ClusterMed is a very useful product for searching PubMed.  But its creator, Vivisimo Inc., refers to it as a “demo” (see URL) which makes me a little nervous that it will go away or become only available by subscription.   So I am “enjoying” it while it lasts AND while it is free!

Anyway, the way it works - when you enter your search terms into ClusterMed, the PubMed database is searched and the results are returned organized in clusters (organized by subtopics). This is especially helpful when searching for articles in PubMed by a particular author. The format for searching for author is “last name, initial first name, initial last name”, for example “walker am” for articles written by Alexander M. Walker. The problem with searching by this format is that there are other authors in the PubMed database with the last name “walker” and the initials “am”. How do you tell which are written by Alexander? Well, ClusterMed helps with that. If you know what Dr. Walker writes about, you can go to the appropriate subtopic cluster and view the article citations under that subtopic.  I demonstate this in my PubMed searching class by first searching PubMed directly for “walker am” and then comparing the results by searching ClusterMed.

ClusterMed allows you to display from 250 to 5000 results. There is a link to view your results directly in PubMed (without the clusters!). Another useful feature is the ability to cluster your results by MeSH terms and then display all the indexing terms for each article.

Definitely a helpful tool to use for as long as it lasts!

Submitted by: Alice McCreary, Reference Librarian
on September 02, 2008 - 3:53 pm

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