API tools.

Now, if GoPubMed (free) did LinkOut and/or made PDF retrieval as easy as PubGet (free) does and marketed it well…that could threaten to make PubMed irrelevant.

However, PubMed makes the index of the world’s medical literature available to millions and it used worldwide as an essential healthcare tool. Ask yourself: Do you want to trust a private corporation to take good and ethical care of such an important public good? I don’t. I’d rather trust the NLM.

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[via: http://liblog.mayo.edu/2009/10/13/video-tutorial-my-ncbi-custom-filters-and-sharing-collections/]

Melissa rules.

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I’ve been fretting about how my library’s patrons will react to the PubMed redesign, so I’m grateful for the revised tri-fold handouts from the NNLM- they’ll probably help ease a few concerns.

The new handouts are available in .doc and .pdf formats and include:

• Full Text and PubMed
• PubMed Basics
• PubMed My NCBI
• Searching PubMed with MeSH

[via The Cornflower]

If you’ve prepared any materials to help your patrons (or your staff) use the new PubMed and you’d like to share them with others, please let me know in the comments?

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In a recent comment, Creaky (Kathleen Crea) made me aware of LigerCat, a 3rd-Party PubMed/MEDLINE tool that is new to me. I’m really enjoying working with it.¹

I’m sure that more experienced Medical Libraryfolk don’t have to do this, but as I start putting together a lit search, I often start by going to the MeSH Browser http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/MBrowser.html to begin working out what MeSH terms I might be working with. Alternately, I might go to Novo|Seek or GoPubMed with a few key words to get a frequency analysis of MeSH terms. In these examples, I’m doing some preliminary searching on Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis.

LigerCat isn’t necessarily *better* at this, but its presentation is simpler. Rather than putting the frequency analysis of MeSH terms in a left sidebar, it gives a cloud of MeSH terms:

Seeing the biggest, most obvious tag item in the cloud (see above) is delightful. If one clicks on the tags in the MeSH cloud, they’re added to the search. When you’re done adding terms, you can click “Go to PubMed” to run the search there.

In this example, the query run in PubMed is:
(”encephalomyelitis, acute disseminated”[MeSH Terms] OR (”encephalomyelitis”[All Fields] AND “acute”[All Fields] AND “disseminated”[All Fields]) OR “acute disseminated encephalomyelitis”[All Fields] OR (”acute”[All Fields] AND “disseminated”[All Fields] AND “encephalomyelitis”[All Fields])) AND (”Encephalomyelitis, Acute Disseminated”[mh] AND “Humans”[mh] AND “Treatment Outcome”[mh])

…and the results aren’t bad.

If I was caught up in Google Reader (I’m not, and haven’t been for about 15 months), I would have noticed Creaky’s post on LigerCat a couple of days ago. This reminds me to move Kathleen’s feed into my “High Priorities” folder. You may want to do the same.

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Over at Up to the Waves, Lin shares her observations.

Lin also writes, however:

Pubget is only one of the 3rd party life science search engines that tries to create shortcut to search PubMed. If you are a serious researcher, my advise is using the 3rd party search engines with caution or as a pre-search. Getting comfortable and familiar using PubMed itself is your goal. If you need assistance using PubMed, contact your medical librarians.

I can’t wholly agree with this. Not all 3rd-Party PubMed/Medline tools are meant to replace PubMed, and some can simply do things that PubMed itself cannot. If you are a serious researcher, my advice is to make yourself aware of all the tools at your disposal, and use the best ones for the purpose at hand.

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The folks at Netbase have issued an apology:

Our first release of healthBase yesterday surfaced a few embarrassing and offensive bugs. These were far in the minority of results but enough to keep us up late improving the site. We sincerely regret and apologize in particular for any offense caused.

…I wasn’t offended. I just thought the tool was awful.

[/Update]

TechCrunch called healthBase “The Ultimate Medical Content Search Engine.”

I beg to differ. Rather than getting into what it is supposed to do, lets just try a few queries and see how its semantic technologies perform.

First, a search for causes of AIDS.

As a Red Sea Pedestrian myself, I’m fascinated to learn that Jews cause AIDS. Huh. What if I was a Jewish Physiotherapist? How would I live with myself?

Next, we’ll look at the “Pros & Cons of lithotripsy”:

Take a look at the “Pros” list. These are just partial phrases describing what lithotripsy is. This list of pros and cons make no sense at all.

Among the sources it searches:
- Wikipedia
- NaturalNews.com (Check out the embedded video in the right sidebar and listen to the lyrics- there’s some idiotic stuff there)

I’d recommend to healthBase that they dump these and instead search sites like MedlinePlus.

HealthBase isn’t even a good medical content search engine, much less the “ultimate”.

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