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Biotech / Medical : Biotech Information sources -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Icebrg who wrote (5)	6/8/2003 6:08:17 AM
From: Icebrg	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 269

PubCrawler - an Update Alerting Service for PubMed and GenBank pubcrawler.gen.tcd.ie A major source of information for anyone interested in the scientific foundations of the work done at biotech companies is PubMed. PubMed, available via the NCBI Entrez retrieval system, was developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Entrez is the text-based search and retrieval system used at NCBI for all major databases including PubMed, Nucleotide, and Protein Sequences, Protein Structures, Complete Genomes, Taxonomy, OMIM, and many others. PubMed was designed to provide access to citations from biomedical literature. LinkOut provides access to full-text articles at journal Web sites and other related Web resources. PubMed also provides access and links to the other Entrez molecular biology databases. PubMed is very useful when a specific subject is researched - less so when one would like to be kept uptodate on a subject over a longer period of time. Unless one is prepared to visit the site regularly and do the relevant search(es). There are a couple of possibilities to automate this task. One of them is the Irish PubCrawler service. The PubCrawler is a "webrobot" which at chosen intervals will trawl the Pubmed database in search for new items on subjects of interest to the subscriber. The results may either be presented as a webpage or sent to a mailbox as an email containing relevant links to new items. I have tested the system for a couple of weeks. More in order to get a feeling for how it works than in support of serious research. (Not that I am attempting to do any serious research, but still). I have found the PubCrawler service quite useful. The entry I just posted to the Elan board: 1: Doggrell SA. Links [] Is natalizumab a breakthrough in the treatment of multiple sclerosis? Expert Opin Pharmacother. 2003 Jun;4(6):999-1001. PMID: 12783595 [PubMed - in process] was the result of a PubCrawler hit. I would under "normal circumstances" not have been alerted to the existence of this article (unless someone else had found it and posted the information). The user interface and reports generated by the system are somewhat geeky. I suppose that should be expected from a search engine with an academic origin. But it is very flexible and packs a lot of power. One advantage using PubCrawler compared with other search services is that PubCrawler actually manages to keep track of what information that has already been presented. So, there is little risk that the same boring abstracts will have to be viewed more than once. That makes it easier to find the pearls. (The email will actually only give the title, the authors and the name of the publication as well as a link to the abstract) One nice feature is the possibility to search on company names. This will make it possible to find new research sponsored by a favorite biotech company (regardless of the subject of the research in question). I believe PubCrawler could be useful for anyone trying to remain current on certain subjects or areas of interest. The time saved by automating the search service will of course be more than lost reading abstracts that otherwise would have passed unnoticed. Erik