NASA PubSpace

Laura Pope Robbins
2017 Charleston Advisor  
Results include check boxes for researchers to select certain articles. Those selected articles can then be e-mailed, downloaded, copied to a temporary clipboard, or added to a collection. Note that creating a collection requires the setting up of an account. Selecting items does not automatically deliver the full-text of the articles to the user. Instead the user receives the citations from the search results with links to the full-text in the different reading formats. Searching uses the
more » ... an operators AND, OR, and NOT and requires that they be uppercase characters. PubSpace uses the asterisk (*) as the truncation wildcard character. Reading through PubMed Help reveals that PubMed does not use adjacency searching. If a user includes quotes around a phrase, and the phrase is not found through automatic term mapping, the quotes are ignored (PubMed, 2016). Automatic term mapping utilizes Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), which are not always useful in a search of NASA-funded publications. Abstract PubSpace is a repository of full-text peer-reviewed articles resulting from NASA-funded research going back to 1961. The National Center for Biotechnology Information has integrated PubSpace into PubMed Central, a freely available repository of medical research. Using an established, stable, government-hosted platform for PubSpace seems to make sense. However, the lack of clear branding, an uneven application of phrase searching, and a missing thesaurus of NASA terminology highlights that this integration may not be the best.
doi:10.5260/chara.18.4.41 fatcat:iyaop4zutfgjtlgc4rfnoptc3a