PubMed and Google have much in common: 1) both are freely-available search interfaces that help people locate digital information on the Internet; 2) both were launched in the late 1990’s (PubMed in 1996 and Google in 1998), just as access to the World Wide Web was becoming more widely available; 3) and both are high-traffic tools on which millions of searches are performed daily.

But while PubMed averages about 3.5 million searches per day, Google handles about 2.3 million searches per minute. Because it has many valuable uses with its great breadth and wealth of information, Google has become essential to most in our world today.  But we must all beware to not become an “Homo unius machina inquirendi” (“person” of one search engine). Despite Google’s many efforts to replicate the PubMed experience for its users by creating and continuing to develop tools like Google Scholar, PubMed is still far superior when it comes to comprehensive searching of the life sciences/biomedical literature.

Here’s why:

PubMed was originally developed to provide free access to the MEDLINE database, which still makes up the primary component of PubMed. The MEDLINE database, first launched in its electronic format in the 1960s, now generally goes back as far as the 1940s in its online version, with the original print version (Index Medicus) going back as far as 1879. The most important and distinguishing feature of MEDLINE: its records are indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®).  Google’s content is not – which is what makes these two search tools hugely different when it comes to the search results that they return on a topic. Continue reading →

Google Scholar has become many peoples’ go-to search interface for locating research articles of interest to them. The ability to “Cite” the retrieved search results is a great option, especially since it includes the functionality to directly export the Google Scholar citation record to a citation manager like Endnote. Unfortunately, the data provided in the Google Scholar citation is not always as high in quality or as complete as the corresponding citation record retrieved from PubMed or via another commercially-produced literature database.

Figure 1: Directly exporting citation information to Endnote (Click on “Cite” > Endnote > Open)

Once the Google Scholar citation has been transferred to Endnote, it can be easily upgraded using Endnote’s own built-in search functionality. By going to References > Find Reference Updates, Endnote will run an online search for the citation. It first searches PubMed and, if the citation is not found there, it tries Web of Science and CrossRef. Continue reading →

Although many of us prefer reading research articles in print format, using colorful highlighters to mark important sections we wish to return to, and hand writing notes about ideas we’d like to remember or share with colleagues later, a downside to adding annotations and highlights to printed articles is that they are not searchable nor easily shareable. The individual copy of the article that we mark up is ours and ours alone and we will have to scan through the whole text to re-locate the needed passage.

Another option: take advantage of the easy-to-use functionality of reference management software programs that allow users to create and search on electronic annotations! For example, Endnote gives users the ability to add notes and highlight text in PDFs and then to keyword search on these PDF notes.

And thanks to a browser extension offered by F1000Workspace, notes can be made directly on PDFs and webpages too! (For example, annotations and highlights can be added directly to PubMed abstracts on the Internet.)

Learn more by asking us at the MSK Library!