Importing RSS feeds from PubMed into Drupal
Video:
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).
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I liked your video, and I think that if we can define a Content Type that is more closer to the PubMed definition, then we can keep our solution closer to CCK. Do you think we can build a PubMed definition in CCK from the PubMed XSD? Joe.
Hi Joe,
Kornel, one of our colleagues won a GSoC to make CCK the storage backend for the Biblio module. That will open up the possibility to map PubMed onto a whole bunch of specially developed content types. I haven't looked into it, but it would surprise me if there is no definition in there of a content type that is compatible with PubMed XSD.
Did you consider the Biblio module for storing publication information, rather than nodes with CCK fields?
benjamin, Agaric Design Collective
Hi Benjamin,
Yes I considered it, I in fact have been playing with the biblio module after your comment on the other PubMed post. However because Biblio doesn't use CCK, it also doesn't work with the feed element mapper. So it doesn't work out of the box.
When I checked out the Biblio module issue queue there were some comments about views and CCK integration. Maybe Biblio needs a rewrite in that direction?
The main advantage of having a Biblio module that plays nice with CCK is integration with third party modules, you never know what people will want to do with your module, so it's better to use the (new) community standards and enable mashups. And now that CCK fields will most likely go into core in D7, CCK has even become more the standard.
Probably it would be possible to have 1 CCK type and do some formAPI magic that shows/hides fields depending on the type of resource one chooses.
Then endnote integration could be a separate module that also works with CCK...
Nice tutorial and keep up the good work. I am looking forward to the module.