- To find out just how many papers have been indexed by
PubMed every year, enter an empty query (simply press 'Build Trend');
- To find the history of a subject, enter a few keywords
describing the subject. For example, clopidogrel will tell
you that discussion about this drug first appeared in 1987,
was ocasional (under one paper a month) by 1996 and really
took off in after 2000;
- To make statistics of the languages of papers as indexed by PubMed
and how they evolved in time enter something like fre[la]
and you will see their number is geting reduced in time, despite the increase
in the general number of papers, so the prevalence of papers in french in the
database falls from about 10%, forty years ago, to less than 2% in 2004;
- To see how many papers have been published in journals published
in a given country year by year enter something like
france[pl] and one can see that the number of biomedical
papers published in France, indexed in Medline, is quite constant over the
years, despite the previous statistics;
- queries can be combined, for example:
eng[la] france[pl]
and you will see that a progressive
number of papers published in france, but in english, are indexed
by PubMed every year;
- trying pitie-salpetriere[ad] will show you that,
while the number of papers published from this famous hospital
is increasing yearly, the fraction of these papers from all
papers in PubMed in the respective year is relatively constant.
WARNING: Counting papers with a given feature is a very gross
bibliometric method. Sometimes, the results are relevant, sometimes
they require extensive checking, but they must always be interpreted
very carefully.
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