Guest post by Bart Trawick, PhD, director of the Customer Services Division at the National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Institutes of Health.
NLM’s PubMed is the most heavily used biomedical literature citation database in the world. PubMed provides free access to more than 30 million citations and is searched by more than 2.5 million users daily. It is a critical resource for helping researchers, health care professionals, students, and the public share information and learn more about the latest developments in life sciences.
Earlier this year, NLM launched an updated version of PubMed with an enhanced design that provides advanced technology to improve the user experience on mobile as well as desktop devices. This modern interface includes updated web elements for easier navigation and enhanced search results, including previews with highlighted text snippets that can help you scan your results.
Instead of telling you more about these new features and how they work, I invite you to check out a few of them in this video.
Video Transcript (below):
PubMed is the most heavily used biomedical citation database in the world, guiding over two and a half million users per day to the latest advances in life sciences research. We’re constantly improving PubMed to meet the needs of its diverse user base and to take advantage of ever-evolving internet technologies and standards.
The latest version of PubMed, released in May 2020, is the product of hundreds of hours of stakeholder engagement and research undertaken to give you a better experience.
And it’s not the first time we’ve made big changes.
From its humble beginnings in 1997, PubMed now comprises more than 30 million biomedical literature citations from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. These citations may include links to full-text content in PubMed Central and publisher websites to take you directly to the information you need.
To be sustainable going forward, the latest release of PubMed required major changes including new databases, web architecture and cloud delivery. Combined, these changes resulted in a much more resilient version of PubMed with a modern design that looks and works great on your desktop, your laptop, and your mobile device!
We realize this feels like a big change, but we’ve been working hard to help everyone make the transition to the new site and have continued to make improvements along the way.
Here are a couple new and revamped features designed to improve the user experience.
The new Cite button makes it easy to retrieve styled citations you can copy and paste into a document or download an .nbib file to use with your reference manager software.
Using the Cite button for an item will open a pop-up window where you can copy the citation formatted in four popular styles.
Automatic Term Mapping, also called “ATM”, was present in the legacy PubMed, but it’s been expanded to include additional British and American spellings, singular and plural word forms, and other synonyms to provide more consistent and comprehensive search retrieval.
We’re always looking for ways to improve PubMed. Just as we’ve done for the past 24 years, we’ll continue to add features and data to stay current as technology, publishing standards, and our users’ needs evolve.
Please think about other ways that NLM can help you, and share your ideas with us.
As director of the Customer Services Division, Dr. Trawick works to connect customers with the vast information resources available from NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information. He has also worked to support the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy since its establishment in 2005. Dr. Trawick is a graduate of Texas A&M University and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.