Adding PubMed search capabilities to Safari
Safari will by default search Google when you type a query in the search box located in the top right of the browser window.
David Watanbe released a great add-on for Safari named Inquisitor, which lets you perform a spotlight-like search in the built-in search box. The program also lets you specify links to additional search engines at the bottom of the results list and assign a keyboard shortcut to each engine of choice.
Since I have to pull up journal articles up at work quite often, I thought it would be useful to add PubMed to the list of additional engines. PubMed isn’t built in to Inquisitor’s list, so I made one from scratch. Here is the code if you are interested:
Site Name: PubMed
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed&term=%@
Shortcut: ^ return
You can also customize the PubMed search a little bit further by adding university support to the query. As a grad student here at the U of M, I like to be able to pull up SFX (U of M library) results directly in PubMed. This can be accomplished by adding “otool=umichlib” to the search query.
The U of M modified PubMed search string looks like this:
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed
&otool=umichlib&term=%@
I have found that I use this searching method almost exclusively now and only travel to the PubMed front page when I need to refine the search to reviews or a specific date period.