As the volume of content in PubMed continues to expand, the need for sophisticated and skillful searching is more important than ever. In addition to developing fluency with MeSH and limits, however, today’s researchers have access to an increasing number of third-party, home-grown, and open-source tools with which to refine their literature searches.

One such resource is the intriguing PubReMiner (http://bioinfo.amc.uva.nl/human-genetics/pubreminer/), which is a front end search overlay that allows PubMed searchers to view search results in frequency tables. This provides an interesting lens for focusing subsequent queries and optimizing results. PubReMiner is web-based, operating system agnostic, and free-of-charge.

For example, a search for terms such as BRAIN NEOPLASM “STEM CELL” TREATMENT might result in a set of frequency tables which would reveal the frequency of each (and all) of the terms as they occur in a variety of fields, such as Journal Title, Country of Origin, or Author.

Using these tables, PubReMiner then allows a user to select terms by checking boxes  to create a query string that can be sent directly to PubMed!

This is only one example of the emerging breed of search tools that are available for your experimentation and use. If you’d like to learn more, please contact Shane Wallace, the Emerging Technologies Librarian at Hardin!