GoPubMed has been around a while, but it should be better known. Medical librarians love PubMed and can be a wee resistant to other interfaces and search tools. But as we are learning, new things can be good things!

Let us, therefore, revisit GoPubMed.

Power searchers looking for medical information might like GoPubMed.

It is particularly good at giving you a quick idea as to who the major authors are on a topic, for instance. And for researchers wanting to make the kinds of connections that a tool such as ResearchScorecard facilitates, GoPubMed is a powerful tool. You could use the two in tandem to determine who has gotten large and/or multiple grants in certain areas of research (ResearchScorecard) and then use GoPubMed to learn about the papers that flowed from such funding and use GoPubMed’s powerful and, as far as I can determine, unique feature of providing an easy pathway to emailing the researcher directly.

PubMed, for instance, often features email addresses of researchers. But oftentimes, the email address PubMed provides is no longer is current if the researcher has moved on to another institution since the publication of the paper in question. By contrast, GoPubMed’s email feature seems to be quite dependable and is certainly easy to use though it is mediated (which ensures that scientists aren’t spammed). It really is wonderful that patients and the scientists who are trying to help them through research can connect via powerful tools such as GoPubMed and the software suite, Private Access.

We are really lucky to live in an era in which scientists and interested lay people can make personal connections. And there are more and more of those kinds of relationships as patient advocacy grows, which is to the good of science, given that the more people like Augie Nieto advocate for the fast tracking of research, the better for science and for those afflicted with terrible diseases. This new openness engages people in science which is good for fundraising for science, for enabling scientists to gather data and for raising public awareness and increasing public understanding of arcane matters such as the intricacies of the clinical trials process and the basics of such matters as molecular biology. Kudos to GoPubMed for helping to foster a climate of mutuality among scientists and patients—and health science students who should add GoPubMed to their list of favorite tools. Think good grade grades on papers, medical and nursing students.

I just tried my favorite search term, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in GoPubMed. I was given the message, “Finding pertinent author” and was given the name, Leigh, P N – London, United Kingdom” who was identified as, “Internationally leading author in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Motor Neuron Disease, Riluzole.”

To check out the accuracy of this statement, I popped over to PubMed and yes indeed, Dr. Leigh is one of the leading experts on ALS and as it happens, only the other day I downloaded his paper, “Biomarkers in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis” from the latest issue of Lancet Neurology. And thanks to the “Contact” feature of GoPubMed I could easily write Dr. Leigh to ask him a question or to just express my thanks for the work he does in an important field. I don’t know of any other medical search engine that provides such a sense of immediacy to the world of medical science. Scientists in GoPubMed become people you can write to in seconds. That is a simple but exciting thing for researchers and the public. No more hunting for email addresses by surfing through the Web sites of the university at which the scientist you are trying to track down may have actually recently left (and who wants to spend fruitless hours in the stinky search engines of most university Web sites).

All is not perfect in GoPubMed, of course. When I clicked on “Show all articles of this author” hoping to find what Dr. Leigh had himself authored or was a co-author on, I got instead a list of articles in which he appears to have been cited, which is not the same thing. PubMed surpasses GoPubMed in that respect.

But luckily, it not a question of either/or with GoPubMed and PubMed. GoPubMed works beautifully and seamlessly with PubMed. For instance, I just clicked on, “Health Care” in my GoPubMed results and wanted to take a look at the abstract for the article, “Birth Order and Genetics of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.” I clicked on the PMID number and was whisked to the PubMed page. I really urge medical librarians, physicians and public and academic librarians who do a lot of medical literature searching to try out GoPubMed. The sidebar enables you to get authoritative, interesting results in such subtopics as, Psychiatry and Psychology, for instance.

And there is more to GoPubMed than just its close tie to PubMed proper. I clicked on “GoWeb” and was taken to wider Web results, which was a handy way to get to general consumer health sites (e.g., MedlinePlus, MayoClinic.com, reputable patient organizations such as the ALS Association).

And for the particularly tenderhearted, there is the related site Go3R, billed as, “semantic search to avoid animal experiments,” which is about as specialized a form of medical search as I can think of, but which makes sense given the increasing number of grantors in the life sciences that frown on grant applications that contain descriptions of animal experimentation and given ever more stringent requirements to prove that any animal experimentation not be duplicative. Go3R would be particularly useful in offices of research administration and for anyone who works in grants in the health sciences and in the field of medical research funding and any medical researcher contemplating projects involving lab animals.

All in all, one is quite impressed by the products of Transinsight, the German company behind GoPubMed. It is a strong rival to the equally impressive Deep Web Technologies and their new medical search engine Mednar.

This is an exciting time in medical search. I hardly have time to write up these products because I spend so much time playing with them for fun and using them in deadly serious ways to educate myself on grim subjects.

Check out GoPubMed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.