Introduction to Meva, a MedLine Postprocessor

Meva (MedLine Evaluator) is a free medico-scientific data mining web service to analyse biblio­graphic Med­Line data. Meva does not act as Med­Line portal, but as post-processor.

How to use Meva? Search in PubMed as usual and save your articles in MedLine format to a local file. Enter file name and biblio­graphic fields of inter­est into Meva. Restrict ana­lysis with filters or minimal fre­quen­cies or to first / last authors. After sub­mission, Meva will return a report.

What will Meva return? Meva condenses the endless list of a Med­Line result by presenting counts, fre­quen­cy distri­butions, contingency tables (relations) and detailed sorted lists of selected bibliographic fields. A hierarchical MeSH tree may be displayed along with term counts and codes. Results can be delivered in HTML or in a delimited format for database imports.

A click on the  red sections  in the flow chart below will lead to the respective documents:

Development reasons. The idea was born in the Institute for Med. Statistics and Epi­demio­logy of the Technical University of Munich. The objective was to facilitate the evaluation of PubMed search results, e.g. "Which colleagues have published about that topic?" "What are the therapeutic approaches for this disease?"

A long article list from PubMed is hard to analyse, field relations are invisible. But this list is more informative than you may think!

First steps. The Result Help will give you a first impression of what a Meva result looks like. The form help will assist you with advanced analysis features. Finally consult Meva on your own.

Additional information. The Field Help tells you more about all field types usable in PubMed and Meva. FAQ, Glossary and History enlighten further aspects of usage, important terms and development of Meva.

Inquiries or comments welcome!