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Literature Searching

What is LitSense?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/litsense

LitSense searches over a half billion statements from both PubMed and PubMed Central at the sentence level, allowing you to type in questions as sentences.  Given a query, LitSense finds the best-matching sentences based on overlapping terms as well as semantic similarity via a cutting-edge neural embedding approach.

Searching Features:

  • Free and open to all users.
  • Has a user friendly interface.  
  • Can simultaneously search both PubMed and PubMed Central (30+ million citations).
  • Results can be filtered by either Publication Year or Article Section (Methods, Results, etc.).
  • LitSense only displays sentences that share at least 60% of similar terms with the query sentence.  Long query sentences will often return no results.
  • To make some part of your query mandatory, surround it by double quotes. For example, for the query "measles outbreak" vaccination only documents containing "measles outbreak" will be shown.
  • Matching terms are highlighted in bold.
  • A colored vertical line represents the degree to which the returned sentence is similar to the user query, from orange (high) to green (moderate) to blue (low).  score colors legend