PMC Releases Improved Related Resources Feature

What's New

Since the launch of the updated PubMed Central (PMC) website in March, the PMC team has been gathering user feedback and making incremental improvements to the article display. As part of this effort, PMC recently released an updated feature to make it easier to explore information related to a given article. You will now see three sections in the right-hand column of all PMC articles (see Figure 1), which can be opened to browse similar articles in PubMed, articles that cite the current article, and links to related data records in National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) databases.

Section 1: Similar articles. When expanded, this section displays a snapshot of articles from the PubMed database that are closely related to the one you are currently viewing (see Figure 2). The title, journal, and publication year of each article are displayed. You can click on an article title to navigate to its record on the PubMed site or click the "See all in PubMed" link to see the full list of similar articles in PubMed. When no similar articles are found, you’ll see a "No results available" message.

Section 2: Cited by other articles. When expanded, this section displays a snapshot of articles from the PubMed database that cite the article you are currently viewing. The title, journal, and publication year of each article is displayed. You can click on an article title to navigate to its record on the PubMed site or click the "See all in PubMed" link to see a full list of articles from PubMed that cite the one you are viewing. When no articles are found in PubMed that cite the article, you’ll see a "No results available" message.

Section 3: Links to NCBI databases. When expanded, this section displays links to records in other NCBI databases that relate to the current article you are viewing. You can click on the name of the NCBI database to navigate to a related record in that database. When there are no links to other NCBI databases available for the current article, you’ll see a "No results available" message.

What’s Next?

PMC will continue to release new features and functionality over the coming months. We rely on your input to guide further improvements and encourage you to provide feedback through the Feedback button on the PMC website. You can also subscribe to the "New in PMC" RSS feed for regular updates on future changes as they are released.

Figure 1: PMC record.

Figure 2: PMC record with "Similar articles" section expanded.