May 15, 2007 (Vol. 27, No. 10)
Rating:
Strong Points: Formatting options
Weak Points: Lack of bulk exporting
Summary:
Speaking of PubMed, we now come to HubMed, a site that describes itself as “an alternative to the PubMed medical literature database” and “The Swiss Army knife of PubMed interfaces.” That Swiss army knife metaphor is getting a little tired, to the point of being a cliché, so I was a bit skeptical about the offerings here. The upshot? There’s a lot to like at this site. One can perform PubMed searches and export citations in several formats, including RIS, BibTeX, RDF, MODS, and RefWorks. One can also unzip the site’s import filter to allow importing directly into Endnote. The RIS format also allows for direct imports to ProCite, RemMan, and others. This is a great way for users to not only search PubMed but also to format results into popular reference managing software. There wasn’t much of a downside except that I didn’t see any simple way of exporting the complete results of a search without having to individually click on each retrieved entry. Given that most searches won’t have a large number of desired hits, I suppose this isn’t a big deal, but it would be nice to see it as an option.
