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Supplement, Fall
1997
PubMed and IGM:Linda Milgrom
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PubMed and IGM will improve. We expect them to incorporate the best features of each other--but, why wait? A popular complaint is the lack of MeSH thesaurus information in PubMed. IGM offers a thorough look through the Tree Structures, MeSH definitions, UMLS terms, and more. PubMed, on the other hand, offers the powerful "related articles" link.
Why not consider having two browser windows open simultaneously? In one, run IGM; in the other, run PubMed. Use the strengths of each. You might, for example, use IGM to examine the MeSH trees and select the very best headings. "Copy" the terms you choose and "paste" them into your PubMed search window.
This strategy was suggested by Benoit Thirion of Rouen, France. In his paper, PubMed mode d'emploi: l'aide d'IGM, Thirion provides great examples and convincing arguments. Naive users will search PubMed for a topic such as colitis by simply typing "colitis" in the basic search box. Although the user will get results, he probably does not realize he is missing articles indexed to toxic megacolon, entercolitis, proctocolitis, and the like, since PubMed does not explode with the default [ALL] qualifier.
We cannot expect all PubMed users to have the hefty print MeSH tools. However, serious searchers can use IGM's "Find MeSH/Meta Terms" to browse the colitis entry. They can select individual terms or may see a need to explode the selected term. By entering "colitis [mesh]" in PubMed's simple search, the searcher is asking for the term to be exploded. "Colitis [majr]" will explode the term as a major (asterisked) descriptor.
Another example offered by Thirion is the term antibiotics. When entered without qualifier, Thirion's antibiotics query retrieved 114,000 articles. When qualified [mesh], the system found nearly 300,000 articles!
More is not always better. Users may be overwhelmed by such large sets. PubMed allows the searcher to easily link to articles pre-computed as "related to" one or more on-target articles. However, if a user searching for antibiotics in the treatment of pneumonia had really been interested in a particular antibiotic, he might have missed it and misinterpreted his results.
What other novel ways of using PubMed have you uncovered? Please share.