Tag: PubMed

Pi in Pubmed

On March 14th, 2012 (3/14/2012), it was Pi day. According to Wikipedia, Pi (π) is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of any Euclidean circle’s circumference to its diameter. While others estimated π using Monte Carlo in R or declared π is wrong, I tried to see how many times the pi value is cited in Pubmed, a database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. And here are the results (please note the log y-axis):

Pi citations in Pubmed (March 2012)

Pi Occurences
3.14159 1
3.1415 1
3.141 110
3.14 11726

I know it has little meaning: very often the string of numbers in the pi value was not there for pi itself but for other reasons. I thought it was fun, that’s all.

Redesigned Pubmed

I often wrote about Pubmed here. Briefly, it’s a search engine for publications in the biomedical domain. They recently redesigned their user interface and, although there are a lot of new things to save time that came with the new design, there is still a problem with their interface: the new search box takes too much space …

Redesigned Pubmed homepage
Redesigned Pubmed homepage (bigger image)

Redesigned Pubmed result page
Redesigned Pubmed result page: search box is hiding the logo, the display settings and the first result (bigger image)

To be fair, I must say these screenshots were taken with Firefox 3.5.3 on Fedora Linux but I didn’t see this problem with other operating systems nor other browser (not even Firefox on MS-Windows). Seems they tested their design with everything except Linux 😦 (A search with Pubmed redesigned doesn’t work with text-only browsers although the previous one perfectly worked)

JoVE on PubMed

JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments is a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. Think of a YouTube-like service for the life-science community, add a quality control before publication and you’ll get the picture. As many other Open Access scientific journal, JoVE is now indexed in PubMed, the life-science publications directory. It’s nice to see interesting, open and innovative initiatives getting a “recognition” like this.

Thanks to Biosingularity for the info.