What's New in PMC: Another Facelift

[Editor's note: The title of this article was changed on August 8, 2012.]

[Editor's note: This sentence was changed on August 8, 2012.]
PMC (also known as PubMed Central) recently updated its look and feel, to conform to NCBI’s new standards for page design. This redesign allows for a cleaner and more uniform presentation across PMC’s site as well as its article, issue and journal archive pages.

In the example of the journal archive page shown in Figure 1, the journal logo is centered on the page and includes additional white space. The navigation links, or breadcrumbs, are also more compact and the font colors more uniform across the site.

The article pages have also been enhanced by a more compact presentation for article front matter, featuring links to Author information, Article notes, and Copyright and License information (see Figure 2).

In addition, if you click on an individual author’s name, for example, H.O. Ammar as in the citation in Figure 2, you will be directed to the PubMed search results page for that author (see Figure 3).

The views for tables and figures have also been improved. For tables, click on the link or thumbnail to get the full view. For figures, you have a choice: either hover over the thumbnail to get a pop-up of the image — or click on the thumbnail or the link to get the full figure page. Each figure page also includes an image strip at the bottom, which displays all the images in the article (see Figure 4).

Other improvements to the new article page (see Figure 5) include easier readability and navigation, including links to the various article formats, and to the corresponding article citation in PubMed as well as to those PubMed citations that are related to the article.

Scrolling down the page, you will also see an enhanced look for bibliographic citations that are referenced in the article. Hover over a particular citation, either within the article or on the right-hand side of the page to make these corresponding citations not only light up but also display the full citation information (see Figure 6).

Finally, at the top of each section of an article, the "Go to" navigation links offer a drop down menu that will take you to any section more quickly and easily, whether it’s the Abstract, Introduction, Discussion, or any others within the article page (see Figure 7).

And yes, further improvements to the PMC site are still to come. To be notified about these and other PMC developments, please subscribe to the PMC mailing list.