|
 |
New PubMed AbstractPlus Display: Instant Access to Related Links
PubMed's new AbstractPlus display shows the titles of the top five related Articles and is now the default display for single records. The new format provides seamless access to the powerful pre-computed similarities available as Related Articles in the PubMed database.
These Pre-computed related items, sometimes called Neighbors, are records in the same Entrez database that are similar based on automated computational comparisons. Traditionally the Neighbors have been available through an item on the "Links" menu on displayed records. The display in Entrez ranks the Neighbors in descending order by the similarity metric as produced by the relevant comparison algorithm. In the molecular sequence and structure databases the comparison or Neighboring algorithms are familiar to most biologists: NCBI BLAST for sequences and VAST for Structure records. In PubMed, an algorithm compares meaningful words and phrases from the title, abstract, and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to calculate a set of PubMed citations that share these characteristics. In PubMed, this provides a rapid and powerful means of expanding a search and can find relevant articles that may be missed by the initial search. The utility of the new AbstractPlus display is easy to see when viewing the abstract of a 2006 article on improvements to the NCBI BLAST services by Jian Ye, Scott McGinnis, and Tom Madden (PMID: 16845079). This article along with another closely related article is easily found by the following search in PubMed.
McGinnis S [Author] AND BLAST
Figure 1 shows the AbstractPlus display of this 2006 Nucleic Acids Research article. The first four of the top five "Related Links" are recent articles on NCBI databases and services, including BLAST services. The first of these is also found directly in this sample search and is cited in the current article. But the other four highly relevant articles would be missed unless other searches are performed. Moreover, the links to the AbstractPlus displays of interesting related articles quickly expands the search into other areas. For example, the top link quickly leads to articles about software packages for managing BLAST output or software interfaces for managing local installations of BLAST and other bioinformatics software.
Having the top five related articles on the same page in the AbstractPlus display saves valuable time and enhances the power of PubMed as a discovery system.
Click on image to view larger
Figure 1 .AbstractPlus display of a recent article on improvements to the NCBI BLAST services found using the query of: mcginnis[auth] AND BLAST. The top five articles are highly relevant to the topic but only one is found by the original query.
