Tuesday, September 18, 2007

PubMed Mashups

I took a brief look at XplorMed, PubMed Gold, and Ali Baba. The results in XplorMed are sorted by general categories based on MeSH headings such as Information Science, Psychiatry and Psychology, etc. This is an interesting way of arranging results, however, the entries are displayed only by the unique ID which means each entry must be clicked individually to view the title and abstract information. I'm not sure if PubMed Gold has a bug or, if it's just me, but I could only see one result for my search, even after broadening the limits. The concept is useful though as most users want free and immediate access to full text articles. I briefly checked out Ali Baba but did not want to download the necessary software on my personal PC. Again, the concept behind it (visual relationships among terms) is quite interesting and may aid individuals who learn best through the use of information presented in a graphical method.

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