Considerations around the upcoming pubmed enhancements

The idea for this post came to me while I was conversing with a relative. She is a medical resident and informed me that she had to start using Pubmed overnight and happened to find it a bit complicated. Consequently, I could confirm that Pubmed is pretty hard for novices to use and took advantage of the opportunity to pitch novoseek to her. Should I remind you that novoseek is a free, easy and intuitive biomedical search engine? Anyway, this discussion with my relative reminded me that some time ago, I heard (thanks to fellow followers present on the MLA in Hawaï) that Pubmed was about to enhance its interface this summer.

This announcement is actually big news for the life sciences community as Pubmed, the search engine of the National Institute of Health, is one of the most used among the choices offered on the web today. Due to the amount of queries it has every day, improving the user experience was something normal and expected. Alisha Miles (a medical librarian for a non-profit hospital in Georgia) declared: “these all sound like wonderful improvements. Hopefully, we will get to a point where we can provide input to NLM before some changes are rolled out“.

Interestingly, these changes aim to make it “easier to use“, will “simplify the interface” and “refresh the look” and offer “better organized text on screen“. It is interesting that Pubmed is moving towards a simpler user interface, as novoseek has been doing this from the beginning.

If you are not familiar with Pubmed, let’s have a look at the screenshot below in order to realize how the layout organized currently.

We acknowledge that a change -as slight as it can be- was necessary. Indeed, Pubmed is difficult to use. It requires learning, training and improving skill to handle it properly. This is why there are many resources (Check this for instance: 18 ways to improve your pubmed searches) and classes about it. The changes will be the following:

1. The tabs will disappear
2. A narrower top banner
3. Combination of Abstract and Abstract +
4. “+” below each citation
5. “Send to” option a lot more visible
6. The right column will be wider and occupies almost 25% of the screen. It will show: the related articles, “Also try” option and recent activity

If you want to have a sneak preview of what it’ll look like you can check directly on David Gillikin’s presentation, although the images are not optimized for viewing on purpose. To make a long story short: Pubmed is about to go a bit more social and current.

Obviously, I have to compare these changes to novoseek’s features. Pubmed currently has more functions than novoseek. However, novoseek has been developed from the beginning with the goal of making it an easy to use, simple and fast biomedical search engine. Now Pubmed seems to be going that way, too.

In addition, we are adding new functions according to your needs. You can now check your search history, save searches and articles, create alerts and manage labels through my novoseek. These are functions we have developed according to the users’ expectations. Indeed, being close to users through twitter, uservoice make interactions and quick answers to their questions possible. We believe it is one of our strenghts against Pubmed.

Should you need to discover how to use novoseek to the best of its ability, you should have a look at the presentation below:

We recommend you to read:

• A surprise for our fans on Facebook
• Interview with Christian Blaschke, scientific director of novoseek
• Data organization and interaction
• Why Publication Types matter when looking for relevant scientific literature in Pubmed
• The importance of context in text disambiguation