At CCC, we regularly hear from life science companies looking to get more out of their literature search efforts, especially those using PubMed as a foundational tool. These organizations want faster access to high-quality insights, more comprehensive coverage of biomedical content, and smarter search tools that reduce noise and increase relevance.
The Power of PubMed
PubMed is one of the most widely used free resources for biomedical literature. Maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, it provides access to more than 35 million citations from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed users can conduct:
- Basic Searches: By typing keywords or phrases related to their topic, refining with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), or filtering by fields like author or journal.
- Advanced Searches: With field-specific queries, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) vocabulary, and history tracking to build complex search strings.
- Clinical Queries: Which narrow results based on study types or clinical relevance.
For many researchers, PubMed is effective, but not without limitations. While 35 million is a lot of citations, it’s not all, and researchers may still need to visit multiple places to run searches. There are also search tools out there built for life science companies that might be worth exploring if you are looking for ways to supplement your PubMed searches.
Expanding Scientific Discovery with RightFind Navigate
The best database for biomedical research depends on your specific scenario. In many ways, RightFind Navigate is a search tool like PubMed, built to help knowledge workers at life science companies find content. At its core, it includes the entire PubMed citation database, and it can also integrate with more biomedical databases and resources while layering on powerful features designed for researchers in pharmaceuticals, biotech, medical devices, and related fields.
Unified, Multisource, Personalized Search
Instead of switching between interfaces, users can search once across integrated sources, saving time and increasing the chances of uncovering key findings. RightFind Navigate searches across multiple types of content including scientific articles, clinical trials, grants, preprints, patents, and more. Using an open integration framework to bring together licensed third party data sources with internal proprietary information and publicly available resources such as ChemRxiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, ChEMBL Compounds, Europe PMC, Drugs@FDA, NIH Clinical Trials, NIH RePORTER, PubChem Bioassays, Compounds and Substances, PubMed and the option to integrate with more than 40 additional 3rd party licensed data sources.
RightFind Navigate uses machine learning for personalized content recommendations so the content surfaced is based on what’s been most relevant in the past, helping reduce irrelevant results and speeding up the discovery process. This means the search function gets smarter over time.
Precision Through Semantic Search
PubMed relies on MeSH terms, which RightFind Navigate also supports, but RightFind Navigate goes a step further by integrating SciBite’s VOCabs, an ontology-driven approach using over 20 million biomedical synonyms. SciBite’s core VOCab pack in RightFind Navigate provides a great entry point for adding ontologies and semantic search across a broad range of biological concepts. The extensive synonym support and contextualization means that search accuracy and retrieval are dramatically improved compared to keyword search, enabling users to locate relevant data beyond just the specific words searched.
Researchers don’t need to be an ontology expert to leverage public, licensed and custom vocabularies in RightFind Navigate. Automatic Query Expansion can be enabled to expand search for semantically enriched results, visualizations and insights. Whether you’re identifying biomarkers, tracking compounds, or comparing therapeutic areas, researchers using Automatic Query Expansion have flexible prioritization of overlapping vocabularies, making it quicker and easier to find what you didn’t even know you were looking for.
Natural Language Search (Beta)
With search habits rapidly evolving and changing, there is a growing need to make search even more accessible. To accommodate search accessibility, another option in RightFind Navigate is a natural language interface that allows users to ask questions in a conversational style to define concepts, identify relationships, and get overviews of topics of focus. The conversational context enables follow-up questions based on previous answers, a full list of search results based on the query so users can see the sources for the answers the system produces, and a key integration with RightFind Navigate core features like “add to library” and “get content” from RightFind to obtain the full text.
CCC has been an industry leader in the discussions about genAI and copyrighted materials, having introduced licensing for internal AI usage. Our approach to introducing AI-enabled features keeps these responsibilities top of mind, with a beta Chat Mode that facilitates copyright compliance through integrated collective licensing and the transparency of linked source materials, speeding the time to discovery while recognizing responsible AI practices. RightFind Navigate bridges the gap between traditional search and GenAI-powered discovery—while staying grounded in trustworthy, licensed data.
PubMed and Navigate: Better Together
For life sciences companies, PubMed is a starting point—and an essential part of a larger research ecosystem. Building upon the key benefits of PubMed, Navigate brings that broader research ecosystem together with aggregated search for known items, keywords or natural language layered with machine learning and semantic ontologies to facilitate deeper discovery.