A picture is worth a thousand words. At Pubget we’re always talking about all the papers you can read on the site, especially if you’re at an activated institution. (Being “activated” means your school or workplace works with Pubget so we can give you all your journal subscriptions.) Our focus on papers is part of how we make science faster for you.

But clicking through this week’s New England Journal of Medicine—-I have it set as one of my favorite journals, so the latest issue is only ever a click away from the Pubget home page—-reminded me of another cool thing about getting PDFs right away: you get to see the figures right away, too.

Take Images in Clinical Medicine, one of the coolest features of the NEJM. Each week, Images in Clinical Medicine describes a medical finding in pictures, captioned with a paragraph about how the patient presented and what the finding means. These pictures are dramatic, arresting, sometimes shocking. A leg and foot that are mottled pink and yellow due to cholesterol emboli. A threadlike white worm growing in an eye. Blackened, charred-looking fingers due to a blood viscosity problem. These are only a few of the many interesting cases the NEJM has covered in recent years.

Checking out the latest Images in Clinical Medicine was one of our favorite things to do each week back in med school. We would have spent hours just flipping through them, if there had been a way to do that, but there wasn’t. With Pubget, there is. With this one search, you can flip through the last 10 years’ worth of Images in Clinical Medicine (assuming, of course, that you’re at an institution that subscribes to the NEJM). Check it out—-it’s a absolute blast.

Publishers have made great leaps forward with how they display articles online. It’s been especially nice to see how some folks, including PubMedCentral, give you thumbnails of images that you can click to enlarge. But for many of my peers in research and at the hospital, there’s just no substitute for having figures there at full size—-especially for Images in Clinical Medicine—-especially when you’re flipping through the paper for the first time. A lot of us read
papers by first flipping through the figures. Publishers do such a nice job on their print layouts that it’s a shame to miss out on that experience, just because you want the speed associated with getting things online. That’s why we’ve done what we’ve done at Pubget: so you can see the figures, as well as the paper, as fast as possible. Because a picture is worth a thousand words.