
Announcing the New PubMed - vo2maxer
https://becker.wustl.edu/news/announcing-the-new-pubmed/
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akinhwan
I'm actually part of the team developing the new PubMed. Very curious and
interested to know what the hacker news community thinks and feels about their
experience. [https://pubmed.gov/labs](https://pubmed.gov/labs)

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joekrill
What's the tech stack behind this, out of curiosity?

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akinhwan
[https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/ma19/ma19_pubmed_updat...](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/ma19/ma19_pubmed_update.html)

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nahikoa
PubMed is an incredibly useful resource. I've found that it is fairly common
for my psychiatrist and GP to be relatively unaware of the latest studies and
treatments.

Of course, reading through abstracts and papers requires a critical eye into
the statistics, methodology, and funding. The Cochrane Reviews are similarly
awesome.

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davycro
Medicine moves fast and it’s impossible to stay up to date on everything. In
general I do not incorporate the latest discoveries into my daily practice
unless the evidence is absurdly overwhelming, which rarely happens. Usually
new therapies have marginal evidence to support them. I prefer to wait until
multiple studies support a treatment before it becomes my standard of care,
and by that time it’s likely going to be summarized in a Cochrane Review.

Should a patient come in with a preference for a treatment they read about on
PubMed (which has never occurred in my practice) then I would likely
accommodate their preference unless I thought it would put them at serious
harm. A patient knowing more than I do about a particular disease happens more
than you’d expect, especially if they have a rare chronic disorder. This does
not diminish my ego or confidence in my knowledge base.

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danieltillett
You are a very unusual doctor. I wish there were more like you.

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jazoom
Doesn't seem unusual to me. I could have written the same thing myself. Most
of my doctor colleagues would be similar. Maybe you live in a different part
of the world where doctors jump on every latest trend/study, but I'm not sure
where that would be. Most of us like to let the water settle first.

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pimmen
Not jumping on the latest fad is very common, and something I expect of a
doctor. However, I wish more doctors I've met fit in with the latter part of
the grand parent comment, though.

A friend of my family met 15 different doctors for a period lasting years
because of agonizing headaches, they all sent her home thinking it was nothing
unusual. She died of a brain tumor the size of a tennis ball. We often think
about what would've happened if one of those 15 doctors would've shown some
humility.

To be clear, I work in tech, we have more than our fair share of big egos too.
I don't think this is anything particular about doctors.

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jazoom
15 doctors and none ordered a scan of her brain? Well I'd say that's very
unusual and the exception rather than the rule. In my experience doctors are
more likely to request imaging purely to demonstrate to the patient that
there's nothing visible, even if imaging isn't indicated.

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pimmen
Some more context; she didn't ask for 15 different opinions, she lived in the
country side and her nearest hospital used relay doctors. So, it was more a
case of being sent home and told to return if it didn't get any better, and
when she did return, her previous doctor was long gone and had been replaced.
All the next doctor had was whatever the previous doctor left them to work
with in her charts. I'm not a doctor, so I don't know how much that would be
in a case of a piercing headache.

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bransonf
Even if you don’t find yourself reading biomedical research on a frequent
basis, you should expose yourself to PubMed just to see how much care went
into its development.

Seriously, PubMed is one of my favorite websites for its simplicity, speed and
incredible usability. It has a querying system for hundreds of thousands of
articles that makes sense, it saves these queries and allows you to edit them.
It allows you to save articles to lists and makes them portable.

While it may be easy to just think of this as just another clever website
redesign, I can tell you from personal experience that these increases in
usability have a non-zero impact on research productivity. And since it’s
PubMed, there’s a lot of important research at stake.

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jszymborski
I usually am skeptical of redesigns that look like this because it typically
signals that literally hundreds of 1MB JS dependencies are to be downloaded to
display simple text.

The new pubmed, much like the old pubmed, is speedy! Pages are ~800kb on first
visit, subsequent pages visits avg 30kb transferred data in my very
unscientific tests.

Congratulations on making a great resource greater :)

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kirillbobyrev
Really happy to see PubMed improving over time!

One thing I'm missing is a recommendation service of articles that might be
relevant for me. I used to read a lot of Machine Learning/Math papers on arXiv
and I have found arXiv-sanity [0] to be extremely useful, maybe something
similar would be great as a part of PubMed functionality - being able to keep
track of research which is relevant to the papers I've added to my favorites.

Also, I'm slightly confused by the sort order in the search. I found four
options for sorting the items while searching:

* Default order

* Pub Date

* Journal

* PMC Live Date

IIUC "Default order" is not "sort by the number of citations/citation index",
but that's what I typically want when I'm trying to figure out what are the
most important/influential research in the field.

[0]: [http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/](http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/)

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cheviana
Thanks a lot for warm words and useful feedback from PubMed Labs team! To make
sure your feedback is heard, please use "Feedback button" found in bottom
right corner of [https://pubmed.gov/labs](https://pubmed.gov/labs)

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abhisuri97
Yay. Big plus for keeping search result page load sizes roughly the same.

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owaty
Great, pubmed and other NCBI resources are long due for a redesign.

I also wish they got a shorter url.

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jszymborski
pubmed.gov redirects to the full URL :)

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drannex
Been using the labs for the better part of a year (over a year?)

Incredibly great work!

