MedASq

Search terms:
Abstract: Titles/page:     Free full text: (according to the publisher)
Highlight: search terms or the following:

Advancements in Medicine - Omega-3 research - Help

MedASq (the Medline Abstract Squeezer) is © Ernesto de Bernardis 2002. Thanks to Eric Mueller for his on-the-fly ZIP creation code, to Google for automatic translations, to the NCBI people who wrote the new Entrez Utilities, and to the USA Government and NLM who allowed free access to the PubMed database [Disclaimer]. The URL of this site is http://www.debernardis.it/medasq.php; my home page is in http://www.debernardis.it

What is MedASq ?

MedASq (the Medline Abstract Squeezer) is a simplified interface to the Pubmed/Medline (TM) database, particularly suited for mobile connections to the Internet (cellphones, handhelds, communicators, palm devices, pda's etc.).
  1. It is text-only, no graphics to load;
  2. does not rely on particular browser commands, like frames, java or javascript;
  3. directly delivers abstracts without having to download titles before;
  4. the list of abstract can be browsed or directly saved, in html or zipped html format;
  5. allows searching journal titles, or MeSH terms, or exploring the complete list of major MeSH terms for a given query;
  6. shows a yearly graph of published papers selected by the current query;
  7. can highlight in bold/underlined or in yellow background the search terms, or selected terms chosen by the user;
  8. explicitly indicates link URLs, allowing to follow them even if the page is saved in text-only format;
  9. permits to limit the search to papers with free full text available on the Internet;
  10. automatically translates abstracts in Italian, French, German, Spanish or Portuguese (thanks to Google!)
  11. includes an automatic update service for continuing medical education in various disciplines (Advancements in Medicine), and for omega-3 unsaturated fatty acids research (Omega-3 research). Other specialty pages to come!
MedASq is programmed atop of the new Entrez Utilities, hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Library of Medicine of Bethesda (USA).

MedASq help

You can enter the search query in the Search terms input field. The search syntax is the same of the official Pubmed site, and you can find it in the Pubmed help page. However, in MedASq it is possible to use the boolean operators AND, OR, NOT also in lowercase. The search field tags can be embedded both in square brackets, like in the original Pubmed, and in angle brackets < >, which sometimes could be easier to find on the keyboards of some handheld devices.

By default, only citations with abstract are searched – but you can change this setting by acting on the control Abstract:

The output pages can list from 5 to 1000 citations; this can be set by the Titles/page: control.

By selecting the Free full text: checkbox, you can limit the search to papers with full text available on the Internet for no fee or paid subscription. This selection relies on data supplied by journal publishers, and sometimes proves inaccurate. To retrieve the full paper, click on Links, at the end of each abstract, and, in the page you get, select a full text online link not preceded by an asterisk (*).

You can highlight the search terms, or selected words, by acting on the Highlight: control. Choose among bold+underlined (black) highlight, yellow background (color), or no highlight.

If the search terms or the following input field if left empty, the search terms are highlighted; otherwise, only the words entered in this field are highlighted.

Press the button to get the output directly on your browser window. Unlike the original Pubmed interface, MedASq outputs directly abstracts, without listing citation titles before.

Use the button to save the output in a file, in uncompressed html format, or the button to save in compressed zip format. These features may not work in some browser, because the implementation of header commands (which tell the browser what to do with downloaded data) seems not to be uniform among different browsers or different releases of the same browser.

The button outputs only the number of citations found.

The launches a search on the text-only Medical Subject Headings browser of the National Library of Medicine.

The button allows to search in full and abbreviated titles of Pubmed-indexed journals. In the search output pages, each journal record is linked to the ACNP Italian public libraries central catalogue service, which gives info on original papers delivery. If you like, you can let me know other countries' library catalogues to link. You can also click on the journal title on each abstract to directly activate journal search.

The command allows to get an overview of the most important subjects related to the search terms. In fact, it gathers the major Medical Subject Heading of the citations that could be found by the chosen search query and parameters, and presents them in an ordered form, according to the main MeSH cathegories. In the output page it is possible to select a number of major MeSH and launch a search based on the original query string and the selected MeSH terms.

The button delivers a graph of the number of citations vs. year, from 1966 to the present.

You can suggest me new features, or customized versions in other languages, by sending me a message from the email form in my home page.

Browse Medline abstract with your wap-enabled phone

MedASq goes mobile: connect your wap device to the address http://wap.debernardis.it . You will be able to search PubMed/Medline by the same query syntax of MedASQ, and apply some filters to select human/animal studies, or evidence-based papers. For your continuous medical education, you will also find "Advancements in Medicine" to browse with your cellphone the most recent and relevant clinical papers in several medical specialties.

Updated November 9th, 2003