Publication date incorrectly defaulting to Jan 1 of publication year#513

We’re running a study with an exclusion date in June, and noticed that many of the studies that NK filters as published on or before 6/11/22 actually have a later publication date listed in PubMed (for acceptance, online publication, and print publication, where relevant), but NK just has 01/01/22 listed as the publication date. Syncing with PubMed doesn’t change the date. Is there a way to get the actual publication date loaded into NK other than manually entering it? Most of our studies use the start of the year as a cutoff anyway, so it hasn’t mattered, but for this one we’re updating a previous search that was performed in June, so we need to catch studies that were published later in the year without duplicating studies that were previously reviewed. Thanks!

Hi Erin- Interesting, could you give an example Pubmed ID of this behavior? We use what we assumed is PubMed’s authoritative/singular publication date (what they use in their publication date filter).

Hi Karl, sorry for the delayed reply, got caught up with a couple projects. Spreadsheet with studies that are filtering as “on or before 6/11/22” in NK attached, all the studies have a publication date of 01/01/2022 in NK, but different dates listed in PubMed. All the searches for the nest have a publication date filter (“2022/06/12”[Date - Publication] : “3000”[Date - Publication]) on them, so I think that should match up with what NK is filtering on. Let me know if there’s any other info I can provide, and thanks!

Thanks Erin! Here’s what PubMed offers for the first record in your sheet: https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/efetch.fcgi?db=pubmed&id=35819948&retmode=xml

We use the journal publication date (Journal > JournalIssue > PubDate), which in this case only offers Year precision, 2022. It’s apparent that we’d more appropriately be using the ArticleDate in this case. I believe we didn’t initially use ArticleDate because it wasn’t supplied for all records, and I believe the distinction is only relevant for e-publications. I think we should be using ArticleDate and falling back to journal PubDate only when the article date is absent.

I’m really glad you pointed this out, it’s not something we’ve commonly encountered but could cause subtle inaccuracies. We’ll look into making this improvement within the next 1-2 weeks!

Thanks Karl!

I’ve been playing with this, and based on more data, I think it’s more correct to prefer the ArticleDate in the event that the article is published as part of an eCollection. In all other instances, we’ll prefer the journal issue publication date. I’m pretty certain that this mimics how the PubMed search interface works. Even then, PubMed offers up only the journal issue publication date when you export records to nbib files.

So, this is turning into a somewhat ambiguous problem. I’m going to chew on it for a while before deciding solution!

Resolved in release 1.66.2- thanks for pointing out this inconsistency Erin, these types of bugs are insidious!