Although PubMed is not going to be very helpful when monitoring your product brands, Stanford’s HighWire Press and Google Scholar are useful, and relatively easy to use. Let’s take a closer look at where these two free tools shine and fall short when brand monitoring.
HighWire
The epublishing platform out of Stanford is a great way to perform full-text searches for your brands.
Pros include:
- Easy interface
- Full text search capability
- Provides useful filters and sorting capabilities
- Set up email notifications when your keywords pop in new publications
Cons include:
- Lack of advanced search queries (e.g. negative keywords, proximity associations etc.,)
- Limited to HighWire’s publications. This one is kind of a doozy.
Overall marketers have been tapping into HighWire for years now and it is useful, but leave it to the crosstown giant to bring the experience up a notch.
Google Scholar
The search giant’s mega database of scholarly articles provides some great functionality and another way to monitor your brands in peer review journals.
Pros include:
- Easy interface
- Full text search capability
- Provides useful filters and sorting capabilities
- Set up email notifications when your keywords pop in new publications
- One of the largest public databases of peer review journals available
Cons include:
- Search results are sorted by relevance, which can make it challenging to acquire comprehensive estimates for a total brand footprint
- Can have redundant results (e.g. html and PDF version of same publication)
- Lack of advanced search queries (e.g. negative keywords, proximity associations etc.,)
Overall, these free tools aren’t perfect, but they’re plenty good to get you started monitoring your brands in peer review journals, so get those alerts set up don’t miss the next time your product powers the next big breakthrough.