PubMed Uncertainty: Smart Alternatives for CME Professionals
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Introduction: The Importance of PubMed for CME Professionals
Imagine waking up one morning to find that the medical library you rely on for your work as a CME writer or professional is suddenly gone, or at the very least severely compromised. What would you do? As CME writers and professionals, we rely on PubMed as the backbone of our literature searches. It's our gateway to high quality biomedical research, the foundation of evidence based medicine, and a crucial tool for our work.
But what if that foundation is at risk?
Potential Threats to PubMed
A recent article in Medpage Today highlights some potential but concerning changes to PubMed due to policy shifts in National Institutes of Health funding. PubMed houses over 37 million citations for biomedical literature from Medline, life science journals, and online books.
And by 2025, this year, papers generated by NIH grants and based on taxpayer funded research are meant to be [00:01:00] publicly accessible with no paywalls. But as Katie Soleta pointed out in her MedPage Today article, the Trump administration's freeze on NIH grants, research, and layoffs put the pipeline of biomedical research in jeopardy, and potentially PubMed itself.
She outlines several ways this jeopardy could play out. Notably, any layoffs would likely take it offline and make it inaccessible. or content could quickly just become outdated because new publications wouldn't be added to the database. She also notes that indexing could become a target.
As I talked about in May 2024, in an episode on streamlining your literature search, journal indexing ensures journal quality and prevents the onslaught of predatory journals, which are often based on bad or fraudulent research.
Indexers at the National Library of [00:02:00] Medicine assign MeSH terms to MEDLINE and PubMed records and provide a standardized way to search and retrieve relevant literature, making it easier for us. Without indexing, any and all journals could be included in PubMed,
making it even harder for us than it already is to determine evidence quality.
Now at the moment these changes are speculative but I'd say they're worrying given the long list of things that have already happened in the first six weeks of the Trump administration that we didn't think would happen. So what does this mean for us as CME professionals?
Preparing for Potential Disruptions
I'm a pragmatist and I want to be prepared and I want you to be prepared too. So now is the time to expand your literature search toolkit and ensure your ability to access high quality, if not completely up to date, medical research remains strong. So make sure you're [00:03:00] prepared. Here are some things that you can do today.
First, bookmark alternative search platforms like Deep Dive, which archives PubMed files daily and has been doing for many years, or the Data Research Project, which is working overtime to preserve datasets.
Write Medicine Insider subscriber Savannah Reid MPH, an epidemiologist and freelance CME writer, also recommends Europe PMC, which is a mirror site for PubMed. Second. Use the Wayback Machine, a digital library of internet sites and other cultural artefacts in digital form. You can use this to retrieve past versions of CDC and government health pages if they're removed.
Third, explore clinical trial registries beyond clinical trials.gov. Samantha Notes that trials are also cross indexed in the EU Clinical trials register, which [00:04:00] provides some of the same information about trials as clinical trials dot go. And fourth, stay informed.
Follow discussions among researchers and medical writers about evolving search strategies and access issues. So don't wait until PubMed is disrupted. Hopefully it won't be. Pragmatists aren't pessimists, but I do suggest you start exploring alternative research tools today.
Conclusion and Call to Action
And if you have a go to resource that I haven't mentioned, I'd love to hear from you.
Connect with me on LinkedIn to share your strategies or send me a voice note via the podcast website. I'll include links in the show notes.
And talking of websites, WriteCME Pro's landing page just got a makeover. We've redesigned our landing page to make it even easier to explore how WriteCME Pro can help you grow your CME writing business.
Check it out at alexhowson.com/write-cme-pro, P R O.
What are your go to backup resources for medical literature searches? Drop me a message or connect with me on LinkedIn. Until next time, keep writing, keep learning and keep making an impact.
