GoPubMed can be viewed as an extension of PubMed, offering more detailed and statistical information about a search query. When inputting search terms into GoPubMed, the database actually runs the search through the PubMed.gov database. All your results are pulled from PubMed and then sorted by GoPubMed into segments–Top Author, Statistics, and Documents.

The Top Author section gives you the name, affiliation, and contact information (if available) of the author whose name is associated with the most papers in your search results. The Statistics portion offers information on top publishing countries, cities, years, and journals of your results. The statistics are both listed and shown graphically or diagrammatically for more visual researchers. Finally, the Documents section of your search results simply shows the articles yielded from your search query. The view of these results are similar to that of PubMed, allowing for familial perusing of articles.

Another useful feature of GoPubMed is the left hand sidebar. This allows you to filter your results by limiting to specific MeSH or GoGene terms. GoGene terms appear in the controlled vocabulary known as the Gene Ontology (GO). This ontology contains 20,000 biological terms describing genes and gene products in different organisms. The thesaurus is cross networked as well, allowing for better navigation to a point of interest from different paths. The MeSH and GoGene terms are represented by a blue “M” or a green “G” symbol, respectively. Ultimately, the sidebar acts as an extension of the Statistics section of the search results (i.e. viewing all authors instead of just the top author, for example).