Searching PubMed with DA

DEVONagent Tips
1

DA + PubMed plug-in only seems to return a very small subset of the hits that you would get on the PubMed web interface, e.g.

  • “peer review” AND (journal or journals) in DA with the PubMed plug-in gives me 9 hits (though 100 files downloaded),

whereas

  • (“peer review”[Title/Abstract]) AND journal[Title/Abstract] in the web interface gives 379 hits, despite appearing to be a more restrictive search

Why is this? Have I misunderstood how you’re supposed to use the PubMed plug-in? If so, how should it be used to get comprehensive results?

[beta 3.0 version of DA]

2

As DEVONagent is not only an interface for results returned by search engines, it’s matching the results on its own. But the title/abstract of few results matches the query, the other ones are rejected.

To accept all results nonetheless, use the secondary query “’*” (without quotes).

3

In addition, plugins return by default only up to 100 results. But you could…

  • create a new search set
  • rename it to “PubMed”
  • set its secondary query to “*” (without quotes)
  • add the “PubMed” plugin to it and set the number of results to e.g. 500 (see “Plugins” tab)

Afterwards just use this set and the results should be as expected.

4

Thanks for the responses.

I followed the second formula and did indeed get the full number of articles downloaded shown as hits.