Is there a reason why PubMed/MEDLINE extracted list elements are joined with ";" instead of keeping them as lists ?

[jtourille]

First, thank you for your tool, it is very very useful.

I was wondering why there is a difference in the processing of list elements according to the parser used. For instance:

• parse_pubmed_xml returns list of strings (e.g. for author_list and affiliation_list)
• parse_medline_xml returns concatenated lists for every list element.

Wouldn't it be more convenient to have a consistent way of handling list elements across parsers ? In that case, I would suggest to store list elements as lists instead of joining them with ;.

Also, I could do the changes if needed.

[titipata]

Hi @jtourille, thanks for the feedback. Yes, I totally agree!

I actually have an input author_list parameter here and here to parse authors as a list output instead of a concatenated string. This may not be the best way and happy to take suggestions from you.

[Michael-E-Rose]

Guess by now the parameter is sufficiently documented.