If you ever download sequences from Entrez, or open a GenBank formatted sequence file, you will often see PUBMED entries in the Annotations tab with blue colored numeric IDs;
The blue color indicates that this is a link that you can use to retrieve an abstract of the publications. If you double-click on the PUBMED row, MacVector will download the corresponding abstract from the NCBI’s PubMed database;
Note that this does require a double-click on the link. Once downloaded, you can save the publication in rich text format.
You can also directly search the PubMed database for publications using the Database | Internet Entrez Search menu item. e.g. you might set up a search like this;
After clicking search, a list of matching publications is displayed. You can select a row in the result table and click on the To Desk button to open up the abstract as shown above. Double-clicking on a row will do the same thing. Alternatively, select the publication of interest and click on the Details button. This will display a web preview of the article.
In many cases, like this example, the entire article can be retrieved by following the Free PMC Article link (there are a couple of extra clicks to get the document in PDF format);
From here, the easiest way to save the PDF is to right-click on the document and choose the Open in Preview option in the context sensitive menu that appears. From Preview you can save the document in a variety of formats.
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