Why is pubmed useful

Walden U Library. Advanced Search. PubMed: Getting Started. Print Page Report a broken link. Getting Started About PubMed. Inaccurate retrieval and variable content means that search results are not necessarily reproducible and therefore not reportable. Google Scholar would not be appropriate to use for systematic reviews. Web of Science and Google Scholar track the most citations.

PubMed tracks citations only for PubMed Central articles. Both Google Scholar and Web of Science track citations--how many times that an article has been cited by other articles, books, or sources. Both Google Scholar and Web of Science allow you to sort your results by times cited Google Scholar includes this in its "relevancy ranking". Be aware that times cited will differ greatly between Web of Science and Google Scholar. Neither one is complete, although Web of Science citation data is considered more accurate and reproducible and is used by official organizations as the standard.

Google Scholar citations include books, theses, other reports, but may not include a lot of older citations because of lack of tagging of older files. PubMed has started tracking some citations, but it is only able to track citations by articles in PubMed Central, which is an open access repository of articles.

It is useful for discovery of articles, but not recommended for any kind of counting or statistics of citations. Google Scholar searches full text of articles but PubMed and Web of Science search only the citation, abstract, and tagging information. Because Google Scholar searches the full text of articles, you can find information that is not necessarily in the citation or abstract of an article, for instance, a detail buried in the Methods section of a journal article.

If you're not having luck finding something extremely specific with your PubMed of Web of Science search, try Google Scholar and you may find it. PubMed and Web of Science are limited to abstract searching, but that is not necessarily bad for most searches. If you want an article that is primarily about a specific topic, certainly the information will be in the abstract. Several university libraries have now posted warnings about the issue, along with guidelines for how readers can identify articles from reputable publications.

MEDLINE has a long-standing, rigorous selection process, through which a federal advisory committee conducts a thorough evaluation of journals, examining things such as their publishing practices and the scientific merit of their contents.

Journals that are accepted into PMC go through a similar—but more recently implemented—appraisal process. Accepted manuscripts, however, are deposited into PMC without review.

Their websites and archiving systems are unstable. Although some articles appear in PubMed often after a delay , the titles are not indexed by Medline and are difficult to find. The unifying theme I see is a hunger to adapt. At other times, these adaptations have revealed a clear lack of purpose and mission, such as the controversial involvement with eLife , the competition with publisher brands and traffic, and now the loose standards that have allowed unscrupulous publishers to enter PubMed via PMC.

Adaptation is required to remain relevant, but there have to be limits, or the adaptation may cause the entity to simply dissipate into the environment via entropy. PubMed seems to be giving into entropy. It needs to realize this moment calls for something else — clarity, standards, and credentialing that means something. Their opportunity is not to follow, but to lead. Opinions on social media or blogs are his own. Thank you. It seems to me that once Pubmed decided to compete with commercial databases quality went out the window and quantity entered through the door.

Thank you for writing about this. I became aware of the backdoor back in when a researcher friend told me about an article one of his post docs co-wrote in a journal not indexed in Medline. For annual reviews my institutions now uses publication lists derived from Web of Science because they are interested the quality of the article and the journal.

While many may disagree with the specific metrics used for impact factor at least it is a metric. Given the current situation, what would you recommend as the future direction of PubMed?

Can it implement new or reimplement old standards, or would it need to build a new brand—a subset of curated literature from the heap that PubMed has become? This is a problem: however, even articles in reputable journals can be faulty.

Peer review is not perfect. I have encountered undergraduate and graduate students that are fearful of questioning studies in journals because they are written by someone with a PhD or affiliated with a elite institution. Agree completely. However, credentialing is an aspect that can be involved in critical evaluation.

When a credentialing service has changed how it behaves, people need to take that into account. Interesting article. Government does not warrant or assume any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed. As John mentioned above, the responsibility of evaluating the literature rests with the reader. Considering that PubMed ends with a. However, speaking as a foreign researcher that peruses PubMed quite extensively, methinks that it is doing a fairly good job as a repository of scientific literature.

As I detailed, PubMed began as an online version of a credentialing service, and has morphed into something rather hard to describe over time. In your last paragraph, for example, you describe it in at least three different ways.