PubMed
A free database of over 36 million biomedical literature citations maintained by the US National Library of Medicine. PubMed indexes peer-reviewed journal articles and is the primary data source for research activity tracking on PeptideTrace, via the PubMed E-utilities API.
Technical Context
PubMed (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) indexes approximately 36 million citations from approximately 5,200 biomedical journals. It accesses: MEDLINE (NLM's curated database with MeSH indexing), PubMed Central (PMC — full-text open access archive), and additional content (ahead-of-print, in-process citations, non-MEDLINE publisher submissions). PeptideTrace uses PubMed's E-utilities API (eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) — specifically ESearch (search and retrieve record counts) and EFetch (retrieve citation details). The PubMed sync pipeline queries all 185 compounds every 23 hours using quoted exact matching ('CompoundName'[tiab]) to prevent Automatic Term Mapping inflation. Publication counts are stored in compound_research_activity with breakdowns by study type. Important caveat: publication count reflects research interest volume, not evidence quality — a compound may have many publications but limited high-quality clinical evidence.