Problem and solution in manually adding PubMed pubs to a Profile

[Meeks, Eric]

Hopefully this hasn’t happened to anyone else, but just in case…

 

We recently were unable to add PubMed publications to profiles via the UI. After much effort we figured out that the process was failing because of an SSL issue. Our IIS servers were unable to talk HTTPS to the https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov PubMed website. We were able to solve it by using https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ to see what protocols and cipher’s https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov offers, and then IIS Crypto to see what our servers could do as an HTTPS client.  We’ve run into similar issues with other sites recently as everyone is locking down their servers with stronger HTTPS protocols and ciphers.

 

Just something to be aware of.

 

Eric Meeks
My pronouns: he/him/his
CTO, Clinical & Translational Science Institute

University of California, San Francisco
490 Illinois St. 6^th Floor

San Francisco, CA 94158
https://profiles.ucsf.edu/eric.meeks

 

[Brian Zimmel]

Hi Eric,

We had the same issue reported yesterday and I am able to create the issue. How were you able to resolve it on your end?

Our production environment is running Profiles 2.9 on Windows 2012 R2. We're in the process of upgrading to 3.0 and have it on a Dev server running Windows 2019 where we can successfully make the call to PubMed. I am hoping there is a server configuration we can make and not a code change. I tried to disable TLS 1.1 the registry for the OS and .NET Framework but it didn't resolve the issue.

I appreciate any help you or anyone else can offer.

Thank you,

Brian Zimmel

Principal Software Engineer

Information Technology

UMass Medical School

[Meeks, Eric]

With the IIS Crypto tool I could see what ciphers were enabled and not enabled as well as the protocols. We needed the TLS 1.2 protocol, and that was already set up. But our ciphers didn't match. With that tool I was able to just click the checkbox for two of the ciphers that the pubmed website offered that were apparently available on our server but not enabled. The tool then asked me to reboot the server. So i did and after that it worked.

For me that IIS Crypto tool was they key.

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From: profi...@googlegroups.com <profi...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Brian Zimmel <brian...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2021, 9:58 AM
To: ProfilesRNS
Subject: [ProfilesRNS] Re: Problem and solution in manually adding PubMed pubs to a Profile

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[Brian Zimmel]

Eric, can I ask what OS you are running? I see that IIS Crypto tool requires Windows Server 2008. I re-ran the SSL Test against our dev environment after disabling TLS 1.2 and now just have a difference in cipher suites. I'm looking into how to modify that if the IIS Crpyto tool isn't compatible with Win2012R2.

Thank you,

Brian

[Meeks, Eric]

I think we are on that as well. Should work with 2012R2: https://www.nartac.com/Products/IISCrypto

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[Heather Tucker]

Hello,

I am resurrecting this very old thread to ask if anyone is having a similar issue using the edit menu under "selected publications." None of the links work for me under this section while everything else does on our site. Has anyone else encountered this?

Thanks so much,

Heather Tucker

https://kpresearcherprofiles.org/Profiles/search/

[Brown, Nicholas William]

Heather

Was selected publications working correctly previously and has recently stopped working? There was a patch for selected publications a few years ago when the NIH changed the SSL encryption used, and we had to update profiles to allow the newer encryption. If this has never been working, I can dig up the details of that patch for you so that you can confirm that it was applied. If this has stopped working recently, it is unlikely due to that patch so we will have to work on troubleshooting.

Nick

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From: profi...@googlegroups.com <profi...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Heather Tucker <dust...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2026 8:20 PM

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/profilesrns/8a54156f-e3de-415c-8c7b-39a1541a5a7cn%40googlegroups.com.

[Heather]

Hi Nick,

This was working previously and has stopped working. I’m not sure how long this has been going on because our PIs don’t change a whole lot and most Profiles are in set-it-and-forget-it mode.

On May 21, 2026, at 8:30 AM, Brown, Nicholas William <nichola...@hms.harvard.edu> wrote:



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