It's hard to believe but 2006 is rapidly drawing to a close. That means that NLM's end of year processing is going on, the MeSH vocabulary has had its annual tune-up, there are changes to the MEDLINE data, and all of these things have implications for PubMed users.

2007 MeSH

The MeSH vocabulary has been updated for 2007. Please read about the changes in the NLM Technical Bulletin articles:

What's new for 2007 MeSH ' highlights of vocabulary changes http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd06/nd06_mesh.html



MEDLINE Data Changes - 2007 ' detailed information http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd06/nd06_medline_data_changes2007.html

The article will tell you the following:

• 494 Descriptors (MeSH Headings) were added for 2007;
• 99 Descriptors were replaced with more up-to-date terms; and,
• 22 Descriptors were deleted

That means MeSH 2007 contains:

• 24,357 Descriptors
• 83 Subheadings/Qualifiers
• 164,331 Supplementary Concept Records (chemicals and substances)

Please remember that the MeSH section has its own web presence at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh. They publish the "Introduction to MeSH" and that document now contains information for 2007. That's where you can find MeSH changes by tree category as well as lists of new, changed, and deleted MeSH headings, the hierarchies of qualifiers, the scope notes for publication types, a history of MeSH, and other interesting things.

NOTE: It is important that you review the MeSH vocabulary changes to see if any of them will impact your saved searches in My NCBI. If so, please remember that saved searches cannot be edited. Instead, a new search strategy should be devised and the old one eliminated.

Status Tag Change: OLDMEDLINE

In the past, the OLDMEDLINE citations in PubMed were tagged as:

[PubMed - OLDMEDLINE for pre-1966]

This will be changing. First, the tag will be shortened to read simply:

[PubMed - OLDMEDLINE]

When originally added to PubMed, these OLDMEDLINE citations did not contain any MeSH headings but instead had their key words (descriptors from old MeSH) placed in the "Other Term" field of the MEDLINE record. Over this past year, many of those records have been updated and those keywords have been mapped to at least one MeSH heading. Those records will now be tagged [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE].

These OLDMEDLINE citations with MeSH headings will be retrieved in searches that are limited to the MEDLINE subset (searching: medline[sb]) or when doing a MeSH term search. Therefore, if you're not interested in the pre-1966 literature, remember that you can limit your search by publication date using the Limits tab in PubMed.

PubMed as a search engine option in Firefox 2.0

Are you using Firefox as your browser of choice? Have you downloaded Firefox 2.0? If so, you can add PubMed as a search engine:

The beauty of this is that you can enter a term or terms in the search box on the right and it will automatically go to PubMed, run the search, and display the results. And, if you're working on your own computer and you signed into your My NCBI account using the "keep me signed in until I sign out" option - boom! You're automatically at the PubMed search results and in your My NCBI account.

How do you add PubMed as a search engine? Start by going to the PubMed homepage. Once there, click the search box drop down arrow next to the default search engine Google, and then select Add PubMed search. Really, it could not be easier.

The same sort of thing can be done in Internet Explorer 7.0.

Donna Berryman, Outreach Coordinator
Donna.Berryman@umassmed.edu