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PubMed Enhancements

PubMed Enhancements. NLM Technical Bulletin. 1997 Nov–Dec;(299):e1.

November 1997 [posted]

Over the last few months, there have been many changes to the appearance of the formats for retrieved citations in PubMed. These changes were made in response to and in anticipation of the requests and needs of librarians and other experienced information specialists.

The document summary page (the brief format displayed when you first retrieve your citations) has been enhanced with the following features:

  • All citations with a MEDLINE Unique Identifier (UI) display this number at the end of the record, where it is easily seen. The PubMed Identifier (PMID) is also shown.
  • Citations for review articles or retracted publications show "Review" or "Retracted publication," right after the source information.
  • Citations for non-English language articles display the language name after the source information.
  • The source information (journal title abbreviation, date, volume, issue, pagination) is shown in a format which meets the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard for this data. Experienced ELHILL searchers will recognize it as the standard MEDLINE format they have seen for years.
  • PREMEDLINE citations display the notice "[MEDLINE record in process]" on a separate line following the source information. Please remember that these citations are in the process of being indexed and undergoing quality control review. Therefore, in process citations will have no MeSH headings and any corrections for typographical errors will be done when the record is loaded into MEDLINE; no changes will appear on a citation while it is in process.
  • Publisher-supplied data are indicated in the citation display with the note "[Record as supplied by the publisher]". This means that the publisher has supplied NLM with the data electronically, which expedites the citation's appearance in PREMEDLINE. However, indexing is still done from the full text, and is based on the complete article not just the title and abstract. The [Record as supplied by the publisher] note will remain permanently only on those citations that are out of scope for MEDLINE coverage from journals that are selectively indexed. For example, future geology articles from the journal Science, would be present in PubMed with the [Record as supplied by the publisher] notation.

[Editor's Note: For more information on PubMed searching, see the article on page 5 of this issue.]