New Search Service Ushers in Era of Science 2.0

Boston-based Pubget, Inc today this month announced the first full release of its biomedical search service, Pubget (www.pubget.com). It's similar to the government's flagship Pubmed service, except Pubget serves up full-text PDFs right away. It takes the clicking and waiting out of web search, improving search productivity by an order of magnitude.

Pubget is modeled on Pubmed, the government-sponsored public search engine that is the first stop for most of the world's several million biomedical researchers when they are searching the literature. The site indexes about 20 million records and returns a list of titles, authors, abstracts, and related information in response to a search. Many of these records, including the majority of recent records, also include links to where the full text of the publication can be found online.

But getting from the link to the full text is a Rube Goldberg mechanism. The link on the record leads to a page on the publisher's site. From there, it's usually another click to get to a 'download' page, and then another to get to the PDF itself -- and that's assuming the user is already logged in in some way. Access to most publications, especially recent publications, requires a login. Often it's up to the user to know how to manage subscriptions: which sites to visit first for access, what usernames and passwords to use.

Pubget introduces a new approach: browse the PDFs directly. This offers a significant potential gain in productivity. Users spend upwards of a quarter of a billion minutes every year searching for scientific literature. Pubget cuts that time by an order of magnitude or moreequivalent to saving more than a full day of work for each researcher, or to adding thousands of researchers to the work force for pennies on the dollar.

The ability to get PDFs fast opens up new ways to use the literature. Pubget lets the user read the latest issue of almost any biomedical journal right away, if the user is at a subscribing institution. The user simply types the name of the journal and then "[latest". The site's home page also has a section called "Hot off the presses" with quick links to major journals like Science, Nature, and Cell, making access to those journals even faster. Pubget also lets users bookmark favorite papers as "keepers," tag and share them, and send citations to Endnote and other popular citation managers, as well as print and save PDFs.

Another nice feature is Pubget turns PDF management into link management, allowing users to can get to their personal libraries from anywhere. Sharing a paper technically amounts to only sharing a link, so there's no possibility of copyright infringement.

This is an important point: Pubget is not a way to get around copyrights. A user can get to a PDF only if the user or institution subscribes to it. There's no cheating. If the user or institution lacks access, Pubget returns an abstract plus links, but no full text. This arrangement benefits publishers another way: by making it so easy to search, Pubget drives visits to publishers' sites, letting them better track interest in their holdings. Thus researchers get information fast, and publishers stay happy. It's win-win.

To manage access, Pubget is offering institution-level subscriptions to universities, companies, libraries, and other research institutions. Because it's an entirely hosted solution, there's no software to download, install, or maintain. Also, because Pubget is web-based, it works cross-platform, on Macintosh, PC, and Linux. Email support(at)pubget.com or call 617-538-5681 for more information.

New Search Service Ushers in Era of Science 2.0

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