Do you hate Pubmed? Here is the solution! March 28, 2008
Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Invention, Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Scienceroll Search, Web 2.0.trackback
After the presentation I gave at Yale this February, all the questions of physicians focused on the problems and concerns about PubMed. And recently, Anna Kushnir expressed her thoughts on this:
For a site that is as vital to scientific progress as PubMed is, their search engine is shamefully bad. It’s embarrassingly, frustratingly, painfully bad.
And later, on the Canadian Medicine blog, another similar article was published while in the comment section, the admins of Pubmed promised to improve the search engine.
Well, I think I might have a solution for you. Check out Scienceroll Search which is a personalized medical search engine powered by Polymeta.com. You can choose which databases to search in and which one to exclude from your list. It works with well-known medical search engines and databases and we’re totally open to add new ones or remove those you don’t really like.
The improvements of this metasearch engine will only depend on your feedback. Give it a try!
You can also add the search box to your site or to your browser.
If you make a search, e.g. diabetes, you not just get some relevant results, but you can use the topic clusters to get closer to the information you need. And if there are too many results, just exclude some of the resources it searches in.
Let us know please what you think!
Further reading:
[...] Bertalan has created ScienceRoll Search, described in his blog post. [...]
Anna is just wrong about PubMed: not knowing how a tool works does not make the tool bad!
I’ll give your meta-engina a try, thanks!
Bertalan, great innitiative. I will support it. WOuld it be possible to add MDPIXX as a source of medical information.
If yes, MDPIXX can integrate your search engine in the site to get more results.
I couldn’t agree more with Martin. Using which tool to do the search depends on what your purposes are. For students doing their course work, for lay persons looking for some background information, and anyone looking for quick answer to a question, Google type search engine is enough to fill the requests. For biomedical scientific research, PubMed is a must database. Those who are not satisfied with or hate PubMed should learn more about PubMed. The more you use PubMed the more you’ll like it. Think about and learn about what’s behind PubMed, you will take back what you said. Go to your medical librarians, they would be happy to show you some tips and tricks about using Pubmed.
I tried a few searches on your search engine and love it. However, to do a comprehensive literature search on biomedical topics, I would still stick to and start my search with PubMed. All other search engines could add as supplements.
[...] Friday, 28 March , 2008 · No Comments Bertalan Meskó is a medical student with a lot of interest in Medicine 2.0. He comes up with a search engine for medical articles which combines a lot of sources. You can read the reasons why in his interesting blog-post “Do you hate Pubmed? Here is the solution!” [...]
This is awesome! And it deserves its own domain:
http://ScienceRollSearch.com
Is there any place where I can read what exactly people think is bad about Pubmed? I am a heavy Pubmed user myself and never had any complaints about their search engine. The only criticism I can think of is the fact that the precomputed ’similar article’ searches almost always link to papers that are older than the one currently being looked at. This suggests that the similarities for a paper are only computed once, when the paper is fairly new. It would be better to have regular updates to also include papers that are newer.
Thank you all for your valuable comments and feedback. In an upcoming post, I will mention and answer everything.
[...] in Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Scienceroll Search, Web 3.0. trackback Yesterday, I wrote about the new Scienceroll Search which is a personalized medical search engine. The feedback is just [...]
How about adding RSS to Sciencerollsearch so I get updates when new results of a search appear?
Nice job Bercy
I have try your metasearch engine and is very effective looking for important information. Although I think that can not replace to pubmed because it is traditionally used to look for articles for research and is a necessary tool for metaanalysis.
I’ve just given your search engine a shout out on ChemSpy. Is there a quick way to add it as a search engine option in Firefox?
Meanwhile, I too am slightly baffled by Anna’s pubmedophobia I can usually find the information I need very quickly, but nevertheless a meta search tool like ScienceRollSearch could be even more useful. How easy would it be to clone this tool and edit it for another subject area (chemistry for instance?)
db
[...] Do you hate Pubmed? Here is the solution! [...]
[...] Do you hate Pubmed? Here is the solution! [...]
If you have a mac, you should try this tool called PubSearch, it’s much easier to use, and fast, than the web interface to PubMed :
http://www.deathraypizza.com
i agree with Anna……… infact I have recently resorted to xtractor- http://www.xtractor.in which provides me with manual validated PUBMED content everyday for free. May be all pubmed users should try it out
I gave it a try: When I select Pubmed to do my search and exclude all other search engines, I takes ScienceRoll much longer compared to Pubmed to generate a list of only 20 hits – where Pubmed normally generates a lot more hits. With SR, I don’t have Pubmed’s linkout options or ‘related articles’. Nor any of the other Pubmed goodies. Of course Pubmed isn’t google and never intended to be that. Pubmed haters should also give gopubmed and hubmed a try.
Thank you, Thomas ,for the comment! I’m glad you gave it a try.
Actually, the mission of Scienceroll Search is not to be better than Pubmed itself (because it cannot be), but to be able to cover all the information you can find in different types of medical search engines in one place.
If you compare Pubmed and only Pubmed to SR, it won’t be worse. But if you take into consideration that SR also searches in drug databases, WHO sites, Meldine Plus, and many other reliable sites, Pubmed cannot beat that.
Berci