Special List Indicators No Longer Searchable in LocatorPlus

As of November 2002, citation subset codes, also called Special List Indicators, are no longer searchable in LocatorPlus. This includes the following subset codes:

E   ethics
Q   history of medicine
S    space life sciences
X   AIDS/HIV

These data were removed from the LocatorPlus MARC field 911 during March-April 2003 and are now being better managed in the Data Creation and Maintenance System (DCMS) for the MEDLINE indexing workflow. To offset the loss of this information in LocatorPlus, NLM intends to make available on the Web later this year the lists of currently indexed journals for these special citation subsets.

Future developments will be announced in the NLM Technical Bulletin.

May 2003 PubMed^® Training Manual Now Available

The May 2003 edition of the PubMed training manual is now available for downloading from the NLM Web site. The workbook was updated to reflect changes from January-April 2003. The manual is available for downloading in Portable Document Format (PDF) and Microsoft^® (MS) Word formats. It is broken down into sections so you can choose the areas of interest to you. The workbook corresponds to the NLM's National Training Center and Clearinghouse PubMed training course described at: http://nnlm.gov/mar/online/description.html

This workbook is not copyrighted. Feel free to use any part of the workbook - you may customize parts for training programs, demonstrations, or workshops you conduct.

Link to SARS Citations from the PubMed^® Home Page

A link to citations to articles about Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is now available on the PubMed Home page. This feature will be available during this time of peak interest to facilitate searching this topic.

New Version of Gateway Adds Citations from 1953 - 1956 Publications to OLDMEDLINE

On April 22, 2003, a new version of the NLM Gateway was released. The OLDMEDLINE collection now includes journal citations for 1953 through 1965. The OLDMEDLINE file contains 1,525,616 citations with the addition of the 429,813 citations from the 1953 - 1956 publications. A new field, Original Title Abbreviation, has been has been added to the OLDMEDLINE record. The Original Title Abbreviation is the journal title abbreviation found in the original printed index while the Title Abbreviation is now the current journal title abbreviation found in LocatorPlus. When the qualifier [TA] is used, both the Title Abbreviation field and the Original Title Abbreviation field are searched.

The Original Title Abbreviation displays in the Complete format and the Title Abbreviation displays in all formats. For the small percentage of citations that do not have a Title Abbreviation, the Original Title Abbreviation displays in its place.

ISSN searching is now available for the OLDMEDLINE collection.

List of Serials Indexed for Online Users - 2003 - Now Available

The List of Serials Indexed for Online Users - 2003 - is now available and can be downloaded in Adobe^® Acrobat^® PDF format (977 KB) from ftp://nlmpubs.nlm.nih.gov/online/journals/lsiweb.pdf. PDF documents require the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded from Adobe's Web site at no charge.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) designed the List of Serials Indexed for Online Users to provide bibliographic information for serials from which articles are indexed with the MeSH^® vocabulary and cited in MEDLINE^®, the backbone of NLM's PubMed^® database. More detailed bibliographic data and information about indexing coverage for serials cited in PubMed can be found in LocatorPlus, NLM's online catalog, at http://locatorplus.gov. The 2003 edition contains 10,192 serial titles, including 4,579 titles currently indexed for MEDLINE, cited alphabetically by abbreviated title followed by full title.

Papers of Nobel Scientist Fred L. Soper Added to NLM Profiles in Science

The Fred L. Soper Papers are the most recent collections to be added to the NLM Profiles in Science Web site, dedicated to the lives and works of prominent 20th century biomedical scientists.

Fred L. Soper (1893-1977) was an American epidemiologist and public health administrator who won a Lasker Award in 1946 for organizing successful campaigns to eradicate yellow fever and malaria between 1927 and 1945. He also made key contributions to the control of typhus fever during World War II, and served as director of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau, (executive agency of the Pan American Health Organization) from 1947 to 1959. Throughout his career, he set new standards for disease control worldwide.

NLM Profiles in Science was launched September 1998 and also includes the papers of Christian B. Anfinsen, Oswald T. Avery, Julius Axelrod, Donald S. Fredrickson, Joshua Lederberg, Barbara McClintock, Marshall W. Nirenberg, Linus Pauling and Martin Rodbell. It is a continuing project and NLM plans to announce each new collection as it is added to the site.

NLM Update Available via NIH VideoCasting

The NLM Update, presented at the Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association, is available for viewing on the NIH VideoCasting Web site. The broadcast is captioned. RealOne^™ Player software is needed for viewing (available for download from the VideoCasting Web site). The broadcast lasts about one hour. The Update consists of presentations by:

• Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg, Director
• Dr. Jack Snyder, Associate Director for Specialized Information Services
• Betsy Humphreys, Associate Director for Library Operations

Their remarks include information on NLM's new building, SIS database activities, services of the Division of Library Operations at NLM and the National Center for Biotechnoogy Information, and many other topics.

The program can be viewed by going to the NIH site at http://www.videocast.nih.gov . Click on "Past Events", click on "Conferences" and scroll down to Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association - Tuesday May 06, 2003, the date on which the event was held. Click on the globe to view.

History and Clipboard Timeout to be Extended in PubMed

PubMed's History and Clipboard features currently expire after one hour of inactivity. To accommodate users who want to return to their PubMed searches later in the same day we will, in the near future, extend the expiration time for these features to eight hours. More information about the History and Clipboard can be found in PubMed's Help.

New Domain for Entrez Utilities (EUtilities)

To provide more efficent processing, the National Center for Biotechnology Information has created a new domain for EUtilities, http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ (www has been replaced by eutils). EUtilities are programming tools for accessing data available through the Entrez retreival software.

Please transition all EUtility URLs to use this new domain. In addition, please remember to include the tool=URL parameter in all EUtility requests.

Free Full Text Subset Available for PubMed Searching

PubMed users can limit searches to a new subset of PubMed. This subset, free full text [sb], retrieves citations that have a link to full text when no payment or subscription is required:

Sample search:
            smallpox vaccine AND free full text [sb]

Please see the associated article, Nahin AM. New Icons in PubMedŽ Indicate Free Full Text Available. NLM Tech Bull. 2003 May-Jun;(332):e6.

Another new subset, full text [sb], retrieves citations when there is a link to full text, free or not.

Sample search:
            children bipolar disorder AND full text [sb]

Note: While publisher-supplied links to full text are displayed on the Abstract and Citation formats, all links (including aggregator links) are shown on the LinkOut display format.

A related article concerning LinkOut can also be found in this issue: Babones K. LinkOut for Libraries Announcements. NLM Tech Bull. 2003 May-Jun;(332):e5.

NLM Launches Asian American Health Site

[Editor's Note: The Asian American Health portal was retired on November 21, 2016.]
The National Library of Medicine has recently launched Asian American Health, an information portal with links to Web sites, documents, databases, and other resources that address issues affecting the health and well-being of the over 11 million Asian Americans in the United States.

SARS Coronavirus Resource Available via NCBI Genome Database

The National Center for Biotechnology Information has added Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) to its database of viral genomes. This Web resource provides data and information relevant to SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV), including links to the most recent sequence data, publications, and results of pre-computed sequence analysis (i.e., genomic, protein, and 3-D structure), as well as links to other SARS-related resources.

NLM Defines Standard for Electronic Archiving and Publishing

The National Library of Medicine is pleased to announce the creation and free availability of a standard model for electronically archiving and exchanging journal articles. On June 10, 2003, NLM released two Document Type Definitions (DTDs) that will simplify electronic journal publishing and increase the accuracy with which these documents are preserved and shared.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) produced the Journal Publishing DTD to define a common format for the creation of journal content in XML. The advantages of a common format are portability, reusability, and the use of standard tools. Although the DTD was originally created for electronic production, the structures are robust enough to accommodate print production, as well.

The Archiving and Interchange DTD also defines journal articles, using the same set of elements, but the emphasis is on a common format for the exchange of journal content.

For more information on NLM's DTD's, read the press release at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/press_releases/dtd_ncbi03pr.html.