Six alternatives to PubMed for searching scie...

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Six alternatives to PubMed for searching scientific content
June 24th, 2007
In my opinion, great coding skills, a thorough knowledge of statistics, and Shakespearian writing ability do not make a great bioinformatician. They help, but the most important things are a relevant scientific question and a good understanding of the literature. If you’re like me, the path to scientific enlightenment begins with typing keywords into PubMed until you get the results you were after - the same way you use Google. However the are other options besides PubMed, here are six other options you might not have heard of, worth a look perhaps?
Google Scholar
Probably the most used scientific literature search engine after PubMed, Google Scholar has three great things going for it. The first is that results are sorted by relevance rather than by date order. This is useful if you’re looking for the most important articles in a field you’re not familiar with, not so much if you’re looking for the latest publications. The second useful feature is the option, for a given paper, to find related articles. For each result in a GS search there is the option to find articles that Google believes are related. For me this has turned up papers that I hadn’t found through keyword searching. Lastly, GS has the option to find all citing articles. Again this is different way to identify relevant papers, other than just by keyword searching.
HubMed
This literature search engine is based on the data that PubMed has collected, but adds functionality. Like Google Scholar, HubMed results can be ordered by relevance, and related articles can be viewed. HubMed also has the option to visualise related articles using a graph view - nodes closer to the central article are more related. Another feature of HubMed clusters search results, the articles are categorised based on keywords. Finally, a feature that I use regularly is the option to save searches as anRSS feed. This means that I don’t have to check regularly for new articles - I get updated via feeds.
Connotea
A Nature Group project, the aim is for scientists to highlight, organise and discuss literature. Users add articles that they’re interested in, and tag the research by adding words that best describe it. Connotea gives the option to add your own comments on each article, just for yourself or for everyone to read. Because papers are all tagged, it’s possible to search Connotea using these tags. The results of a search contain the papers users have thought interesting enough to highlight, with the possibility people may have added their own thoughts. A similar functionality is also provided by theFaculty of 1000.
ET Blast
As the name implies a BLAST like search for the literature. Take the abstract of your work, or of a paper you’re interested, paste it into the box then press go. After a few minutes you’ll get a list of articles ordered on their related-ness to the text you entered. Furthermore, continuing the resemblance with blast functionality, you can add select the results of the search that you consider relevant, and repeat including these. Hopefully presenting a more specific to-what-you’re-after set of results. ET Blast is also able to suggest journals to submit manuscripts to, and possible referees, based on the text you entered.
Nature Precedings
Often it can be useful to get early access to pre-publicised data or manuscripts, usually via collaborations or attending conferences. The Nature preprint server, Preceedings, now offers an additional avenue whereby authors upload unpublished manuscripts for early scientific consideration. Of course, these manuscripts aren’t peer reviewed and it’s up to you to use your discretion on interpreting the results and conclusions. There isn’t much on Proceedings at the moment, but hopefully it will be used by the our scientific community more and more in the future.
Scintilla andPost Genomic
Not all scientific opinion appears only in journal type articles, scientists are beginning to publish more of their opinions on personal websites and blogs. Since you’re reading this on a blog you probably know that though. Scintilla and Post Genomic collect and aggregate these opinions for you perusal. Since these both follow scientific blogging opinion the subject matter is usually quite broad. You’re likely to find a fair amount of commentary on stem cells, but typing “amino acid synthetic cost on protein evolution” is likely to less successful.
Summary
The aim of this post was to highlight some of the other options for searching on content your research. PubMed is still going to be your first stop for keyword based literature searching. But I think it’s worth considering the options based on related articles and citing articles for the things you might have missed the first time around.