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Anne O'Tate. University of Illinois at Chicago, 1200 West Harrison Street, Chicago, IL, 60607; http://arrowsmith.psych.uic.edu/cgi-bin/arrowsmith uic/AnneOTate.cgi; free.
INTRODUCTION
Anne O'Tate is an alternative interface for searching PubMed developed by the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). It was developed as part of the Arrowsmith project, which has been developing informatics tools for advanced text mining of the biomedical literature. The tool is hosted on the Arrowsmith website on UIC servers and is freely available to the public [1]. The tool is designed to mine results data for relevant keywords, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms, and bibliometric data to help users refine and develop their search strategies.
DESCRIPTION
Anne O'Tate interfaces with PubMed through an application program interface (API) developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Users enter search terms in a text field, and those terms are passed to PubMed through the API, which then returns the results set. A "Limits" tab provides a subset of PubMed search filters, and a "Details" tab displays the detailed search string that is passed to PubMed. Anne O'Tate's intended audience appears to be librarians and researchers conducting a general literature search, particularly those having a difficult time refining their search strategies.
FEATURES
Basic search
The front page provides the user with a search box with Limits and Details tabs, a bulleted list of instructions, help text with links to various PubMed help pages, and a description of the tool with a link to an article outlining the tool and the algorithms used for its functions. Unlike PubMed, the search box does not provide any predictive suggestions, but otherwise the search text is treated the same as if the user entered it in PubMed. Natural language is mapped, and field tags and Boolean operators are recognized.
The Limits tab includes dropdown menus for Field, Publication Type, Age, Language, Humans and Animals, Gender, Publication Date, and PubMed subsets. There is also a checkbox to limit results to those that have abstracts. The options available in the filters represent a subset of the filters available in PubMed and cannot be customized. The Details tab displays the full search string used by PubMed and is the equivalent of the Search Details box in the PubMed interface. Selected Limits are displayed...