Saturday, July 11, 2009

More simple requests

Pubmed, you have some good qualities. Also, some not so good ones. To wit:

--Why must the cursor automatically jump to the search field when a page loads? Like all right-thinking, i.e. keyboard-shortcut-using, people, I am a fan of using the space bar to page down. But on each new results page, the space bar just....adds space, unless I click somewhere else on the page first.

--When I type the first few letters of a recently-performed search into the search field, you bring up a helpful drop-down of my recent searches. I key down to the desired one and press Return to put it in the search box.
(a) You immediately re-run that search. Sometimes I wanted to add something else to that search term.
(b) Not only do you immediately re-run that search, for reasons beyond me you sometimes fail to run the full search term, but instead use only the fragment that I had typed in. For example, when I type in "Ph" and then key down to select "Physioprof" from the drop-down, sometimes you produce Physioprof's papers. Sometimes you produce every single goddamn paper with "ph" in it. All 8 million of them. [This is just an example, people. In reality, "physioprof" produces no search results in PubMed. Don't waste your time.]

--Select some unique author ID method and implement it. I don't care which one. But if I have to try searching for a paper by "Xu X" ever again, I will maim you.

9 comments:

Analytical-ish said...

ya. my boss' name is "XU Y." I had a lot of fun with that one when I was looking up the papers before applying.

qaz said...

What drives me crazy about pubmed is the new must-submit-all-papers thing that NIH has implemented. It's a great idea for all NIH-funded papers (that's basically everything) to be online free, but they take the final submitted paper, not the final published paper! This means that the pubmed online papers don't reflect proofreading.

And also they only accept Word. Some of us don't write papers in Word.

Comrade PhysioProf said...

Why must the cursor automatically jump to the search field when a page loads?

If it *didn't* do this, I'd be enraged.

When I type the first few letters of a recently-performed search into the search field, you bring up a helpful drop-down of my recent searches. ...etc

This functionality is provided by your browser, not by the Pubmed Web site.

Select some unique author ID method and implement it. I don't care which one. But if I have to try searching for a paper by "Xu X" ever again, I will maim you.

This is not something that Pubmed can unilaterally implement, as there is no way for Pubmed to automatically determine when it indexes a new publication which "Xu X" is the author. Journals will have to included in the process of deciding how to implement a unique author ID system.

Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde said...

qaz, that's completely crazy, I had no idea--I thought they just took the PDFs from the publisher. Weird.

This functionality is provided by your browser, not by the Pubmed Web site.

Then why does it only malfunction with pubmed? I use different versions of firefox on different computers, but somehow it's only ever pubmed that has trouble.

This is not something that Pubmed can unilaterally implement,

Of course not. But they're the ones with the stick. All they have to do is tell the journals, here's an additional field for author ID, and please use System X (there are a couple available). Once PubMed requires it, everyone will fall in line.

Ms.PhD said...

LOL re: Xu X. I have so been there with the common name headache. My favorite problem is one nobody knows how to fix. Ever try to search for the transcriptional regulation of the gene for p53? hahahaha. There is no way to do it with the current keywords. Natural language recognition, please get here soon! K thx.

Patchi said...

I prefer to search ISI Web of Knowledge. Their author search is great, you can set limits before you get the reference list. And it will find all those non-medical papers buried in the journals of minor results.

Ms.PhD said...

Patchi, ISI doesn't include all the journals. Did you know they wait 6 years before indexing new journals?

Patchi said...

So I guess there is no way around it... one can't have it all unless you search with all.

Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde said...

Wow, didn't know that MsPhD. Huh, thanks for the heads-up!