NLM® Resource — Drug Information Portal
[Editor's Note: This is a reprint of an announcement published on NLM-Tox-Enviro-Health-L, an e-mail announcement list available from the NLM Division of Specialized Information Services. To subscribe to this list, please see the NLM-TOX-ENVIRO-HEALTH-L Join, Leave, or Change Options page.]
A new version of the National Library of Medicine® (NLM) Drug Information Portal was released in October 2008. The portal now covers over 16,000 drugs.
The update includes:
- Direct searching of drug categories, which are derived from the Medical Subject Heading® (MeSH®) Pharmacological Action Terms.
- Name and category suggestions, to eliminate common spelling errors.
- Phrase parser that assists users in finding drug names within phrases.
- The addition of the MeSH notes, when available, to spell checker results to give additional usage information about each potential name choice to the user.
- Searches retrieving multiple results are now sorted by the number of citations in PubMed®, from highest to lowest. This tends to display the most frequently discussed drugs in the biomedical literature first, rather than the previously used alphabetical sort.
The Drug Information Portal is a free Web resource from the NLM that provides an informative, user friendly entry-way to current drug information for over 16,000 drugs. Links to sources span the breadth of NLM, the National Institutes of Health®, and other government agencies. Current information regarding consumer health, clinical trials, AIDS-related drug information, MeSH pharmacological actions, PubMed biomedical literature, and physical properties and structure is easily retrieved by searching for a drug name. A varied selection of focused topics in medicine and drug-related information is also available from displayed subject headings.
Contact Information
Please send comments and suggestions to tehip@teh.nlm.nih.gov.
NLM® Resource — Drug Information Portal. NLM Tech Bull. 2008 Nov-Dec; (365):e3.
