Tip #26: Display Settings in PubMed

By

 This week's tip is a quick and easy one, but it can save you loads of time when skimming PubMed results for relevance. Did you know that you can adjust PubMed's display settings from your My NCBI account? Things like highlighting can help you efficiently skim through results to find your keywords of interest, and expanding the abstracts can help save you the time of clicking on every title to view the article details.

"My NCBI" is a tool that allows users to set up a profile to manage preferences and services (collections, saved searches, My Bibliography, custom filters, etc.) for several NCBI databases, including PubMed.


Step 1: Set up your My NCBI account

Start here to create your My NCBI account. From the "My NCBI Help" documentation: 

"There are multiple options to sign in to a My NCBI account: using a username and password associated with an eRA account or an NIH account, or using a username and password associated with a partner organization. Partner organizations include research organizations and commercial Web sites using either an InCommon or OpenID standard to authenticate users."

Step 2: Open your My NCBI Dashboard.

Once you are logged into your My NCBI account, you can access your Dashbaord by clicking your account icon in the upper right corner of PubMed, then click on "Dashboard."


Step 3: Access NCBI Site Preferences

 Click on the "NCBI Site Preferences" link located in the upper right corner of your Dashbaord.

 

Step 4: Pick a Bright Color for Highlighting

These are just suggestions, you may find something works better for your own situation, but a bright color could make it easier for your eye to jump to keywords. Under the the "Common Preferences" section, click on "Highlighting" to select a color. Click Save.
 

Step 5: Change the Default Display to Abstract

Under the "PubMed Preferences" you will find the option to adjust the "Result Display Settings" from Summary to Abstract. Click Save.

The default is "Summary" which provides just the citation information and a short preview of the abstract:

Switching the default format to "Abstract" will open up the complete record. This also has the benefit of allowing you to jump between records using the Find function (command + F for Macs, and CTRL + F in PCs) in your browser to look for other relevant keywords. For example, in the screenshot below I'm looking for any instance of "cessation" among all of my results.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tip #1: Bulk export from Google Scholar

By
Image
This post was updated on October 10, 2022 with new instructions for #3 under "For EndNote users..." For years, I kept hearing from colleagues that I should be searching Google Scholar as part of my systematic review projects. I didn't, for 3 reasons: I didn't know GS' search syntax GS notoriously does not allow bulk export to reference managers I didn't have a sense of how many results I should export.   Last fall, I finally said enough was enough and it was time to learn how to wrangle this beast. It turns out that there is now a third-party tool that facilitates bulk export from Google Scholar, Harzing's Publish or Perish . Here's how you get started: Download PoP for free Paste your query into the Keywords field Set your maximum number of results. I follow the guidelines on p. 135 of Wichor Bramer's dissertation , which is a great handbook for expert searching. Bramer suggests the first 200 results, or 100 if you are getting low numbers of res
Read more

Tip #23: PubMed's [tiab] vs. [tw]

By
Image
Search field tags are a quick way to specify the exact fields you would like to search when using keywords. For example, I can tell PubMed to search for my term only in the title field or only in the MeSH Terms field. You can view a list of available search fields from the drop down menu in PubMed's Advanced Search Builder. Specifying field tags for keywords is also a good practice in PubMed because keywords searched without field tags will be translated through Automatic Term Mapping which may reduce the precision of your results. Here are a few sample searches in my search history, including #4 which wasn't limited to a field (notice how it was translated in the expanded search details): The fields that are included in the [title/abstract] fields are pretty self-explanatory (words and numbers included in a citation's title, collection title, abstract, other abstract and author keywords), but what is actually included in the [Text Word] (can also be searched as [tw]) fi
Read more

Tip #4: Ovid MEDLINE Adjacency and Field Tags

By
Image
This tip was submitted by Kathryn Vanderboll (University of Michigan):  In Ovid MEDLINE, using adjacency with .kw. does not work the way you (probably) want - use .kf. instead! While searching (surg* adj (educat* or instruct* or learn* or teach* or train*)).kw., our team couldn't figure out why our sentinel article tagged with with the author supplied keyword "surgical teaching" wasn't showing up. Through trial and error, we learned that .kw. adjacency only works between lines . That is, how close keywords are to each other on different lines. For example, (surg* adj teach*).kw. picks up articles with keyword headings like:  But does NOT pick up articles that might have keyword headings like:   To use adjacency searching within a single keyword heading, you'll need to use .kf. The Ovid help documentation notes : "The Keyword Heading (KW) field contains the Keyword Headings assigned by authors. Keyword Headings are the author keywords. To retrieve every Key
Read more