PubMed Search Clinic Guide & Why the Kitchen Isn't Falling to the Sea

PubMed Search Clinic

Other than a shoutout over at DavidRothman.net for maximum reminder exposure about the July 17th Search Clinic: PubMed® Update on Automatic Term Mapping, Citation Sensor, and Advanced Search (Krafty Librarian has posted a good review of the objectives) things have been quiet around here because I was with my family on a European vacation. Things didn't quite go according to plan since we were quarantined for part of it, but more on that in another post this week.

I am a fan of guides so I can jump straight to the point when streaming video lasts for more than 3 minutes and includes more than one subject. Therefore, as with the NLM Theater presentation breakdown, here is one for the recent Search Clinic:

• 2:35 - Citation Sensor
• 4:37 - Old vs. New ATM (compare/contrast discussion and illustration)
• 6:20 - Example: Burns laryngoscope 2005
• 7:10 - July 2nd enhancements to ATM were based on user input (we do have a voice that results in additional change), details at the tech bulletin
  
• 7:40 - Examples: ferrous gluconate & complement factor B
• 8:20 - What new ATM means in general: larger retrieval
• 8:30 - Why was it done?
  
  Short answer: in FAQ.
  
  FAQ navigation: (more direct route than the clinic but not by much) at the top of the PubMed page is the U.S. National Library of Medicine page, from there under 'The World's Largest Medical Library' banner is a link to the FAQs, select MEDLINE/PubMed and other databases, then Why was PubMed's Automatic Term Mapping (ATM) changed?
  
  For future sanity: Bookmark NLM FAQs at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/faq.html
  
  
• 10:20 - Result of change: MyNCBI search results may be larger, check and refine as needed.
• 10:30 - Advanced search (to the right of the search box) in beta, please provide feedback. In my opinion the features here are mostly intuitive, with the exception of the ability to set limits as ‘sticky’ or ‘unsticky’ (15:50), and may be subject to change as a beta.
• 18:30 - Questions & Answers, with additional answers to be posted at a later date.

The bottom line, according to the ATM FAQ, is that the previous ATM “caused thousands of citation-type searches to fail every day.” Revised ATM testing found that “no significant problems were discovered, nor complaints received.” Since the ATM was changed, “the Citation Sensor is now used in several thousand searches per day. From all our available indicators, the enhanced ATM has considerably improved searching PubMed.”

I am quite happy that the NLM distance education resources page has been updated to highlight the visibility of PubMed information which must be in high demand now; I didn't know about BabelMeSH and the multi-lingual guides to PubMed!

Kitchens falling to the sea? What?

Once upon a time there was a beautiful castle on the Antrim coast of Northern Ireland (click to enlarge, thumbnail doesn't do it justice). It was everything money could buy perhaps as far back as the 13th century and definitely by the 16th century.

However, deciding to build a castle on an outcropping of unstable basalt 100 feet above the ocean wasn't exactly a smart engineering move. One day in 1639 the kitchen suddenly fell into the ocean and took the majority of the servants with it. The lady of the castle decided she no longer wanted to live there after that unfortunate event and who could blame her? Dunluce Castle was abandoned 3 years later & gradually fell into these picturesque ruins that inspired a Led Zepplin inner album cover and the setting for many local wedding photo sessions.

What does this kitchen in Ireland have to do with PubMed?

It's all about the core foundation and awareness of the environment. Building a massive building on shifting ground? Not the best of decisions that led to dire structural consequences. Having a strong foundation of biomedical information and not responding to the fact that thousands of access attempts a day aren't working for users? Also not a smart move. We are no longer in medieval times where defense is a way of life, and PubMed is not the exclusive domain of health information professionals. We have & know the tools to refine PubMed queries beyond the basic search box that we can teach to users as needed to show them there's much more than citations that scratch the surface. Lower the drawbridge instead of shouting from the tower that users are doing it wrong, then think Nordstrom's vs. majordomo to show them the value of resources inside the impressive outer walls to halt their march to Château de Google as a primary resource.

Will duct tape cure PubMed? Simplicity vs. the Curse of Knowledge

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

~Antoine de Sainte-Exupery, quoted in
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath (pg. 28)

Made To Stick has a large piece of fake duct tape as part of the dust jacket. Its case for simplicity as part of the measure of SUCCESs (Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional & Stories) for both creating and communicating good, lasting ideas has really struck a harmonic chord with me. Unfortunately, another good C (concise!) tends to elude my writing but I keep striving towards it.

I believe the recent changes in the PubMed's Automatic Term Mapping (ATM) came along as Unexpected for most of us in the medical library field. The source institution for PubMed (National Library of Medicine, or NLM) is certainly Credible, and the changes have inspired plenty of Emotional Stories that I will not rehash here.

Concreteness has been left in the dust. More than a month after the changes were unveiled, we have little from the source of Credibility except the midsection of a 25 minute conference video to answer the traditional journalism Who/What/Where/When/Why/How? (5 Ws/H) and a blurb in the Help page about these changes.

The intent may be to make PubMed queries easier for users to retrieve relevant results, but in reality they are anything but Simple. I want to clarify: Simple here does not merely mean the lowest common denominator, but one of "elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down." (Heath and Heath, p. 30) From the breakdown of the ATM to include so many different attributes to increasing consumer health education needs, there have been many protests of 'dumbing down' things when in reality those protesting often have the Curse of Knowledge.

The Curse of Knowledge... [is] the difficulty of remembering what it was like not to know something. Accuracy to the point of uselessness is a symptom of the Curse of Knowledge... People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more. (Heath and Heath, p.57)

Sound familiar? How many of us have had users' eyes glaze over while providing them with information that we believe to be both concise and accurate? If there are any librarians out there who have never had this happen, please share with me how because I'm still learning the fine art of balance in this department.

Please, keep sending in feedback directly to NLM (at the bottom of each PubMed page) that is Simple and Concrete along the 5Ws/H! While there is always room for improvement, I have to believe that the decisions to implement PubMed changes were based on valid website usage/statistical analysis and (hopefully) usability studies before these changes left development and not because they wanted to torture medical librarians. NLM is apparently not receiving all that much feedback from anyone about the changes, and then only from librarians. Generally that means other users aren't finding much to gripe about since it's a rare day when someone submits feedback of 'Woohoo, awesome!' about anything.

Medical librarians are not the sole users of PubMed, and we have a whole arsenal of Cursed Knowledge to refine queries for us as we both assist and teach users ([MHDA], anyone? (seriously)) and that's ok. We don't want eyes to glaze over explaining everything about PubMed to our users at once. Conducting a good health reference interview, determining what filters and tabs are appropriate for the information needed, assessing our users' comfort level with query construction (I think far too many assumptions are made in this area but that's a post for another time), then suggesting and teaching appropriate modifications is the way to go. We want to provide just enough info, then a little more, and keep them coming back to us to keep learning and refine things as needed. 'Just in time, not just in case' is far more than a collection development policy.

As an FYI my duct tape and I are heading out until mid-July so things will be temporarily quiet around here, but don't be surprised if you see us pop up somewhere else in the biblioblogosphere as a guest over the next few weeks!

New ATM & PubMed: Straight to the source

I wanted to provide an update to my brief PubMed Review shoutout during MLA 08 with a direct link to the 25-minute PubMed Review slides & audio presentation that was shown at the NLM Theater in Chicago. If you have not previously used Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze) on your computer, you may be prompted to a free upgrade/install... just a heads up that this isn't Slideshare.

In the interest of time & highlights, here's an approximate breakdown of where in the timeline subjects are featured so you can skip around

• :00 - PubMed Factoids
• :50 - Collections Updates/MyNCBI
• 2:03 - PubMed Central ID (PMCID)
• 3:09 - Collaborators vs. Authors
• 4:18 - Abstract Plus
• 5:46 - Patient Drug Information on Abstract Plus
• 6:22 - Related Reviews on Abstract Plus
• 6:50 - Advanced Search Beta (must see)
• 13:55 - New Automatic Term Mapping (ATM) (critical to see)
• 18:00 - Using Advanced Search to focus subjects due to ATM (must see)
  
• 18:44 - Citation Sensor (ties in to ATM)
• 19:52 - Diacritics
• 20:19 - Summary Display
• 21:05 - Browser Advice
• 21:29 - Future Attractions
• 22:40 - Audience questions (hard to follow)

The Pacific Northwest Region of the National Network of Library of Medicine (NN/LM PNR) also posted a blog entry giving a brief guided tutorial to the changes.

All of the MLA 2008 presentations are on the NLM Distance Education Program Resources page; scroll way, way down to the Medical Library Association 2008 Annual Meeting Theater Presentations for them. My kingdom for an anchor tag! This page also includes a large number of NLM tutorial and handout resources, although due to the ATM changes use caution before passing them on as the information regarding PubMed search strategies has certainly changed since last month.

Please send feedback to NLM regarding your experience with these changes. At the bottom of every PubMed page is a tiny little hyperlink of Write to the Help Desk. If you do not need help but have a comment, this is still the method to do so. Decisions to create and change resources are not done in a vacuum at NLM. We are their users and they respond to our needs and feedback just as we do to our own library users!