April 12, 2007 [Citation added]
April 26, 2007 [updated]
April 26, 2007 [Editor's note added]
NCBI to Introduce Changes to the Entrez System — Beta Version Available for Preview
[Editor's Note: This beta version was made available in PubMed on April 26, 2007.]
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is close to completing work that forms the foundation for the next generation of new features and capabilities for Entrez databases. For a short time — until NCBI is ready to transition to the new system — a trial version of the new system will be available. Look for a Try BETA link displayed on Entrez databases. Although the beta version has the same look and feel, it includes some minor changes described below:
[The last three bullets in the list below were added on April 26, 2007.]
- Web page titles display at the top of your browser's window. NCBI has made these more descriptive. Whereas the title for all pages within PubMed® used to be "Entrez PubMed," the titles for various pages are now more specific, e.g., "PubMed Home," "PubMed Limits," and "PubMed History." Titles for search results pages will include your entered search terms up to approximately 100 characters, e.g., "sleep disturbances heart disease – PubMed Results." The tabs used by some browsers to provide access to multiple Web pages within a single window, also display page titles. Please note that browsers use page titles to create the default names of "bookmarks" or "favorites," so although it may appear that you are bookmarking the PubMed Clipboard or a page of PubMed search results, the bookmark will actually be for the database homepage.
- The Send to Printer feature no longer uses a pop-up window. Also, the "Close this window" button on the printer-friendly page has been replaced by, "Go back."
- If you select Related Articles from the PubMed Display menu without selecting specific citations, PubMed will retrieve the related articles for (up to) the first 500 items in the retrieval. In the past, if no citations were selected, Related Articles was based on the items shown on the page.
- The option to highlight search terms in your results is now available in other databases, e.g., MeSH, Journals, and NLM Catalog. Choose from yellow, green, plum, or aqua in My NCBI's User Preferences.
- Placement of library icons as described in the article, Library Icon Position on PubMed® AbstractPlus. NLM Tech Bull. 2007 Mar-Apr;(355):e8. [Citation added on April 12, 2007.]
- Changes for PubMed Central (including enhanced Limits) to be described in a forthcoming article.
- The Nucleotide database has been divided into three subset databases. Nucleotide search results will be presented as the number of nucleotides in these subsets:
- CoreNucleotide contains all Nucleotide records that are not in the other subsets. These are the records that are of interest to most users.
- EST contains Expressed Sequence Tag records only.
- GSS contains Genome Survey Sequence records only.
- History numbers may start at a number higher than one.
- Searches created by using the links to other databases found on the Display menu will eventually lose the options, Save Search and Send to RSS Feed.
- The Restrict Search to Major Topic and Do Not Explode options (used with Send to Search Box) in the MeSH database will temporarily require that you use the checkbox to select the term. This will be corrected.
Nahin AM. NCBI to Introduce Changes to the Entrez System — Beta Version Available for Preview. NLM Tech Bull. 2007 Mar-Apr;(355):e7.
