Wondering if citations for your research topic are abundant in PubMed? Or how many articles a specific person has authored? Look no further than MEDSUM for analytics of MEDLINE (PubMed) citations to find out! MEDSUM performs four basic tasks to help you get a handle on your search:
- Quick Call
- Timeline
- MeSH It
- PROFILE
Quick Call tells you how PubMed translates your query and how many records are indexed in PubMed based on your search terms.
Timeline shows the number of papers written on your topic broken down by year dating back to 1945. MEDSUM also returns a nice graph of this information once the process is complete. Try this for practice: how many articles were published on “breast neoplasms” in 2002?
MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) It does exactly what it suggests: it finds the correct MeSH term(s) (if any exist) for your entered search term(s). It also retrieves the top 10 MeSH terms related to your topic.
PROFILE is useful for determining the subject specialty of a researcher or author. Entering in the author’s name the way MEDSUM dictates (e.g. Smith AR) will retrieve the major topic of research for this person as well other authors associated with her/him.
It’s important to note that MEDSUM does not actually retrieve article results per se. It is meant to give an idea of what is retrievable in PubMed on a given topic. Knowing the top publishing year, author, and journal of a topic (breast neoplasms, for example) will help to limit your search and ultimately target your results to get the most relevant articles for your research.