Extension:PubmedParser

What can this extension do?
This extension provides a parser keyword (#PMID) to fetch article information by unique ID from the Pubmed database. It outputs the article information formatted as Wiki markup for a template. The template can be defined inside the Wiki and adjusted as needed.

Compared with the other, very useful extension Pubmed, this extension can be fully configured using Wiki messages (see the special page "Sytem Messages" in your wiki). It does not require editing configuration files on the server.

PubmedParser fetches information on a single article at a time only. If you would like to generate lists of article, please have a look at the Pubmed extension.

If the Cite extension is installed, you can add an additional parameter to the #PMID keyword, and PubmedParser will generate a   structure for you. This makes it extremely easy to insert reusably references into your Wiki page.

Usage
To retrieve the article with PMID 19782018, insert the following into your page:

This will produce the following output:

If the template "pubmed" exists in your wiki, you will never get to see the output in this way, because it will be replaced with the output of your template.

Notes:
 * The template "pubmed" must exist in your wiki; otherwise, "Template:pubmed" will be inserted in red into your displayed page (click on the red link to create the template).
 * You can fully customize the names of the template itself as well as the names of the parameters of the template (see below)).
 * Your template does not need to use all parameters; unused parameters will be discarded.
 * authors is an abbreviated list of the author names; use allauthors if you need all of the names.
 * journal is the full journal name as stored in Pubmed; use journala to get the ISO abbreviation.

Thus, if your template looks like this:

You will get this:

Alon: How to choose a good scientific problem. ''Mol. Cell.'' 2009;35:726-8.

Adding tags automatically
You may add an additional parameter to the #PMID call to make the PubmedParser automatically insert   tags. The Cite extension will use these tags to build your bibliography. To reuse the reference, simply insert  .

Example:

This will produce the following output:

Since this output is immediately parsed again by MediaWiki, you will never get to see it this way; instead, you will see the footnote generated by the Cite extension, which contains whatever output your template "pubmed" produces from this.

Customization
You can customize the name of the template as well as the names of the parameters by editing the system messages of your wiki: Go to Special:AllMessages and search for "pubmedparser".

Download instructions
Download the archive and extract it in.

Note: $IP stands for the root directory of your MediaWiki installation, the same directory that holds LocalSettings.php.

Installation
To install this extension, add the following to LocalSettings.php:

Configuration parameters
There is one configuration variable that you may want to adjust to your needs:

If this path exists and is writable for the web server, PubmedParser will locally store the XML data of the articles in this path. This accelerates retrieval of article information when a page is edited. Note that viewing of a page (rather than editing it) does not trigger information retrieval from Pubmed, as the information for unchanged Wiki pages is cached by the MediaWiki software regardless of this setting.

Code
Source code is available as a Git repository and can be browsed at sf.net/p/pubmedparser/code.