Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Not at Harvard? Try www.pubget.com—or subscribe

We've noticed that an awful lot of people out there seem to be going to Pubget through our Harvard flavor, harvard.pubget.com. We're sure you've noticed that unless you have a Harvard PIN, you can't get Harvard's own holdings this way, just public-access PDFs. Visitors to harvard.pubget.com will notice you now get sent to a login screen. This is much nicer for folks who are actually at Harvard, since it's fewer clicks for them—Pubget is all about speed—but for everyone else, it must be pretty disappointing, because now you won't be able to get to any of your search results, not even the public ones.

Luckily, the solution is easy: if you're not at Harvard (or another subscribing institution), use www.pubget.com instead of harvard.pubget.com. When you do, you'll get all the access you were already getting—plus now you'll at least see the abstracts for papers that you don't have access to. Of course, if you're not at a subscribing institution but still want to search at Pubget speed, just tell your university or hospital or company to subscribe, and we'll set you up with your very own flavor of Pubget.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Blogging in Europe

Jens de Groot of Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium, covered Pubget in his library biomedical sciences blog today. A few days ago, Blogue CISMeF, which covers medical sites (in French), covered us, too. We're glad they seem to like it! We've been getting more and more visits from the Benelux countries, and from Europe more generally, as well as inquiries about subscribing (Pubget gives you open-access PDFs for free, and "Pubgets" your own subscription library holdings when you subscribe to Pubget). Keep them both coming!

Hot off the presses! April 25 Science

The April 25 issue of Science is now up on Pubget: if you're at a subscribing institution, just click the link in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

Make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to subscribe to Pubget.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Hot off the presses! April 24 Nature

The April 24 issue of Nature is now up on Pubget: if you're at a subscribing institution, just click the link in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

Make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

Also, remember you can get the latest issue of any journal by searching for the journal name and then typing "[latest]," like this:

PLOS biol[latest]


A tip: To search just Nature, add "AND Nature[ta]" to your search, and to search just reviews from the Nature, add "AND Nature[ta] AND review[pt]" and you're golden.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Hot off the presses! April 23/30 JAMA

The April 23/30 issue of JAMA is now up on Pubget: if you're at a subscribing institution, just click the link in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

Make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

Endnote and a few other tweaks

The past few days have seen a few tweaks to Pubget that we wanted to tell you about.

First, the abstract view is now a little more functional. (This is something you'll see a lot if your institution doesn't subscribe to Pubget yet.) Clicking on the author now does a search for that author. And we've added a link to search for related articles. We also added a link to the YouTube video, so you can see how Pubget works if you get your institution supported.

Second, the "retry" button in the top-right corner is now a little easier to see and use. You click this if your PDF doesn't show but you think it should. If that doesn't work, click "still a problem?" and tell us what went wrong; we'll do our best to help. Oh, and please leave an email, or else we can't write you back.

Third, you can now download citations for any or all of your keepers folders. This is handy for sending a lot of citations to Endnote or BibTeX all at once. You could always download citations for individual results using the little down-arrow on the results listing (and still can). But now you can go to your keepers and click "get citations" and Pubget will download whatever folder you're in to a .ris file on your computer, which you can import into Endnote or drag-and-drop to Bibdesk.

Fourth, it's now a little easier for you to tell when your browser's finished loading each result; results go from light blue to black when they've loaded. We did this to save you from clicking on results before they load.

As always, we'd love to hear what you think. And check back here often; we've got a couple of other things in the works we think you might like.

Pubget, meet iPhone



Pubget makes searching fast. Now, the iPhone is making Pubget mobile. Don't get us wrong—with Pubget you've always been able to get to your favorite PDFs from any computer. What's new is, now you don't even need the computer.

If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, we'd really love to hear about your experiences with Pubget mobile. Do you check literature on rounds at the hospital or in the call room? Are you leafing through latest issues in a park somewhere?

We've still got some tweaks to make, so you'll be hearing more about this soon. But since Apple's gone and featured us, we thought we ought to blog at least a bit about it now.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Belated hot off the presses! April 15 PNAS, April 18 Cell

Our fault for not blogging about this last week—we've been working on a few surprises, about which more soon—but the April 18 issue of Cell and the April 15 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have been up Pubget for a little while now: if you're at a subscribing institution, just click the link in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

Make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Hot off the presses! April 18 Science

The April 18 issue of Science is now up on Pubget: if you're at a subscribing institution, just click the link in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

Make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Hot off the presses! April 17 Nature and NEJM

The April 17 issues of Nature and The New England Journal of Medicine are now up on Pubget: just click the link in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

This week, we decided to put them up on the ticker for both subscribing and non-subscribing institutions. We did this because several of the papers in each issue are publicly available, so everyone can read them. However, most of the original research is still not publicly available, so if you're at a non-subscribing institution, as you flip through you will eventually get to papers that appear as abstracts-only.

Again, to read these latest issues (or as much of them as you have access to), just go to the home page at www.pubget.com, or click below:

Nature[latest]

NEJM[latest]


And if you don't have access to the whole issue but would like to, be sure to tell your library to get your institution supported.

Tell us what you think!

We were looking at the network traffic today and realized that Pubget now has users in 67 countries on six continents. That includes pretty much every country in Europe and North America, as well as half the countries in Asia, among others.

Today we'd like to ask you all to take a moment to tell us what you think, either through our feedback page or at team at pubget dot com.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your experiences with Pubget. What are we doing right? What could we do better? What new features would you like to see? Do you know how to get your institution supported? What questions do you have for us?

Please drop us a line with answers, or whatever's on your mind—wherever you are. And whether that's Seoul or San Diego, Berlin or Mumbai—welcome to Pubget.

Search examples, take 2

Today we're reposting something from last week, after one of our readers pointed out the links in last week's posting didn't work (thanks for the tip!). So if this looks familiar, you're right—but do read on, and click away.

Just a quick post to tell all the new users we've had over the past couple of days that we've updated the home page with a new set of example searches that should give you a better idea of just what Pubget is all about.

There's nothing particularly special about these searches except that the results are just about all public PDFs—although we admit we're big fans of PLoS, Sean Carroll, Penny Chisholm, network theory, and the nik gene cluster (it's true). For good measure, we've copied those searches below:

Simple search
Just type in words—terms, names, whatever. This is fast but sometimes too general (in which case read on).
Try it: nik gene cluster

Title and abstract
[ti] after a word makes Pubget search in the title; use [ab] for abstract, and [tiab] when you want to search for a term in both the title and abstract. We find [tiab] particularly useful.
Try it: centrality[tiab] hub[tiab] network[tiab]

Latest issue
Type a journal name and then [latest]. Note that [latest] means the latest issue, not the latest papers. You get the latest papers by default.
Try it: plos biol[latest]

Authors
It goes last name then [au]. Initials or a first name are optional. AND, OR, and NOT also help.
Try it: carroll sb[au] AND (rokas[au] OR gompel[au]) NOT kassner[au]

Citation
Use [dp] for date, [ta] for journal name; [vi] and [pg] are volume and page but are usually overkill.
Try it: chisholm sw[au] nature[ta] 2003[dp] 424:1047

Note the [au], [tiab], and other tags. Tags always come after the term they apply to. In that respect they're like adjectives in Spanish or French. We really recommend you use them (we'll blog more about them soon). They make searching much more focused and powerful. You can get a reminder of them anytime you're on Pubget just by clicking where it says "How to search" under the search box.

To those of you who came across Pubget for the first time just in the past couple of days, you may want to try out these searches. And thanks for visiting!

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Hot off the presses! April 16 JAMA

The April 16 issue of JAMA is now up on Pubget: if you're at a subscribing institution, just click the link in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

Make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Getting your institution supported

More and more people have been asking us how to get their institution supported, so we thought we'd explain a bit more.

As you know, Pubget makes it easy for users to retrieve and navigate full-text articles, most commonly in PDF form. Where access to these articles is free, Pubget displays PDFs for free. But where access is restricted by subscription, Pubget displays only abstracts; to display the full text of that material, Pubget must support the subscribing institution.

In general, support is a paid service, with the cost paid not by the end-user but by the subscribing institution. The cost depends on three factors: (1) the size of your institution's subscription holdings, (2) the setup of its bioinformatics infrastructure, and (3) the suite of features your institution is looking for.

Because Pubget's mission is to make search ever quicker, easier, and more powerful, we are also interested in novel pilot projects; these may modify the above paid arrangements.

Finally, we're mindful of the unique requirements of supporting commercial institutions, like pharmaceutical companies, with enterprise-level solutions, and also of supporting institutions in Europe, the Far East, South Asia, and elsewhere (we have experience setting up enterprise-level solutions on four continents).

We've put this info up on the site here (you can also get to it by clicking "Contact" at the top of the page). To find out more, if you're a librarian, administrator, or other executive, please go there and take a moment to tell us a bit about yourself, your institution and its holdings, and what you're looking for, and we'll get back to you soon with more details about how to get Pubget supported at your institution. And thanks again for your interest!

New NIH's policy: good news for Pubget users

As you may have heard by now, the National Institutes of Health instituted a new policy earlier this month that requires that any paper that was supported by NIH funding has to be available to the public for free within a year after publication. (For those who don't know, the NIH is the single biggest source of funding for biomedical research in the United States.)

For Pubget users, this is good news: it means you can get more PDFs. It is especially nice for users whose institutions don't have large library holdings, since it means they will now have access to more science than ever before.

So how do you get the new PDFs on Pubget? Easy—the same way you got PDFs on Pubget before. Just do a Pubget search. If the PDF's available, you'll see it (or else let us know). If not, you'll see the abstract and links, just like you've always seen for papers you don't have access to.

Still, remember that NIH-supported papers don't have to go public for a whole year. That means if you want to get the latest PDFs on Pubget, getting your institution supported is still your best bet (more on that later).

It's important not to dismiss the honest work that publishers put in in adding value to the science, but we've heard from a lot of people about this, and the consensus is folks are happy. They figure it was people's tax dollars that paid to do the science, so it's only fair for people to be able to read about it.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Hot off the presses! April 11 Science

The April 11 issue of Science is now up on Pubget: if you're at a subscribing institution, just click the link in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

Make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Hot off the presses! April 10 NEJM

The April 10 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine is now up on Pubget: if you're at a subscribing institution, just click the link in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

Make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

A tip we've mentioned before: To search just in the New England Journal, add "AND N Engl J Med[ta]" to your search, and to search just reviews from the Journal, add "AND N Engl J Med[ta] AND review[pt]" and you're golden.

Hot off the presses! April 10 Nature

The April 10 issue of Nature is now up on Pubget: if you're at a subscribing institution, just click the link in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

Make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

Also, remember you can get the latest issue of any journal by searching for the journal name and then typing "[latest]," like this:

PLOS biol[latest]


A tip: To search just Nature, add "AND Nature[ta]" to your search, and to search just reviews from the Nature, add "AND Nature[ta] AND review[pt]" and you're golden.

New: Public-access example searches

Just a quick post to tell all the new users we've had over the past couple of days that we've updated the home page with a new set of example searches that should give you a better idea of just what Pubget is all about.

There's nothing particularly special about these searches except that the results are just about all public PDFs—although we admit we're big fans of PLoS, Sean Carroll, Penny Chisholm, network theory, and the nik gene cluster (it's true). For good measure, we've copied those searches below:

Simple search
Just type in words—terms, names, whatever. This is fast but sometimes too general (in which case read on).
Try it: nik gene cluster

Title and abstract
[ti] after a word makes Pubget search in the title; use [ab] for abstract, and [tiab] when you want to search for a term in both the title and abstract. We find [tiab] particularly useful.
Try it: centrality[tiab] hub[tiab] network[tiab]

Latest issue
Type a journal name and then [latest]. Note that [latest] means the latest issue, not the latest papers. You get the latest papers by default.
Try it: plos biol[latest]

Authors
It goes last name then [au]. Initials or a first name are optional. AND, OR, and NOT also help.
Try it: carroll sb[au] AND (rokas[au] OR gompel[au]) NOT kassner[au]

Citation
Use [dp] for date, [ta] for journal name; [vi] and [pg] are volume and page but are usually overkill.
Try it: chisholm sw[au] nature[ta] 2003[dp] 424:1047

Note the [au], [tiab], and other tags. Tags always come after the term they apply to. In that respect they're like adjectives in Spanish or French. We really recommend you use them (we'll blog more about them soon). They make searching much more focused and powerful. You can get a reminder of them anytime you're on Pubget just by clicking where it says "How to search" under the search box.

To those of you who came across Pubget for the first time just in the past couple of days, you may want to try out these searches. And thanks for visiting!

Hot off the presses! April 9 JAMA

The April 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association is now up on Pubget. Subscribers: just click the links in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of your flavor of the home page. (Non-subscribers will see only free journals.)

For folks at subscribing institutions, make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

Also, remember you can get the latest issue of any journal you subscribe to by searching for the journal name and then typing "[latest]," like this:

PLOS biol[latest]


By the way: kudos to JAMA and NEJM for their "In This Issue" and "Article Summaries" PDFs!

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Pubget in the news: Davidrothman.net

David Rothman, who blogs about things medical, technological, and library-related, posted this story about Pubget, complete with a link to our first YouTube Pubget video. If you want to keep up to date on developments in medical search, check out his excellent blog!

Friday, April 4, 2008

New next week: Pubget talks

Want to find out more about Pubget? Come to a talk! I'll be giving a few around Boston and Cambridge in the next couple of weeks. They're each about 15 minutes and include an introduction to Pubget, a demo and tour, and time at the end for questions. Here are the next three:

Thursday, April 10th at 11 a.m.
MGH Neuroendocrine Unit—Bulfinch Building, 4th floor, Room 457

Thursday, April 17th at noon
HMS Department of Systems Biology—Warren Alpert Building, Room 436

Friday, April 19th at noon
MIT Science Administrators Meeting—E17-110

There are more in the works; I'll update the blog with the latest. And if you want one at your own institution, let me know at iconnor at pubget dot com and I'll do my best to oblige.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Hot off the presses! April 4 Science and Cell

The April 4 issues of Science and Cell are now up on Pubget: just click the links in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

For folks at subscribing institutions, make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

Also, remember you can get the latest issue of any journal by searching for the journal name and then typing "[latest]," like this:

PLOS biol[latest]


There's good stuff this week on the replisome, AIDS, music, splicing, and more. Happy reading!

PDF speed boost on Safari

The latest stats are in: about half of you are using Safari on Macs. If you're in that half, we've got a suggestion for how you can get your PDFs even faster: use Safari's native PDF viewer.

A little background: To display PDFs, your web browser uses a bit of code called a PDF viewer. Most of you are probably familiar with the one Adobe makes, called Acrobat. Acrobat's got some nice touches, like the toolbar that appears across the top of the window that has buttons for emailing, saving, printing and so forth (see Pubget's help for details). But it can be pretty slow, especially the first time it launches. Also, it can glitch when you switch between PDFs: you get a black screen where the PDF should be and have to reload the page to fix it. We've noticed this more on the Mac than on the PC.

Since Pubget is all about speed, we recommend a faster alternative to Acrobat: using Safari's own PDF viewer. You don't get the toolbar, but it can do pretty much everything Acrobat can do; it just works a bit differently (again, see Pubget's help for details). So, Mac users, here's how you tell Safari to use its own PDF viewer instead of Acrobat in two easy steps.

1. First, go to the Finder and go to the /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ directory. The quickest way to do that is through the menu bar (Go -> Go to Folder..., then type in "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/", then hit enter).

2. Then, if you're using Acrobat, you'll see a file called "AdobePDFViewer.plugin". That's Acrobat. You DO NOT want to delete it (in case you want to go back to it later); you just want to disable it. (If you do delete it, you'll have to download a new free copy from Adobe.) To disable it, in the "Internet Plug-Ins" folder, make a new folder called "Disabled Plug-Ins" (File -> New Folder) and move the file "AdobePDFViewer.plugin" to that new folder. (Note that if your Mac was set up by an administrator, it might not let you do this; you'll have to get your administrator to do it for you. But usually it will let you do this yourself.) For those of you using the Schubert-IT PDF viewer plugin, you'll also have to move the "PDF Browser Plugin.plugin" file to the "Disabled Plug-Ins" folder you just made. (If you don't have that file, no worries; it just means you don't use the Schubert-IT plugin.)

That's it! Now just restart Safari, go to Pubget, and PDF loading and switching should be even faster. And if you miss the PDF toolbar and want to go back to Acrobat, all you have to do is move the AdobePDFViewer.plugin back out of Disabled Plug-Ins and into Internet Plug-Ins, restart Safari again, and it's done. Hope this helps!

Hot off the presses! April 3 New England Journal

The April 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine is now up on Pubget: just click the links in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

For folks at subscribing institutions, make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

Also, remember you can get the latest issue of any journal by searching for the journal name and then typing "[latest]," like this:

PLOS biol[latest]


A tip: To search just in the New England Journal, add "AND N Engl J Med[ta]" to your search, and to search just reviews from the Journal, add "AND N Engl J Med[ta] AND review[pt]" and you're golden.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Related articles and Endnote

Today someone wrote asking about when Pubget would support Pubmed's "related articles" feature. Well, for everyone else who's been waiting, great news: it's here!

In fact—and not to rain on our own parade—it's been there all along. But it's been tucked away under the little downward-pointing arrowhead that you'll find at the bottom-left of each result entry. Something else you'll find there: the ability to download references to Endnote. More on this handy little arrowhead in a later post.

Hot off the presses!

The April 3 issue of Nature and the April 2 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association are now up on Pubget: just click the links in the "HOT OFF THE PRESSES" ticker on the top right of the home page.

For folks at subscribing institutions, make sure to go to mit.pubget.com, mgh.pubget.com, harvard.pubget.com, etc. For everyone else: tell your librarians to get your institution supported.

Also, remember you can get the latest issue of any journal by searching for the journal name and then typing "[latest]," like this:

PLOS biol[latest]


By the way: kudos to JAMA and NEJM for their "In This Issue" and "Article Summaries" PDFs!

Can't get a paper? Here's what you do

Here at Pubget we get feedback every now and again from people who are sure they have access to a paper, but aren't able to see it. For example they'll do a search and one of the results will be a paper from Nature from 2004, and they're sure they have access to that, but instead all they see is (1) an abstract, (2) a cheery page that says to try the little "retry" button on the upper right, (3) a less cheery page from the publisher's website saying there was some kind of error, or, rarely, (4) the dreaded "404 Not Found" message. And they send us feedback asking what to do.

Well, here's what you do.

The first thing to try is the little "retry" button at the upper right. If you click that it'll flash for a second, and then about a second later the page will refresh. Nine times out of ten it'll refresh with your PDF; most of the rest of the time it'll give you back an abstract (read on). Why does this happen? Sometimes there's just no link yet; either the paper was just published, or else came out way back in like 1947. Other times papers get moved from somewhere proprietary to somewhere else (most often an open-access archive), and every so often that throws Pubget for a loop. Usually we realize it and so present to you that cheery page that says to try the retry button, but on those rare occasions that we don't, just know to try the retry button. This almost always fixes things (especially the dreaded "404 Not Found" message).

What if it doesn't fix things? Usually when it doesn't fix things, what you see is the abstract. What that means is Pubget has checked and is pretty sure it doesn't have access to that PDF. Sometimes we're wrong about that. For example, just recently Pubget thought that Harvard didn't have access to a journal called Cell Cycle, when in fact it did. You'll notice that after you try the "retry" button, it changes into a button that says "still a problem?" We've got error checking on our end that usually catches these things, but if there's still a problem, just click the "still a problem?" button and send us a quick note. And here's something important: please remember to include an email address, so we can get back to you! Otherwise, we've got no way of getting back to you to let you know we've fixed the problem (which we can generally do pretty fast).

Which reminds me: whoever-you-are, you'll be glad to know Cell Cycle at Harvard is fixed.

The other thing that can go wrong is there's a bad link somewhere. There are 20 million records out there, and while publishers usually do a pretty amazing job of making sure all the links work, every so often they don't. Sometimes we can provide a workaround, but only if you let us know. So thanks for letting us know!