PubCrawler

October 19, 2009 – 2:40 pm

PubCrawler is a free “alerting” service that searches the NCBI PubMed (Medline) and Entrez (GenBank) databases daily using search parameters (keywords, author names, etc.) specified by the user. PubCrawler was developed by Karsten Hokamp and Ken Wolfe in the Department of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. The public web service has been in use since March 1999. There is no limit on the number of searches that can be carried out.  Previous search hits are stored and only the newest PubMed or GenBank records are shown each day.  The results are presented as an HTML Web page, similar to the results of an NCBI PubMed or Entrez query.  This Web page can be located on our computer (the PubCrawler WWW-Service), on your computer (the stand-alone program), or you can receive it via e-mail (set this up using the PubCrawler WWW-Service). The Web page sorts the results into groups of PubMed/GenBank entries that are zero-days-old, 1-day-old, 2-days-old, etc., up to a user-specified age limit.