Comments on: PubMed sucks, or the user is broken

By: PubMed blijft de gemoederen bezig houden « Debibliotheker’s Weblog

PubMed blijft de gemoederen bezig houden « Debibliotheker’s Weblog — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:06:58 +0000

[…] hebben gegeven op een klaagzang van Anna Kushnir. over PubMed (Dean Guistini, David Rothman, Wowter (bedankt voor je commentaar)). Ook ik heb er een paar woorden in mijn vorige stukje aan gewijd. […]

By: Stephanie Willen Brown

Stephanie Willen Brown — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:29:07 +0000

PubMed is broken. I have had students complain to me that “it only has one search box.” The traditional librarian response is “teach the user — they should learn it OUR way! We are right! The user is wrong!” (or “the user is broken” — hee)

But in this Google / information overload age, that no longer holds any weight, at least in my opinion.

PubMed NEEDS to be more user-friendly. Researchers, students, medical professionals — their goal with PubMed is to FIND research and then study it. Their focus should be on the finding, assessing results for relevance, retrieving the full-text of the citation they’ve identified, and then be gone from PubMed.

Researchers, students, etc. SHOULD NOT have to be expert searchers in order to find what they need. That’s unrealistic and a misunderstanding of their role. Searching be seamless for them, simply a tool, like scissors.

Our role as librarians is to advocate for users with vendors. Unfortunately, I’ve had several go-rounds with PubMed on user interface issues (mainly to get our OpenURL resolver to work properly in PubMed so that users can get to the full-text) and have received only perfunctory answers from them.

It’s a serious problem. Great content that’s almost impossible to get to unless you’re a medical librarian.

By: Heather

Heather — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:10:09 +0000

Isn’t Anna Kushnir just turning things around and looking at things backward? Medical terminology and publishing methods weren’t thought up by information professionals, though we do our best to keep track of them! You can’t keep all of the people happy all of the time, but maybe one way to enrich PubMed would be to allow authors to tag their own articles with ‘natural language’ and current jargon tags. This could be a help for the Google generation.

By: jenjen

jenjen — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:33:02 +0000

The way I try to pitch it when I’m working with students who are starting to think like researchers, PubMed and its ilk are tools in the research toolbox, and there are many tools used in biomedical research that are not completely user-friendly. Dissection, cell culture, PCR, electron microscopy etc - nobody just sits down at the bench and expects those to be intuitive. But because PubMed is on the web we have these expectations that it will be as easy as shopping.

I’m not suggesting that it’s a perfect interface or that NLM shouldn’t try to improve it. It was pushed onto the web in response to political demands and the PubMed interface wasn’t really designed for researchers (ask an old-timer about the old superior Internet Grateful Med interface - sniff, sniff). But it seems to me that in its current state, it’s probably worth the half-hour it will take to sit down with a librarian and get you up and running with alerts and whatever other feature you need. Getting local help (as opposed to from NLM’s help site) is also useful when it comes to your own institutional route to the e-journals and how to request stuff. Anyway, just tossing in my two cents. I do get the frustration - I see it all the time. It’s frustrating!

By: Anna

Anna — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:03:09 +0000

Hello, WoW!ter. I think you have hit the nail on the head, in a much more eloquent manner than I was able to in my somewhat angry rant against PubMed. The site is just not intuitive, nor is it user friendly. Today I took the time to look at the help page. There is so much material there! There is no way that I can make the time and summon the attention span to make my way through all of it, nor do I think I should have to. There are plenty of search engines and sites that are easier to use than PubMed. I am loyal to the PubMed brand, however. I would like to continue using PubMed and I want to see it improve and grow. I very much appreciate you taking note of my post

By: WoW!ter

WoW!ter — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:00:41 +0000

Hi Dean, Yes it is a great teaching oppurtunity. That is true. But we only address so few. For the long term we need to mend PubMed.

By: Dean

Dean — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:03:18 +0000

Hi Wow!Wouter,

Great post. I agree it’s a challenge for us professionally to deal with PubMed both in the short and long term. Would you agree with the idea that some of the questions Anna has could be answered quickly and that this would at least alleviate some of her apprehension as she completes her research?

With best wishes,

Dean