lh3

To make sure pii is the right tag, I asked PubMed helpdesk how to retrieve "page numbers" for online-only papers without pagination. They replied: ELocationID is used in cases where pagination is not present. and pointed me to the latest pubmed DTD.

Thank you so much! I do agree with you that the current is a weird practice. I didn't realize this mess until now.

If you worry a page number like "eabl4178" may interfere with BibTeX, you may add an option and let users decide whether to use such a string as page numbers. The bottom line is we need page numbers for citation and many papers don't have real page numbers. PS: this problem is not specific to PubMed as many journals, like Science, don't have real page numbers these days.

If you worry a page number like "eabl4178" may interfere with BibTeX, you may add an option and let users decide whether to use such a string as page numbers. The bottom line is we need page numbers for citation and many papers don't have real page numbers these days. PS: this problem is not specific to PubMed as many journals, like Science, don't have real page numbers these days.

If you worry a page number like "eabl4178" may interfere with BibTeX, you may add an option and let users decide whether to use such a string as page numbers. The bottom line is we need page numbers for citation and many papers don't have real page numbers these days.

If you worry a page number like "eabl4178" may interfere with BibTeX, you may add an option and let users decide whether to use such a string as page numbers. The bottom line is we need page numbers for citation.

We need something equivalent to page number to pinpoint a paper in a volume/issue. The current practice unfortunately chooses this identifier. For example, a Nature article cites PMID:35357911 as (without DOI): Altemose, N. et al. Complete genomic and epigenetic maps of human centromeres. Science 376, eabl4178 (2022). eabl4178 is de facto the page number. If you click "cite" on the Science website, the citation format is the basically same (plus DOI). In the PDF of this paper downloaded from Science,...

At least in our field (biomedical research), most online-only journals give you a "page" number like "btae333". There are no actual page numbers. I haven't checked old PubMed XML files because I don't have one. I guess old PubMed put "btae333" in the Pagination element [1] but later they decided that was confusing. Now they put "btae333" at an ELocationID element [2]. It looks like the following now: <elocationid eidtype="pii" validyn="Y">btae333</elocationid> Is it possible to use this as the page...