he National Library of Medicine (NLM) has released PubMed Text Version created specifically for users who require special adaptive equipment to access the Web and use PubMed. PubMed Text Version provides basic PubMed search and retrieval functionality. Its text-based page design and easy-to-use navigational controls help simplify the process of searching and reviewing the results in PubMed. The Text Version can be accessed from the PubMed sidebar or directly at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/queryd.fcgi.

Search attributes for PubMed Text Version are similar to most of those available in the full-featured version of PubMed. It provides a query box for entering search terms, a History pull-down menu displaying up to the last fifteen searches, and results that are initially displayed in a Summary format. Citations can also be viewed in the Abstract format. Links to other resources, such as LinkOut and other databases developed by National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), are available from the links to the right of each citation. The Nucleotide and Protein databases are available to search from the Search pull-down menu.

Capabilities are the same as standard PubMed for searching for authors, journals, subjects, phrases, truncation, dates and date ranging. PubMed Text Version uses PubMed's Automatic Term Mapping and Boolean syntax (AND, OR, NOT). Online Help is also available from the PubMed Text Version homepage.

PubMed Text Version was tested on screen reading software including JAWS^® for Windows^® and outSPOKEN^® for Macintosh^®.

By Kathi Canese
National Center for Biotechnology Information

Canese K. PubMed^® Text Version Now Available. NLM Tech Bull. 2002 Mar-Apr;(325):e2.