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Instructions for Creating a Web Link to the Entrez Databases Revised

Canese K. Instructions for Creating a Web Link to the Entrez Databases Revised. NLM Tech Bull. 2007 May-Jun; (356):e9.

June 26, 2007 [posted]

Last month's announcement about the change to the PubMed URL (New and Improved PubMed®/Entrez and New URL) included a recommendation that links to PubMed be created using the instructions found in Creating a Web Link to the Entrez Databases.

The instructions have been modified to use the new base URL for PubMed, eliminate an extraneous URL parameter, orig_db=database, and provide a simplified format for links with relative date ranges.

To create a link with a relative date range without activating Limits use the following format:

  • term="last X days"[Search Tag]
  • term="last X months"[Search Tag]
  • term="last X years"[Search Tag]

where X is the number of days, months, or years immediately preceding today's date and [Search Tag] is the date search tag:   [dp] or [edat].

For example, the following URL can be used to create a link that retrieves citations on drug resistant tuberculosis with a publication date that falls in the last six months: //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=search&db=pubmed&term=drug+resistant+tuberculosis+AND+"last 6 months"[dp]