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Back in 2012 I published a couple of papers in my not-to-be PhD and, very occasionally, I do a quick google search to see how they're being used (although I often can't now access the citing articles or much detail). On this particular occasion, I noticed something quite cool - the very first search result for "artemisinin pilkington" was this. This is very surprising for me; I have two papers, this one (cited 12 times) and another (cited over 200 times). This paper was never the first result of my search before.

In the grand scheme of things, I think this paper was far more impactful; basically all papers that looked at analysing artemisinin (a key anti-malarial drug) concentrations in plant extracts just stated that "the sample was reconstituted" in some other solvent for analysis. My paper shows that just saying "reconstituted" in the methodology would make quantitative analysis both unreproducible and unreliable across the literature without standardisation. I really wanted this to set a new bar for detailing the reconstitution methodology.

Does this new catapult in the SEO to make it the first search result, and the fact that it's associated with the NIH, actually mean anything? Is it just a case of time for it to be absorbed into their repository or does it mean that it has gained some kind of status/endorsement towards my original goal?

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    No, NIH indexes all kinds of papers. Which, while nice, is not any indication of quality or accuracy. (No aspersions on your papers, just that they don’t review them or endorse them.)
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Apr 17 at 18:00
  • No aspersions taken! I just wasn't sure how else to search for the answer here. Thank you :) Feel free to post as an answer
    – roganjosh
    Commented Apr 17 at 18:02
  • This is a popular misconception; at least, at some of our other SE sites like Biology.SE, MedicalSciences.SE, Psychology.SE, we get any number of questions starting with the motivation that "The US NIH says (X)", where (X) is some crank theory published in some dodgy journal that just happens to be indexed in PubMed and has absolutely no actual scientific support and has certainly not been supported by the actual US NIH. It's slightly more meaningful than "Google the company claims that (thing that I found via Google search)" but not much.
    – Bryan Krause ♦
    Commented Apr 17 at 18:06
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    I'm not understanding, though, why you think it would be interesting or unexpected for a paper to show up high in search results when you include the name of one of the authors plus an item in the title. I don't know why anyone would use those search terms unless they were already aware of the paper they were looking for.
    – Bryan Krause ♦
    Commented Apr 17 at 18:10
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    Are you searching in Incognito mode? By default, Google uses other information it has to try to deliver the search results most relevant to you. So, first result for you isn't necessarily first for anyone else. Incognito mode does not use that other outside information about you to inform the search.
    – Bryan Krause ♦
    Commented Apr 17 at 18:18

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The NIH offers Pubmed: "PubMed® comprises more than 36 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites." More info in the About section.

It has been available since 1996 as an open resource for literature searches. The NIH does not endorse or review the entries, just makes them available.

Searching for myself on Pubmed results in several papers, none of which I consider to fall under the medical field in any way, shape, or form (the first one listed is on point defects in amorphous silicon for example). This is noted to emphasize that the focus of Pubmed is to make citations available broadly, not pick and choose.

Now, just why Google prioritizes the Pubmed listing is, well, a mystery to us mere mortals. But one reason could well be the traffic to Pubmed is pretty high, much like why StackExchange questions get bumped up in the listings. All part of some algorithm.

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  • The title of the question asks about the meaning of the NIH listing, but the body asks about the meaning of Google picking it up as the first result. I think you are only answering the first part.
    – Cheery
    Commented Apr 17 at 18:15
  • @Cheery - fair enough, added a bit at the end.
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Apr 17 at 18:18

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