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Python - List counts for InfoSeeking studies in PubMed, by audience

For creators of human-centered health and medicine information products

Task: Let's say you are creating a new web resource for a particular audience, such as "caregivers." What do you know about the information needs, information seeking, and information use behaviors of this audience? The more you know, the more effective your communication will be. Much has been published.

If you are a subject-matter expert, product manager, public affairs staff member, etc. in a medicine- or health-related discipline, having this type of ongoing connection to audience research can improve your effectiveness.

This script searches all terms in the top three levels of the Persons branch of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) tree, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/68009272. In the levels below the third, some terms will be included here and others will not be. You can edit the list of what is checked. Terms retrieving zero results are not included in the report.

Sample report output, HTML and screenshot

Number of studies by audience type.

Preview the HTML report: http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/wendlingd/Browse-InfoSeeking-PubMed/blob/master/InfoSeekingStudies.html

Screenshot:

Details

Through this basic Python script, the Persons branch of the MeSH tree becomes a useful tool for accessing research by individual audience types. The script provides a standing count of studies for each named audience, that you can retrieve from pubmed.gov.

Run this bibliometric report periodically so you and your staff can have an uncomplicated foothold into this type of research.

The script's output is an HTML file with hyperlinks to pubmed.gov, for each Persons term that retrieves PubMed records added within the past 6 years. Because the script only retrieves records assigned subject headings (MeSH), the newest, unindexed records will not be retrieved.

MeSH changes; you may want to update the csv file here to match the pages starting from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/68009272. Most yearly updates are done in the fall; more info: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/policy/yep_background.html.

Requirements

BioPython package, http://biopython.org/DIST/docs/tutorial/Tutorial.html

The email address from a MyNCBI account must be used to communicate with the server; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3842/