ASBMB Today, January 2003
Getting the Right Result: Fine-Tuning your Search with a Single Click

[In early 2002, ASBMB Today introduced the new "portal" site from Stanford's HighWire Press, which allows you to search all of Medline plus 340 journals' full-text at once -- including the JBC, of course! We began a monthly series of short articles highlighting tools or features of this new site for researchers' sore eyes. The new site is at http://highwire.stanford.edu ]

The HighWire Portal contains over a million full-text articles from hundreds of the world's best journals; that's good news, but even better, it also includes over 12 million article abstracts from MEDLINE in its searching and alerting facilities. But a search across all this content can bring back so many results that you feel you are facing the proverbial "needle in the haystack" problem.

With a single click on the search result page you can easily try variations of your search if you see too many - or too few - results.

Let's suppose you were looking for a single full-text article about recent research on insulin resistance, for assignment to students in a course you are teaching. You type the words "insulin resistance" in the Quick Search box; the system searches for these words in the full text of several hundred HighWire-hosted journals, plus all MEDLINE's abstracts. In a few seconds, HighWire tells you there are over 37,000 articles and shows you the first page of ten citations.

Let's refine this search one click at a time (see Figure 1):

Click on phrase to reduce your search result to only those articles in which the words "insulin resistance" occur together as a phrase. You are left with 23,000 results; too many to assign to a class!

Click on review articles to further reduce your result to only those articles that are reviews. Still over 4,000!

Click on HighWire-hosted journals to further reduce the result to journals whose recent full-text is online. The search result will allow you to see easily which articles are accessible to you and your students online (no need for a course reader or putting the article on reserve!). Now "only" about 500 articles.

FIGURE 1

At this point it is probably efficient to scan the first ten results showing and see if any of these are just the right article to assign. Why might you get lucky in the first 10 of 500 articles? Because the HighWire portal's search engine offers "relevance-ranked" results, as well as the "most-recent-articles first" option (PubMed offers only the latter). So, if your search term is found in the title of a document, the document will be closer to the first page in your search result than if the term were found in the abstract but not the title; and if the term were found in the abstract, the document would be ranked higher than if the term were found only in the full text body of the article.

Since you were interested in recent research, you might next click on within last 2 years to be sure you are looking only at the most recent research. But there are still over 250 such articles.

You now want to limit the results to the set of journals you are most familiar and comfortable with for your own searching. Click My Favorite Journals. Depending on the set of journals you've selected, you might have only a dozen results, or perhaps a hundred.

You can now force the system to drop relevance ranking and simply present the results so that the most recent articles are first. Click newest first. While this doesn't reduce the number of articles in the result, it might make something particularly recent jump to the top, such as the JBC and Journal of Lipid Research articles shown in our example page. You know you can assign these articles because you can see the indication that this article is FREE to you.

As a check to see whether you have missed anything, you note the top right of the page shows Topics best matching my search, which indicates some subject-based collections of articles that are about the topic you want to assign. You click on the topic name, and see that the first article, while it is from 1997, is about molecular mechanisms and signaling pathways of inherited insulin resistance, and is freely available without a subscription. So you note that as a background article for your students, and put it on your growing reading pile.

The 2002 and 2003 issues of ASBMB Today covered topics about the new HighWire Portal. The articles are online at