Pubmed interfaces

Another day, another interface to PubMed. This one is from Muin et al. from the NLM, where you'd think they'd have the home field advantage (to be fair, the NLM is a big place with lots of projects going on).

It's called SLIM, for 'Slider Interface for MEDLINE / PubMed searches'. Basically, instead of all those drop down boxes and things you use sliders to choose to limit your search to papers submitted after a certain date, in certain types of journal and so on.

Let me first say that I like the sliders idea. It's just plain friendlier to be able to graphically manipulate limits. Let me then say... why wasn't the potential here maximized? How about six months developing the idea further, and then submitting a manuscript describing it?

When I read the abstract I envisioned some kind of AJAX / XML powered intelligent filter. You type in a broad search term, it comes back with 1,000 papers (and displays the first page so you get an idea of the type of results returned). You move the sliders around and as you do so the total number of papers changes as you watch. Something like this Laszlo demo (watch out: link leads to Flash). Er, it's not like that, at all. I was disappointed.

OK, the fault lies more with my heightened expectations than the authors. But there are already excellent PubMed interfaces out there with more good ideas presented every month. You have to do something a bit more special than an interface mockup and some reports on stability during alpha and beta testing, really, to stand out. Everybody who has access to the NCBI E-Utilities can build their own search interface, which is great. From the NLM we need stuff that we can't whip up ourselves in a couple of days...