If you’re familiar with Pubmed, (click here for more information) Pubget advertises itself as “…like Pubmed, except you get the PDF’s right away,” meaning, you don’t have to go navigating through a bunch of links in a site the search engine ives you just to find the document you’re looking for. Pubget will only give you actual PDF links.

On getting to the actual PDF link from the start of a search, “It’s a Rube Goldberg mechanism,” says Ramy Arnaout, cofounder of the company. “The link on the record takes you to a page on the publisher’s site,” which often is filled with publishing houses each hosting the PDF’s separately. This takes time to wade through. From the publisher’s page, it’s usually another click to get to a ‘download’ page, and another click from there to get to the PDF itself — “and that’s if you’re already logged in,” Arnaout said.

According to Pubget, scientists spend more than a quarter billion minutes searching for biomedical literature online each year. This is time they could better spend curing disease and doing science. Pubget’s mission is to give them that time back.

The site indexes about 20 million records and gives the user titles, authors, abstracts, and other related information in response to a search. Many of these records, including the majority of recent records, also include links to where the full text of the publication can be found online.

Whether you have to pay for the service actually depends on what you’re looking for. Where PDFs are free, Pubget gets you them for free. Where PDFs are restricted by subscription, Pubget gives you only abstracts. To get the PDF, your institution must subscribe to Pubget.

Access to most publications, especially recent publications, is not free. The user, or some institution to which the user belongs, must purchase a subscription; at major research universities, subscriptions can number in the thousands.

Pubget also lets users bookmark favorite papers as “keepers,” tag and share them, and send citations to Endnote and other popular citation managers, as well as print and save PDFs. Another hidden advantage is that when you share a paper, you only have to share a link, so there’s no possibility of copyright infringement.

To manage access, Pubget is offering institution-level subscriptions to universities, companies, libraries, and other research institutions. “Because it’s an entirely hosted solution, there’s no software to download, install, or maintain,” Connor said.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 11:12 am and is filed under Guest Authors, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.