If you’re not familiar with PubMed, I recommend reading PubMed for beginners over at Student BMJ, authored by Mohammad Al-Ubaydli.
For those of you who are familiar with PubMed, I have written a Twitter Application that acts as a communication layer using NCBI’s Entrez Utilities and the Twitter API along with some other custom stuff too.
The application is still in Beta and not supported, approved, affiliated or anything else to do with NCBI — It was Sunday, the sun is shining and I figured the best way to spend my day was to write this tool.
To test the application, all you need to do is send me a message in the following format:
@pubmed your search term(s)
You will then get a reply with the first, most relevant result and a link to the article at PubMed.
If you’re getting unexpected or non-relevant results, this is not a fault of the application, please read PubMed for improvers, authored by Kirsteen Burton and Lorraine Toews.
PubMed is forgiving: it searches for whatever you ask it to. The answer you are looking for will probably be somewhere in those 645 papers. But being specific gets you the right answer quickly.
The application scans for new queries every two minutes so it should respond pretty quickly, however, I have implemented some restraints and there is a three second delay between each query to NCBI, as to be kind to their servers.
It’s also worth mentioning that I have integrated the Medical Abbreviations for Twitter from the wiki, which some healthcare tweeple have been working on. This allows the application in many circumstance to reduce the characters in the returned result and display more information.
As it stands the application currently only searches the pubmed database, however, in the next version I’m working on there will be an introduction of a new hashtag #db — which will allow you to utilise the entire NCBI including journals, structure, protein, taxonomy and all the many other databases available to you.
