Good news for PubMed searchers!  Presently, the great majority of PubMed records contain the affiliation of the first author only.  Beginning in mid-December, 2013, for PubMed 2014, publishers will be able to submit author affiliations for each Author name, Investigator name or Corporate author name associated with records for inclusion in the database.  This advance will greatly assist in carrying out author searches.  The policy will apply to MEDLINE indexed journals.  There is a component of PubMed which contains records from non-MEDLINE indexed journals and the new policy will not apply to them.

For those who tweet, a new “Related headlines” feature will be a welcome addition to this social networking site.  The “Related headlines” section is found on the permalink page of tweets that have been embedded on websites.  It links to websites where the tweet was embedded so it is easier to find stories that provide more context.

With this new development, a tweet can be embedded directly into the content of an article or website.  Tweets will display with expanded media such as photos, videos, article summaries, and also include real-time re-tweet and favorite counts.   When embedded, tweets are interactive and allow your readers to follow the author, reply, re-tweet, and favorite all directly from the page.  Click here to learn how to embed a tweet on a website.

If a concept consisting of more than one term is entered into PubMed, it will be searched for in the phrase index.  If it is not found, the program will use Automatic Term Mapping to process the search.  Each term in the phrase will be searched in all fields and combined, often resulting in some off-target records.  To focus the search specifically on the concept, it is possible to search for a phrase in PubMed using quotation marks, e.g. “kidney allograft.” Automatic Term Mapping will be bypassed and the exact phrase will be searched for in all fields. The retrieval will have fewer off-target records.

To access the indexed phrases, use the Advanced search builder show index list.  After selecting a search field, (Text  Word [tw] is recommended for subject searches), enter the beginning of a phrase and then click Show index list.