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Importing RSS feeds from PubMed into Drupal

CEO, Co-Founder
Dec 09, 2008

In this demo videocast I explain how articles from PubMed can be integrated in a Drupal site. First I focus on the end-user perspective (e.g. adding RSS feeds for specific PubMed queries). Afterwards I talk about how you can implement this on your own website. This solution can be useful for scientists with a blog or research groups in the medical/biotechnological field that want to give easy access to some of their publications. It could also be the basis for an intranet where you want track and share comments on new developments in specific medical fields. I imagine that you could configure the site with automatic notifications when new content is aggregated and for public sites require the user to approve any new content. The contrib Drupal modules I use are FeedAPI and the feed element mapper, 2 modules developed by DevelopmentSEED. I'm also of course using CCK and Views, to make the content types and the lists. In the demo I'm using a PubMed feed for Myers PZ, who is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. His blog, pharyngula was number one of the top 50 popular science blogs in 2006 at nature.com. I made this mash-up as part of the research for the PubMed module that I talked earlier about on this blog. Since then I found a student, who participates in the Drupal class which we help organize at the University of Szeged (and not a thesis student as I mention in the screencast). This mash-up proves the feasibility of the aggregation of content from PubMed with existing Drupal modules. It also however uncovers a couple of drawbacks to this set up (e.g. manual feed creation, problems to capture the data in a structured way with existing parsers).

Kristof Van Tomme is an open source strategist and architect. He is the CEO and co-founder of Pronovix. He’s got a degree in bioengineering and is a regular speaker at conferences in the API, developer relations, and technical writing communities. He is the host of the Developer Success & the Business of APIs and the API Resilience podcasts.

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