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One of my picks is a smart external enhancement by Alf Eaton to PubMed, which has been permanently enhanced internally without much fanfare in the media. The other pick is the Web site of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), which is a small but very good site, particularly when you realize that, even if you don't like standards, you'd better follow them for sake of interoperability. The pan is the electronic publishing service of Extenza which promises much more than it delivers, both in terms of quantity and quality. This is not a good business policy -and it is also bad for the users.
the picks
HUBMED
Of course, the name HubMed is a play on words, although the official tagline of this service [www.hubmed.org] is "an alternative interface to PubMed." There are zillions of PubMed interface alternatives because so many information services like to add a free 12- to 15-million-records database (depending on whether it includes PreMed, OldMed, or some other record set) with their own retrieval software. Do these services think of it as wearing platform shoes to make them look taller?
Most reduce the power options of the native PubMed software (including its excellent behind-the-scenes term look-up in more than 120 medical dictionaries matched to MeSH terms). Not HubMed-it lets PubMed show it prowess by sending to it the user's query, but takes over when receiving results.
HubMed is the brain child of AIf Eaton, who can implement brilliant applets and hacks faster than I could possibly explain them. He created a hub of links derived from PubMed records. It's not actually a database, but rather a set of scripts that searches PubMed and extracts data elements (PubMed ID, title, starting page, DOI) from the records retrieved. It then inserts these data elements or combinations thereof into a target-specific query (similar to an OpenURL query), creates and labels a series of links, and lets you click on them to run the queries against such target sites as BioMedCentral, Scirus, CrossRef, PubMed Central, OAI, Google, Google Scholar, and Scopus. (You must have a subscription to get into Scopus.)
All this is made possible because the designers of PubMed (who are pioneers in many regards) were among the first to make PubMed records...