Publication Tracking Toolkit

PubMed offers millions of citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, full text from PubMed Central, and online books, from the 1800s-present. Use the Brown University link to access full text subscriptions through the University library.

You'll need a MyNCBI account to save searches and create collections. This account is not just for PubMed, but links across many NCBI products and NIH awards management systems. To sign up for an account, click "Log In" in the top right corner:

Then click the "Sign Up" button from the list of options. 

You have the option of connecting an eRA Commons account if you have one, or linking your Google account. The simplest way of signing up is to link your Brown Google account.

Once you're logged in, you'll see your chosen name in the top right corner. Click that to access your dashboard, where you can see your saved searches and collections.

Copy and paste the below strings into PubMed, in conjunction with an author search.

PubMed - Brown University only 

PubMed - Brown & Clinical Affiliates

• This can be done either in the simple search interface (e.g. "Carberry J" AND ("Brown University"[Affiliation] OR "Warren Alpert"[Affiliation] OR "Alpert Medical School"[Affiliation] OR "Alpert School"[Affiliation] OR "brown medical school"[Affiliation] OR "02912"[Affiliation] OR "brown.edu"[Affiliation]),
• or in the advanced search interface (recommended, and described below)

Building the Search

Use PubMed's advanced search builder to combine the affiliation search string below with the list of investigators you are searching for:

1. Click "Advanced" under the main PubMed search bar.

2. From the Advanced search page, copy and paste the applicable affiliation string into the main search box. Hover your mouse over the carrot next to Search, and instead click "Add to History."

3. Return to the query box. Click the field drop down list, and select "Author"

4. Copy and paste the formatted names column from your spreadsheet, or type in the names you would like to search separated by the OR operator. Click Add.

*A note about names. The author field in PubMed generally indexes the authors full name. Unless someone has a very common name and consistently uses their middle initial in addition to their first name, you will likely get bet results with lastname and first name only. If you search by lastname, first name, initial, you will miss articles that do not include the initial. 

5. When the formatted names are in the query box, click "Add to History"

6. In the "History and Search Details" area, locate the assigned line numbers of your affiliation and author searches. Combine the corresponding line numbers into the query box by typing the numbers preceded by a #. Click Search to see the results immediately, or Add to History to see the number of results before clicking through.

When to include author initial searches

Generally the full author name is indexed in PubMed, and searching by Lastname, Firstname (ex Carberry, Josiah) yields more specific results than Carberry, J. would. However, there are instances where you would need to search by Lastname, First-Initial (Carberry, J). The reason being that some journals do not supply full author names to be indexed, so the initial is the only entry in the full name field. PubMed also did not index full author names reliably prior to 2002. 

If you would like to search by initial without being overwhelmed by false results, search by full name + affiliation as described previously FIRST, then add an additional line for the initialed names.

From there, you can combine the results of the initial names + affiliation with the full names with a NOT operator, which will give you only results from journals that *do not* maintain full first names in the full author name field, as well as others who share the same initial but not the full name. You will need to review these results carefully to ensure you are not retrieving publications authored by another person with the same last name and first initial.

When you have created an effective search, save it! To save your search, click "Create Alert" beneath the search bar. You won't have to receive email alerts if you don't want them. 

You can access your saved searches by going to your MyNCBI dashboard, then click the hyperlinked title of the search. If you only want to see the new results since you've last looked, you can click on the hyperlinked number in the "What's New" column.

When you are ready to export your results to a bibliographic manager such as Zotero or EndNote, click the "Send to" button beneath the main search bar. Then click "Citation Manager":

From the following screen, make sure to select "All Results" from the selection options, then click "Create File"