Since it is online, PubMed may
not seem like a Government Document. Certainly when we received it in paper as
Index Medicus, it looked more like a Government Document. But PubMed is indeed
published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information
(NCBI) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM); since its online coverage
extends back beyond Index Medicus, we no longer have the printed documents in
the library collection.
PubMed is an extremely valuable tool for students and researchers in the Biology Department. It is the first source to check when looking for new articles on a subject or a good review article for teaching. It is an extremely powerful, up-to-date, and fast search tool, so it can also be used to recall important works. One researcher told me he no longer needs to organize his reprints carefully because it is so easy to locate an article in PubMed with just an author's last name and a keyword. Frequently, PubMed abstracts allow access to full-text documents.
Another useful aspect of PubMed is that it is easy to save searches and have them delivered regularly via email or RSS. You can also create a bookmark or link which will run a specified search. For example, this search is one we run regularly in the library to help keep up-to-date lists of publications written by researchers in the Biology Department:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=search&db=pubmed&term=biology[ad]+AND+washington+university[ad]+AND+63130[ad]&otool=moufgllib
Since PubMed is freely available throughout the world, colleagues can access this information easily.
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last update: Friday, August 07, 2009 Page maintained by: gpub@wustl.edu © 1993-2012 Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA |