Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Tuesday 19 February 2013

How to grab the search results URL from NCBI PubMed

For those familiar with PubMed
It's the 'See more...' link below the rectangular box on the right, once you've done a search - click that and then select the 'URL' button that appears below the box on the new page.

New readers start here
When you run a very basic search on PubMed (eg literally just typing aspartame insulin) the URL of the page changes from

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed to 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=aspartame+insulin

If you then add a filter (look on the left hand side for the 'species' filter) so that you're only looking at results of studies done in humans then the URL returns to

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

which is a bit disheartening if you want to email it to someone and say 'hey look what I found'.

There is a way round that but I think that, in most cases (within reason), the URL of the page should reflect what the page is doing (except where you've had to log in of course). Mind you if I'd been in charge of this from the start we'd have never had frames.

First catch your URL 
Have a look at the right hand side of the page (you might have to scroll down a bit) for the 'Search details' box where you can see how PubMed has converted your typed in search words into a properly built search. Below the box (on the right) is a 'See more...' link - click it.

You're now on the 'Search details' page, there's another box and below it are two buttons one of which says 'URL' - click that and you'll be taken to a page of search results. At the top of the page, where the web address / URL is (ie the address bar) is a plain text version of the URL which has spaces in it and doesn't look that URL-y. However once you click on it and copy it, and paste it anywhere else it should automatically fill in the spaces and even if it doesn't, when pasted into a browser it will work as a web address and take you to a copy of those search results.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%28%28%22aspartame%22[MeSH%20Terms]%20OR%20%22aspartame%22[All%20Fields]%29%20AND%20%28%22insulin%22[MeSH%20Terms]%20OR%20%22insulin%22[All%20Fields]%29%29%20AND%20%22humans%22[MeSH%20Terms]&cmd=DetailsSearch




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