Why Mapping MEDLINE?
The biomedical sciences are a global endeavor, and PubMed contains citations from researchers and clinicians investigating things around the world. Mapping MEDLINE graphs that geographical diversity by taking the results of your PubMed search and displaying them by country.
How it works
Most citations in PubMed are from MEDLINE, and MEDLINE records are indexed with (typically around 10 to 12) Medical Subject Headings. These MeSH headings include not only topic areas but geographic regions — around 15% of all indexed records are tagged with the name of a continent, country or city. Mapping MEDLINE searches your results against these goegraphical headings. Of course some articles might mention a country name in a title or abstract without a corresponding index term, so Mapping MEDLINE searches those fields by country name as well.
Note: Mapping is proportional in order to better reflect regional variation.
Comparing searches
Once you have done more than one search, you can compare the proportions for each in a given region.
Contact
Mapping MEDLINE is a experimental project of Ed Sperr, M.L.I.S.
Ed can be reached at ed_sperr@hotmail.com or esperr@uga.edu.
Caveats
As a relatively small number of citations are location-specific, broad searches work best. The scale for each choropleth is variable, so small differences for one search could be represented by the same colors as for a much larger difference in another. Because we rely in part in part on a text-word search for country names in the title and abstract, there is a potential for false hits.
Technologies
Mapping MEDLINE is lashed together with bailing wire and and jQuery. It utuilizes NCBI's Entrez Programming Utilities for searching PubMed and Google Charts for drawing the maps. Responsive layout made easier with Bootstrap.
You can find the source code for this application at GitHub.
License
Please note that the information provided here comes ultimately from the National Center for Biotechnology Information and is subject to the terms listed under their Disclaimer and Copyright notice.
Feel free to us this tool as you wish, but if you use Mapping MEDLINE for publication, I'd appreciate a citation:
Sperr E. Mapping MEDLINE [Internet]. 2016 [cited your_date_here]. Available from http://esperr.github.io/mapping-medline/
See also...
Want to have even more fun with tools like this? Check out Visualizing PubMed.