The Evil Monkey has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from a southeastern U.S. university. After a postdoctoral nightmare of Inquisitorial proportions, he is currently working in a laboratory and an adjunct assistant professor at a nearby state university.
Scicurious is a graduate student wrestling with a PhD in Physiology at a southern institution. She is a nerd, a geek, and also a dork. And yes, that really is her brain.
NotoriousLTP is an MD-PhD student in New York City. After finishing (hopefully soon) his PhD in behavioral neuroscience, he will re-enter the fun vortex that is medical education.
Dearest Pubmed,
You know how I generally feel about you. You are like a faithful science butler, forever serving up my lovely citations with a cheerful, dry wit, which sometimes causes you to return things like "priapism" when I searched for "[drug] withdrawal". It was cute, and I appreciated that bit of sass in response to what was probably a rather silly series of keywords.
And then, you underwent some reformatting. The new look is very snazzy, very modern, vaguely Google-like. Not bad. It would be icing on the cake, however, if Pubmed actually...worked. Right now. Sci has no time for these shenanigans, Pubmed. Sci is under a deadline, and wants her citations. It's one of the lovely, reliable things she has come to expect out of her Pubmed service.
And no use with the whole "bad gateway". Nice try passing the blame, Pubmed. I'm ashamed of you.
And now, pubmed, see what you did?! Sci was feeling productive! She was looking forward to getting stuff done this day, and, with a cold beer in the evening, looking back at her afternoon and going "BOOM, BABY!" But now it will not happen. No. Without pubmed, Sci is reduced to playing around with twitter and is considering digging into her long-neglected Google Reader. SEE WHAT YOU'VE DONE?!
What I'm saying, Pubmed honey, my adorable butler of science, is that you need to drink some coffee and get your little tuxedoed butt off the floor. Shake it off. I suppose it might have been a rough weekend, and we've all been there, but I need those citations on a silver platter, and I need them yesterday.
Much love,
Sci and her Reference Mananger
Brain & Behavior
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
damn straight! i rearrange my entire day to get some stuff down for rationale and experimental design citations, and what do i get? my afternoon is toast. >:(
Posted by: leigh | October 26, 2009 3:01 PM
Yeah I've spent the last two hours trying to squeeze some genome information out of the ncbi. Because, somehow, I feel that refreshing every 2 minutes will fix their broken gateway.
Posted by: JohnV | October 26, 2009 3:22 PM
Why aren't you using Web of Science?
Posted by: Isis the Scientist | October 26, 2009 3:34 PM
Sci's MegaU is not a patron of Web of Science, unfortunately. Stuck with my heretofore faithful little butler.
Posted by: Scicurious | October 26, 2009 3:45 PM
In my experience Web of Science also seems to lag in picking up publications which may or may not be an issue (but would still be better alternative than nothing).
Good news tho, it looks like ncbi has almost fixed itself. I'm now getting pages to load once in a while, but my ability to string together the multiple-good loads in a row isn't at the point where its useful yet :p
Posted by: JohnV | October 26, 2009 3:49 PM
Scopus seems to work reasonably well in most cases. More user friendly than WOS too IMHO.
Posted by: antipodean | October 26, 2009 8:14 PM
OH MY GOD- what did they do to my pubmed. It didn't look like this yesterday :(
Posted by: JohnV | October 27, 2009 4:15 PM