Thing 12: Adding a Pubmed search alert to My Library

After completing Thing 12, you will have:

-done a simple search on PubMed, and set up an alert on My Library which will inform you of new relevant articles as they are indexed.

Why don’t I just set up an alert direct via PubMed?

·         Using My Library will mean that all updates from your favourite feeds and your PubMed alerts will come in the one email. 

Part one: doing the search

Firstly, go to the PubMed homepage:

www.pubmed.gov

We are going to use three search lines when setting up our alert, so click on the ‘Advanced’ search link: 

We are interested in finding anything that discusses

• information skills
• or information literacy
• in a health environment.   

So that’s (‘information skills’ OR ‘information literacy’) AND health

 We’re not going to use MESH headings, but we are going to use the indexing list.

In the first search box, type information skills then click ‘Show indexing list’ – the list of indexing terms will be displayed.

BEWARE!!!

this is not the same as a thesaurus function; it just lets us jump into the (alphabetical) indexing list at this particular point.  We are going to have to look elsewhere if we want to add related terms

 Use the Ctrl key and the mouse to select information skills, information skills instruction, and information skills training – note that they are automatically added to the first line of the PubMed Advanced Search Builder using the Boolean operator ‘OR’.

Click ‘Hide index list’ to clean the page up a bit, then go to the next search box; we are going to search for information literacy as a related term;

• Use the drop down menu to change the operator from “AND” to ‘OR’  and type information literacy into the search box 

Display the indexing list for our second line, and using the Ctrl key and mouse again select information literacy, information literacy education, information literacy instruction, and information literacy skills (you will need to scroll down the list a little for this one...

Click ‘Hide index list’ to clean the page up a bit, then go to the next search box

Lastly, type in the third part of our search – health.  No need to change the ‘AND’ as the Boolean operator when adding the line this time. 

Then click the Search button...

We have a lot of hits (222 on the day of writing this!) but don’t worry –we’re setting this up to receive updates, not to go through everything that’s already there in PubMed.

Part two: adding the RSS feed to My Library

Click on the RSS icon at the top of the screen; you’ll get a display box like this:

• Set the number of items to be displayed (15 is the default) and
• don’t worry about naming it – you’ll be doing that in My Library
• Then click the ‘Create RSS’ button.

You get a second display box that looks like this:

• Click on the orange XML button , then copy the URL of the feed
• Go to My Library; click the blue ‘Add feed’ button
• Paste the URL into the box
• Give it a name that will remind you what the search was about
• Then click ‘Add feed’ underneath the URL box, just like we did with the RSS feeds we added in the last post 

You will now get your updates as part of your My Library email! 

! TIP: Remember we set a number of hits we wanted to see in our update?  My Library only shows the first few by default, but clicking on ‘List all’ when logged in to My Library will show you the number that you asked for...