Registering for a My NCBI account – if you have never done so – is a great way to start off your year doing research. “My NCBI is a tool that retains user information and database preferences to provide customized services for many NCBI databases.”

Here are some ways that My NCBI will enhance your PubMed user experience:

• A My NCBI account extends PubMed’s capabilities to allow for more permanent saving of one’s work. With a My NCBI account searchers can not only save lists of relevant article citations, but they can also save entire search strategies to be re-run at a later date. This can translate into a significant reduction in the duplication of effort over time. Without a MyNCBI account, a PubMed user can only save their literature search strategies and selected citations for up to eight hours in the Clipboard (provided their browser is set to accept cookies).

• A My NCBI account makes sharing lists of selected citations with colleagues easier than ever. When a “Collection” of citations is saved in My NCBI, the account owner has the option to make this list public or private. If set to “Public”, a persistent URL is generated that can be “copied and pasted” into other documents/email for sharing with others. With PubMed, collaborating on a manuscript with co-authors or generating a shareable bibliography does not have to involve commercial citation management software. Continue reading →

With so many new journal titles appearing each year, it is becoming more and more difficult to determine the quality and legitimacy of new scholarly publications. One often overlooked search tool that is useful for confirming whether – and to what extent – a journal is being indexed in MEDLINE and PubMed or both is: Journals in NCBI Databases. (NCBI stands for the National Center for Biotechnology Information.)

This resource can be accessed under “More Resources” from the PubMed homepage and is essentially a search of the (National Library of Medicine or NLM) NLM’s catalog limited to the subset of journals that are referenced in NCBI database records.

There are essentially three statuses that a journal can have in PubMed:

• Every article in the journal is indexed in the Medline database (ie. Index Medicus) and PubMed.  PubMed was created to be the free public search interface to the Medline database so all Medline records will appear in PubMed. Medline records are also leased by other commercial databases, for example EMBASE, Scopus, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Clinical Trials (CENTRAL), so being indexed in MEDLINE will give a journal article maximum visibility.
  Index medicus: v8n1, 2014-
  MEDLINE: v8n1, 2014-
  PubMed: v8n1, 2014-
  Currently indexed for MEDLINE. Continue reading →

Scopus, an Elsevier database that the MSK Library subscribes to, differs from PubMed in some significant ways. Here are the key differences to keep in mind when you are selecting the best tool to use for your next research project:

• Scopus includes Cited References, in fact they recently reached a project milestone of 5M cited references added. Cited references are essentially the references in an indexed article’s bibliography, which – if included in a database’s citations records, allow for searchers to see which other articles have cited a particular article since its publication. Note: PubMed records do not include cited references; however, PubMed has begun displaying links to cited references pulled from full-text articles included in PubMed Central (PMC).

• Scopus includes more than just articles, also indexing books, book chapters, and conference abstracts.

• Scopus includes journal titles that go beyond the strictly biomedical disciplines, including content from journal titles in the Health Sciences and Life Sciences, but also from the Physical Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities. Continue reading →