Pub re-miner: a tool for PubMed query building and literature mining

[koster]

Pub re-miner: a tool for PubMed query building and literature mining.

In the vast amounts if medical literature, finding information tailored to your needs and interest is becoming more and more complex. Using the right keywords is essential for effective searches, but which ones should you use?

Pub re-miner is a web-based tool that allows simple text-based query building and information gathering(mining) of the NCBI literature search engine PubMed. Pub re-miner presents its results, gathered from abstracts, in frequency tables of journals, authors and words, which can be included/excluded in an iterative fashion.

I am very curious about the usefulness to all of you and would be honored if you are willing to give it a shot, and perhaps share criticism and/or suggestions with me.

The Website can be accessed at :
http://bioinfo.amc.uva.nl/human-genetics/pubreminer/

 

[Floyt]

Hmm... so this looks to be designed to close a feature gap in the PubMed engine - namely that you can't do subset searches? I'm asking because I normally use ISI Web of Knowledge, the interface of which has this kind of functionality already built in.

Seems to work nicely, anyway. Not that PubMed does anything for me in the population ecology field

 

[koster]

I don't know this ISI web of knowledge, but it looks to me that this is a paid service. Pub Re-Miner is absolutely free

Although pub re-miner allows and makes use of subset searching, it has not been developed for this purpose. The idea behind the tool was to provide "term-suggestions" to refine your query, which will always return results (because all terms have actually been used within the subset that you are working with).

For me, the tool has provided references to articles I would have missed, if I would not have used this tool (simply because I would have chosen slightly different keywords, which are not used within the area of focus).

 

[Floyt]

Ah, got it. That is a deal more sneaky than I thought, and a cool idea! (should read the OPs more closely...)

Yes, ISI WoK is a subscription service, I tend to forget that since I always access it from university. It's just that PubMed is, well, medical in nature, so tends to not have the articles of my interest listed.