About Pubservatory

Every up-to-date literature database requires maintenance. Errors must be corrected, duplicates removed, and new publications added. For over 150 years, the National Library of Medicine in the USA has been maintaining the PubMed database in this way, ensuring its high quality. Pubservatory makes this work visible and transparent.

What is Pubservatory?

Pubservatory provides weekly insights into the changes made to PubMed, one of the world's most important biomedical literature databases. Our platform visualizes both additions and deletions, giving researchers, librarians, and information professionals a clear view of how PubMed evolves over time.

Understanding Deletions

The vast majority of deletions in PubMed are duplicates. This means the article itself remains in the database—only redundant entries are removed. Deletions typically do not indicate that an article has been permanently removed from PubMed, but rather that duplicate records have been cleaned up to maintain database quality.

*Note: We are working on a new release planned for spring 2026 that will directly identify and mark duplicate deletions, making it easier to understand the nature of each change.

Features

Track additions and deletions on a week-by-week basis
Interactive graphs showing trends in database maintenance over time
Click through from weekly summaries to see individual articles that were added or deleted
View combined data or separate graphs for additions and deletions with optimized scaling
All changes are documented and accessible for analysis

ATTENTION

The detailed data for articles added before September 2024 is available at ZB MED, but cannot be displayed correctly at present. We are working to resolve this and update the website soon.

Connection to OLSPub

Pubservatory is associated with the OLSPub initiative, which aims to create a backup infrastructure for PubMed.

This initiative recognizes PubMed as critical infrastructure for biomedical research and works to ensure that this essential resource can always be maintained and recovered if needed. By making PubMed's maintenance activities transparent, Pubservatory contributes to understanding and monitoring this vital database.

Project Contacts:

Get Involved

We welcome your feedback and suggestions! If you have ideas for improving Pubservatory or would like to report an issue, please contact us through our contact form Contact Us.