Creating an NCBI search


WELCOME about st basillisa ABOUT the SEARCHES search introduction search terms about ncbi searches SEARCHES pall care journals general med journals all pubmed ncbi search collection ncbi - expanded term OTHER RESOURCES Cherny DB search PubMed WHAT'S NEW at St B's

about NCBI

St B's has discontinued providing updates of its palliative care searches. These were created not by dull, repetitive searching and the burning of many candles, but by setting up an automated system that sent the results to St B's each week. Although we were happy to do this, and it helped us to feel superior, it is preferrable to set up your own searches and have them delivered by email at a time you specify yourself; the process is straight forward.

NCBI is the National Centre for Biotechnology Information and the home of PubMed and Medline; among its services is "My NCBI". "My NCBI", allows you to save PubMed searches and receive updates at specified intervals; it has an excellent help section, including a set of tutorials which explain the process in detail.

setting up and saving a search
If you want to set up your own search at "My NCBI" using the general palliative care search term this link will run the search and open PubMed in a new window. You will have a ridiculous number of results the first time you run the search but the automatic updates will only return the citations added since the previous running of the search.
This is the general palliative care search term.	palliat* OR terminal care OR terminally ill OR hospice* OR "end of life" OR advance directives OR advance care planning OR withholding treatment OR bereavement OR grief OR attitude to death OR life support care OR death[mh:noexp]
You can then save the search at "My NCBI" and create an account, if you need to, by using the "Save Search" link at the top of the PubMed page which will look like the image below.

You will then be asked to "Sign in here or register for an account." You only have to follow the instructions after that.

The results from "My NCBI" can be sent to your email address as a web page type file (HTML) or as a text file depending on what you want to do with it.

NB: If you want to save the citations to a bibliographic database manager - under "FORMAT" select "MEDLINE" and "text".

The text files, when they arrive, will start with something like this:

This message contains My NCBI what's new results from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM).
Do not reply directly to this message.

Sender's message:

Sent on ... (There will be a date here.)

Search (palliat* OR terminal care OR terminally ill OR hospice* OR ....

==================== Entrez pubmed Results ======================

Items 1 - 2 of 2

Save as a text file. Open again with a text editor such as "Notepad". Delete everything above here and save again as a text file. A bibliographic database manager should then be able to import the references in "MEDLINE" format from the text file. This works with "EndNote", "Biblioscape" and "bibus". The start of the file will look like this...

PMID- 17371889
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE....

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PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, includes over 15 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. PubMed includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources.

Created Sept 2006

Updated 19 July 2007