Rachel Walden writes:
What I’d like to do is to be able to enter the PMIDs of several citations and have the tool search MEDLINE via PubMed for the assigned MeSH terms, and return a single list of the terms used by any of the entered citations with a measurement of frequency. For example, if I input PMIDs 16234728, 15674923, and 17443536, the tool would return results telling me that 100% or 3 of 3 use the term “Catheters, Indwelling”, 2 of 3 use “Time Factors,” 1 of the 3 uses “Urination Disorders,” and so on. Although this example uses 3 PMIDs, I’d like to be able to input at least 10, just based on personal experience.
This would be useful in situations where a single “gold standard” search strategy is needed for the purposes of a systematic review or other process – for example, we may find a number of great articles on a topic by using multiple approaches to the search, but have difficulty developing a single strategy that captures them all due to differences in indexing. In effect, it would inform reverse-engineering a search strategy from a pool of relevant citations. It might also be helpful as a teaching tool for medical librarianship students and those new to the profession.
No, it wouldn’t change my medical librarian life, but it would make it easier from time to time!
This is a really great idea and I don’t think it’d be too difficult to implement for a Web applications developer who knows how to work with NCBI’s API tools. Any takers? – David