Is Issn Available When Looking At A Medline Entry Using Bioruby?

Question

[Andrewjgrimm]

Is the ISSN of a journal article's publisher available via Bio::Medline?

Answer 1

[Neilfws]

It is there, but it's not as easy to access as it might be. Some sample code:

require 'rubygems'
require 'bio'

# a sample query
entry = Bio::PubMed.query(21281468)
# convert to Medline object
med = Bio::MEDLINE.new(entry)
# PubMed keys
med.pubmed.keys.sort
# ["AB", "AD", "AID", "AU", "CRDT", "DA", "DEP", "DP", "EDAT", "FAU", "IS",
# "JID", "JT", "LA", "MHDA", "OID", "OWN", "PG", "PHST", "PL", "PMC", "PMID", 
# "PST", "PT", "SB", "SO", "STAT", "TA", "TI", "VI"]

# the JT key
med.pubmed['JT']
# "BMC bioinformatics\n"
# the IS key
med.pubmed['IS']
# "1471-2105 (Electronic)\n1471-2105 (Linking)\n"

So the ISSN for BMC Bioinformatics is 1471-2105, but a little more text parsing is required to isolate it.

Another approach would be to extract the journal title (or another identifier) and use the BioRuby Esearch library to search Entrez Journals, which has ISSN as a key. See this link for a list of Entrez databases and their searchable fields.

[Andrewjgrimm]

Thanks! PS: Are you sure the link's correct?

[Neilfws]

That link is giving me attitude. I'll post a comment when I get it right.

[Neilfws]

OK, link should work now.