[Biopython-dev] Fwd: Online access, Bio.PubMed & Bio.GenBank vs Bio.Entrez

[Peter]

I'm trying sending this again as there seems to have been a glitch on
the mailing list...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter
Date: Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 5:35 PM
Subject: Re: Online access, Bio.PubMed & Bio.GenBank vs Bio.Entrez
To: BioPython-Dev Mailing List <biopython-dev at biopython.org>


On the topic of ESearch and date restrictions, I wrote:
> ... in my testing of the date restriction arguments (reldate,
> mindate and maxdate) the URL was constructed correctly, but the
> searches returned no hits.  Indeed, there is a comment in the
> Bio.PubMed source code (revision 1.4, Jeff Chang in 2003):
>
>    XXX The date parameters don't seem to be working with NCBI's
>    script.  Please let me know if you can get it to work.
>
> It looks like I'm not the only one to to find this (I was using the
> nucleotide database instead of pubmed).

There is some interesting information on the BioPerl wiki related to this:
http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/HOWTO:EUtilities_Cookbook

>> Set the -reldate parameter to the number of days prior to today's
>>  date. As a note, for some reason NCBI has dropped the EDAT
>> field for the nucleotide and protein databases (which is the default
>> date type when using -reldate); in this case use the -datetype flag
>> to MDAT (modification date) or PDAT (publication date, or the date
>> added to the database).

Hopefully I'll remember to try this with Bio.Entrez and, if it works,
update our documentation accordingly.

Peter