eTBLAST is a unique search engine for searching biomedical literature. Our service is very different from PubMed. While PubMed searches for "keywords", our search engine lets you input an entire paragraph and returns MEDLINE abstracts that are similar to it. This is something like PubMed's "Related Articles" feature, only better because it runs on your unique set of interests. For example, input the abstract of an unpublished paper or a grant proposal into our engine, and with the touch of a button you'll be able to find every abstract in MEDLINE dealing with your topic. No more guessing whether your set of keywords has found all the right papers. No more sorting through hundreds of papers you don't care about to find the handful you were looking for--our search engine does it for you.

When most people use PubMed to search MEDLINE they pick one or two keywords to describe their topic, then browse through a long list of results. When they find a paper that looks interesting they click on its "Related Articles", in hopes of finding more papers like that one. If they find another relevant paper, they explore it's related articles--and so on. This process of culling long lists of documents by hand makes literature searching tedious and time consuming. We make it easier for you by providing better results the first time, and then allowing you to automatically combine the papers you care about for a second round. Our "Iterate" feature allows you to checkmark the abstracts you found interesting in the first round and combine them all to create a new query. It's like rolling several Related Articles lists into one.

• We sort our results by relevance, while PubMed sorts by date.
• We save you the time and effort of creating a complicated query.
• We let you iterate your search over several good papers to narrow your focus.
• We provide you the full MEDLINE abstract in our results, and a link to the PubMed page.
• We can send your results straight to your email so you never lose a reference or forget where you found it.
• This absolutely free service is provided by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. No registration necessary!

Instructions:

1. Follow the eTBLAST Search link at the top of this page.
2. Type, paste, or upload a paragraph of plain text. (Longer paragraphs get better quality results but take longer to run.)
3. If you would like a copy of your search results emailed to you, you may enter your email address. (Your address will be kept confidential.)
4. Hit the Search button. You will be shown a confirmation page, and that page will contain a link to your results page. Our Medline search generally runs in 2 minutes or less.

News

• New! 2008-10-09 The power of eTBLAST and Deja vu cited in Nature News.
• 2006-09-15 Paper detailing operation of eTBLAST published; James Lewis, Stephan Ossowski, Justin Hicks, Mounir Errami, Harold R. Garner,
  Text similarity: an alternative way to search MEDLINE, Bioinformatics Sep 15, 2006; 22: 2298-2304 and it quickly becomes the second most read paper of the month, see http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/reports/mfr1.dtl
• 2004-05-14 Our etBLAST code has been written up in Science, May 14, 2004 issue. Under NetWatch, see the topic, "TOOLS: Just the Right Words".
  Read the Article in PDF format.