Entrez Genomes
Textbooks Linked
to PubMed
PubMed Abstracts Linked to Textbook Information
In collaboration with book publishers, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is adapting textbooks for the Web and linking them to the PubMed literature database. These textbooks will provide background information to PubMed users for exploring concepts they encounter in PubMed citations.
The first textbook to be included online is Molecular Biology of the Cell, 3rd ed., 1994, by Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, and James D. Watson, published by Garland Publishing, Inc. Molecular Biology of the Cell is one of the most widely used undergraduate textbooks in molecular and cell biology. This textbook provides background information on central topics of molecular and cell biology. Books covering other topics and approaches to biology and medicine will appear in the future.
Linking the Textbooks with PubMed
Textbook information is accessed from the Books link shown on the abstract display of most PubMed records. Selecting this link causes the abstract to be redisplayed, with some words and phrases highlighted as links to corresponding textbook sections. Users may navigate within these sections, accessing text, figures, tables, and references. Rather than mirroring the print version of the textbooks, we provide logical units of content based on the book’s native organization of chapters, sections, and subsections. The size of a unit and its interconnection with other parts of the book depend on both the native organization of the book and the intention of the publisher.
From the textbook sections, references are also linked back to their PubMed abstracts. This gives the textbook reader a starting point to further explore the literature using PubMed’s Related Articles function. Because books usually contain established knowledge, their reference citations are often several years old; using the Related Articles link, readers can move forward in time to find articles that are similar, but more recent, than those cited in the book.
For More Information
Authors, editors, and publishers interested in linking a book to PubMed should contact books@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
For more information on the textbook project and how to access book information, select the Books link from the NCBI Literature Databases home page at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Literature.—MM, BR, DW
