Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Summon & PubMed : an update


The Asian Shores of Discovery River
"
In a recent demo of Summon at the University of Groningen Library we tested some medical search terms, users would likely to be entering when they are discovering what a tool that promises "One Search Box, Your library discovered" or "One search engine, one search, no stress"
The rather stupid search "heart attack" (but is to be expected by starting new med students expecting a google-like framework and no serious search experience for scientific information) does give you really terrible results, especially when you forget to choose to:
  • Limit to articles from scholarly publications, including peer-review or
  • Exclude Newspaper Articles
    (thank you Wichor Bramer for the search tip, and @Dympie about Scopus still using "heart attack" as example search)
Bad results from the perspective of the medical librarian in a academic setting who expects students and staff to turn up with Pubmed records.
Having seen a Ebsco Discovery Services (EDS) they day before, I was expecting to at least see that some records came from PubMed.
But much  to my surprise Pubmed seemed not to be included in Summon, no MESH-term turned up at first view. here is a list of all resources and titles they "(dis)cover"
At that session it could not be cleared or explained completely, so I asked  Ronald van Dieen to  find out more.
Here is his answer of today:
"Currently they (Summon) are addding PubMed records to the index, but it seems to take a long time. What is included is the ProQuest CSA Medline which has a completly different coverage and metadata than PubMed. "
To be continued ...

(probably at the Google site: Unified Resource Discovery Comparison: collating of info & comparison of Unified Resource Discovery Tools.  For more information or to contribute please contact one of the following: Andy Ekins (Christ Church University, UK) andy.ekins@canterbury.ac.uk) twitter

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Guus,

I expect the results from PubMed by EDS were from the federated search part of that solution.

Summon does not show from which source the results come from as your link resolver will link the user to the full text. Other reason is the records for the same publication from different sources ie. PubMed record, fulltext article provided by publisher and fulltext article from an aggregated database are deduplicated and combined into the Summon database.

regards

Ronald