Several post-publication peer review forums already exist, such as Faculty of 1000 or PubPeer, that facilitate discussion of papers after they have already been published. F1000 only allows a small number of "faculty" to comment on articles, and access to read commentary requires a paid subscription. PubPeer and similar startup services lack a critical mass of participants to make such a community truly useful.

I'm updating my CV and biosketch for a few grant applications, and for some time now, NIH has required you to include the PubMed Central ID for each article you publish that arose from NIH support. I only have a dozen or so papers indexed in PubMed, but I still wanted a way to do this automatically. If you have scores of publications, looking up all the PMCIDs could easily become a hassle. First, create an account at My NCBI.

NCBI has put a lot of effort into unifying their data access and retrieval system -- whether you are searching for a gene, protein, or publication, the results are returned in a similar fashion.

While preparing for my upcoming defense, I found a cool little web app called pubmed2wordle that turns a pubmed query into a word cloud using text from the titles and abstracts returned by the query. Here are the results for a pubmed query for me ("turner sd AND vanderbilt"): And quite different results for where I'm planning to do my postdoc: Looks useful to quickly get a sense of what other people work on.

Do you submit manuscripts to journals that are not indexed in PubMed? This can make it difficult for others to find your publications, especially if they don't have a subscription to the journal. This often happens with us when we publish in computer science journals. Using the NIH manuscript submission system you can upload your manuscript to PubMed Central, which provides free open access, and is indexed in PubMed.

If you've never heard of it before, check out my previous coverage on Pubget. It's like PubMed, but you get the PDFs right away.  Pubget has recently implemented a number of improvements. 1. Citation matching.  Pubget's citation matcher seems to work better than Pubmed most of the time.

I've used this a little bit recently. Pubget indexes essentially everything that PubMed does, except you get the PDF you're looking for right away. Lots of other useful tools as well. I sent one email to the Pubget team and CC'd the biomedical library, and a few days later they've worked it out so PubGet recognizes Vanderbilt's subscriptions.

So you have found significant SNPs from a study, and you are investigating the region. Browsing through Ensembl or Entrez-Gene, you find a coding region nearby. Atop this coding region, you see a collection of letters that are commonly used to refer to this gene, lets say "MYLK". So you begin a PubMed search to find publications that describe the function of this gene, searching with "MYLK". Seems reasonable, right?Beware!

As Stephen nicely posted earlier, RSS feeds are a very powerful way to keep up with the literature -- they "push" the information to you. In addition to subscribing to individual journals, you can subscribe to a PubMed search! This will let you keep up with ALL PubMed indexed journals.To subscribe to a PubMed search, first go to www.pubmed.org and enter your search terms.