Ghana-UM Collaboration: Information Resources

1. Enter your search in PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/)

2. Open FLink (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/flink/flink.cgi)

3. Open the "Please choose a database to start" menu and select "PubMed"

4. Select "Input from Entrez History" from the dialog box that allows you to select your desired input method

5. a. Use the pull-down menu on that tab to view a list of your recent PubMed searches; b. Select the PubMed query for which you'd like to download a CSV formatted search results file; c. Press "Submit"

6. FLink will now display your search results in a "PubMed" folder tab.

7. Select the "Download CSV" option and choose to "open" or "save" the file, as desired. (The browser window will also display the URL at which your results can be retrieved.)

8. The columns in a CSV file will depend on the database you accessed through FLink. For PubMed, the columns will include:

A. UID (PMID)
B. Authors C. PubDate (Year)
D. PubDate (Month)
E. Title of article
F. Summary (which includes the following information in a single cell: Authors, title, journal name, year, month [if applicable], volume, issue, pages)

Note that an additional "frequency" column will appear in any CSV file that contains data from a FLink "destination" database. In the example above, the CSV file does not contain a "frequency" column because we used PubMed as the starting ("source") database.

However, if you started your FLink operation in the Entrez Gene database, for example, and then used the "LinkTo" function to retrieve associated PubMed records, PubMed would be the "destination" database. In that case, the resulting PubMed CSV file would contain a "frequency" column, and the value in that column would indicate how many of the gene records from your input list had links to each PubMed record in your output list.