bioinformatics toolbox: getpubmed.m does not return the expected number of records

I'm running the 'getpubmed.m' script that is found in the bioinformatics toolbox. I'm using examples from the script.

Example1: out = getpubmed('breast+cancer+AND+BRCA1+AND+Clinical+Trial[PT]',...

'NumberOfRecords',20)

According the script maxnum = 50; % NUMBEROFRECORDS default is 50

However, running the above script the number of records returned is nine (9).

Example2: out = getpubmed('OBP+insect',...

'DateOfPublication','2018/1/1[DP]:2021/10/1[DP]');

give the same result (output of 9 records)

Is there a way to tweak with the script and get the requisite number of records. Thanks in advance for any suggestions

Answer 1

[Ive J]

getpubmed (and generally, most of the functions in Bioinformatics toolbox) are quite outdated and TMW for some reasons, does not put any effort in improving/expanding it's functionality.

You can write your own scripts using Eutils API, take a look at examples there.

x = webread('https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?db=pubmed&retmode=json&retmax=20&sort=relevance&term=breast+cancer'); % retmax: max number of IDs to return
x.esearchresult.idlist % returned pumbed Ids

ans = 20×1 cell array
    {'33219915'}
    {'32710374'}
    {'32927238'}
    {'31132476'}
    {'32040723'}
    {'34225090'}
    {'34229127'}
    {'33023825'}
    {'34329948'}
    {'32056079'}
    {'33878598'}
    {'33160147'}
    {'32890963'}
    {'33774461'}
    {'32394414'}
    {'33285381'}
    {'32144736'}
    {'32440959'}
    {'32601800'}
    {'33242753'}

[George]

Thank you Ive. Much appreciated