Announcements 

PubMed Commons: A New Space for Discourse

Kathryn Houk

You may have recently heard about a new feature related to PubMed called PubMed Commons. The Commons was imagined as a place for researchers to provide thoughtful comments or commentary on published items found in PubMed. From NCBI:

“… this service is an initiative of the NIH leadership in response to repeated requests by the scientific community for such a forum to be part of PubMed. We hope that PubMed Commons will leverage the social power of the internet to encourage constructive criticism and high quality discussions of scientific issues that will both enhance understanding and provide new avenues of collaboration within the community.”

Who is eligible?
  • Those who have a published abstract, article, review, letter, editorial, etc. indexed in PubMed
How can I participate?
  1. Sign up for a MyNCBI account if you don’t already have one
  2. Get an invite:
    1. Check to see if your email is already in the database of eligible participants by going here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedcommons/join/
    2. OR ask a colleague already active in the Commons to send you an invite
    3. OR send your first and last name and .edu email address to a librarian, and it will be submitted as a list for NCBI to register (then use the link above)
  3. After signing up, log in to your NCBI account before you begin browsing/searching PubMed
  4. You will then see a link on every abstract view that allows you to add a comment to that record
Some guidelines:

Commons signup