Linked Discoveries™
is an experimental resource developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) that helps users explore how articles with PubMed® abstracts connect to the surrounding literature. Linked Discoveries creates neighborhoods of related articles, highlights shared conditions, genes, and chemicals across the neighborhood, and surfaces context like NIH funding, citation relationships, retractions, and reviews.
How can I access Linked Discoveries?
When looking at an abstract page in PubMed, you may see a “Linked Discoveries” button along the right-hand column on larger screens or below the title on smaller screens. Please note that this button is only available on abstract pages for articles that represent original research, reviews, and related evidence.
To explore a “neighborhood” of related articles for the PubMed record of interest (the “seed” article), click the Linked Discoveries button. A new browser tab will open and in Linked Discoveries, you will be able to:
- View your article of interest (the “seed”). Your seed article appears as the light blue node labeled “Seed” in the top left corner of the visualization. In the timeline view, a dotted blue line marks the publication year of the seed article.
- View related articles (the “neighborhood”). Each article in the neighborhood is represented by a node labeled with the first author and year of publication. The node color indicates the article type. See the key at the bottom of the visualization to identify article types.
- Filter the neighborhood by shared topics. Filter by condition, gene, or chemical to narrow the neighborhood to articles sharing those topics. You can select one or more topics to filter on and choose whether the neighborhood is narrowed to records tagged with any of the selected topics, or all the selected topics.
- View details for a selected node. By default, details for the seed article are shown in the article information card to the right of the graph or timeline. Click a different node to view its details instead. Filter the graph or timeline by clicking on the name of a specific condition, gene, or chemical on the information card. Click “View in table” to view the neighborhood in a structured table format.
- Build a new neighborhood from one of the nodes. Click “Set as seed article” to generate a new neighborhood from any of the nodes in the current visualization.
How does Linked Discoveries relate to PubMed’s Similar Articles?
Both Linked Discoveries and PubMed Similar Articles identify neighborhoods of related articles, but each is built for a different kind of task and does this in different ways.
Linked Discoveries is a dynamic, interactive tool that lets users explore the research neighborhood itself to surface shared topics such as conditions, genes, and chemicals, along with contextual signals like citation relationships, retractions, and reviews. For more information about Linked Discoveries, please see https://linkeddiscoveries.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/userguide
Where does the data come from?
Linked Discoveries uses data from PubMed, along with related condition, gene, and chemical data linked from other NLM databases like Gene, MedGen, and PubChem®.
How can I learn more?
