Pubmed has no ranking ?

[HenrikFuture]

Advertisement - Members don't see this ad

Hello, as most others of this forum i have grown up in a world where the internet became an extension of your fingertips rather quickly in my youth.

So i learned that in the medical world Pubmed is greatly esteemed, and i had hoped that what google is to general surfing, pubmed might match in the world of science.

I find pubmed to be lacking, as when i search i get everything published with "recently added" being the only matter of being on the top of the search page. Being a new student and wishing to gain the newest and most profound knowledge, i have no idea how to sift through this ocean of articles. The articles are simply thrown at you in a way i consider to be completely unranked. Somehow everyones articles on this page is equally good/bad.

As an analogy, if i woke up tomorrow, with amnesia, and i googled "memory loss", the big reputed webpages with which a majority agree, and a majority find the most useful show up first. You stumble upon webmd, mayoclinic and other sites. Your first sites in google search will not be some Jesse's webpage on "How the aliens caused my memory loss". Google ranks stuff in all kinds of ways, and the simple fact of it is that it works. In the event you want more specific stuff you further your search string.

Using Pubmed, i wished to see if i could gain frontier knowledge, but even when searching only for Reviews, it strikes me i have no idea which article there is a consensus on being worthwhile or groundbreaking. And which ones are considered less useful, remarkable, or maybe just downright poor research.

I have no chance of looking through 10916 articles in a week either.


So in short;

Pubmed, does this searchmachine contain no ranking, is it necessary to start from one end and work your way to the other, and personally judge the quality and importance of every article?

Kind regards, Henrik

 

[FSU2013]

Hello, as most others of this forum i have grown up in a world where the internet became an extension of your fingertips rather quickly in my youth.

So i learned that in the medical world Pubmed is greatly esteemed, and i had hoped that what google is to general surfing, pubmed might match in the world of science.

I find pubmed to be lacking, as when i search i get everything published with "recently added" being the only matter of being on the top of the search page. Being a new student and wishing to gain the newest and most profound knowledge, i have no idea how to sift through this ocean of articles. The articles are simply thrown at you in a way i consider to be completely unranked. Somehow everyones articles on this page is equally good/bad.

As an analogy, if i woke up tomorrow, with amnesia, and i googled "memory loss", the big reputed webpages with which a majority agree, and a majority find the most useful show up first. You stumble upon webmd, mayoclinic and other sites. Your first sites in google search will not be some Jesse's webpage on "How the aliens caused my memory loss". Google ranks stuff in all kinds of ways, and the simple fact of it is that it works. In the event you want more specific stuff you further your search string.

Using Pubmed, i wished to see if i could gain frontier knowledge, but even when searching only for Reviews, it strikes me i have no idea which article there is a consensus on being worthwhile or groundbreaking. And which ones are considered less useful, remarkable, or maybe just downright poor research.

I have no chance of looking through 10916 articles in a week either.


So in short;

Pubmed, does this searchmachine contain no ranking, is it necessary to start from one end and work your way to the other, and personally judge the quality and importance of every article?

Kind regards, Henrik

I don't think you're really using PubMed for its intended use....it sounds like you're more interested in UpToDate. That will give you the consensus. When I need to look something up, I'll start with the textbooks (after a cursory wiki read)....if I can't find what I'm looking for, I'd go to UpToDate......still can't find it - ask an attending.......I would only go to pubmed after I had exhausted those resources.

If you are really interested in learning more about a specific topic, look up the articles that are cited in the texts or UpToDate and read the original article - I think this is usually overkill.

PubMed is really more for doing research and learning highly specialized stuff.....in med school (at least the first two years), you won't be expected to read the original articles often (if ever).

 

[boggvir]

As the poster above said, pubmed is simply a repository of knowledge. There are other websites that sift through the data and create summaries/rankings/analysis of published articles in your field. Pubmed is when you are looking for primary literature in a subject, primarily if you are a researcher.

 

[SpecterGT260]

Mesh search. /thread