A blog about information technologies in the biomedical sector

The second of February of 2009 we did our official announcement of novoseek. Now we are a year older. We have learned a lot along the way from our users, partners and competitors. We have gone through some difficult and some really exciting moments. We continue to develop our system in order to give our users an alternative to PubMed that is easier to use and with which you can get relevant results faster.

New challenges are coming up this year. We are anxious to show the new features  that novoseek is going to offer which most of you will love while others will just think “why didn’t I came up with that idea”

Stay tuned and don’t miss this image that represent a few of the things we have been doing this pass year. We hope you like it.

Thank you.!

novoseek, the first year

This user case is inspired by a search tutorial for Pubmed (see page 61) brought to our knowledge by María, Medical Librarian from Torrevieja Hospital (Spain). We found it interesting to show how novoseek provides results as satisfactory as Pubmed in a simple and quick way.

1. We first search for « tamiflu » in novoseek.There are 840 results in pubmed and 144 in free full text to date.
   
2. Looking in the search details we notice that our search has been mapped to pharmacological substance « tamiflu ».
   Clicking on the the term tamiflu pops up a window with complementary information. This is handy to know the synonyms (alternative names) to Tamiflu : Oseltamivir phosphate , GS 4104 are some of them.

3. We need to look for influenza disease to keep building our search.Obviously, it should appear in the first relevant related concepts to the previous search. Indeed, it is the first related disease to the search Tamiflu. Clicking on it will add it directly to the current search (alternatively you can click on the « i » icon and click on « add filter » as shown on image). The search is now refined and we have gone from 840 results to 639 results in Pubmed.
   
   
   In this case, we are looking for Meta-Analysis publications. In science, “meta-analysis does more than just combine the effect sizes of a set of studies. It can test if the studies’ outcomes show more variation than the variation that is expected because of sampling different research participants” as explained in the Wikipedia. This should help us find publications showing the efficiency of Tamiflu to diminish the percentage of secondary complications.
4. We now need to select the publication type (or type or article).We click on the « bibliographics tab » and where publication type is, we click on the « more » button. Where « Meta Analysis » appears, we click on that term which is directly added to the current search. We now have gone from 639 results to 9 results in Pubmed.
   
   
5. The results are very satisfactory as they contain the same publications as in Pubmed. Should we need to look specifically for publication mentioning children, look for the filter “Homo Sapiens” in the related concepts tab on the left and add it to your search. We now have 5 results in Pubmed.
   • Check more User cases.
   • Check more Tips.


We can compare now these results to Pubmed’s and we notice that we have the 3 publications found in Pubmed in novoseek results. The advantage with novoseek is that we have performed a complex search in a simple way and in no time.

We are glad to announce the launch of the biomedical gadgets working thanks to the novoseek’s API. The use of the biomedical gadgets is open to everyone and free. You can get your API Key today and start using the gadgets to extract relevant biomedical information from novoseek and to create biomedical gadgets. In order to create biomedical gadgets, you just have to follow a few steps to publish it on your website or blog.

Gadgets will allow you to publish biomedical information where you want. Gadgets can be published on your blog, website…(where scripts are accepted) and will alllow you to easily extract information from the literature according to your query. With the gadgets you will:

• Enrich your content
• Integrate valuable data
• Display more information
• And no need to know about programming.

There are at this time 2 types of gadgets:

• The Key Concept Gadget allowing you to display the information related to any biomedical concept.
• The Document Gadget allowing you to display the most recent documents related to your search.

Through an intuitive interface, you will create handy gadgets in a few seconds and will be able to publish a gadget where you need it and modifying it as many time as you want. You are also able to create multiple different gadgets.

Let’s have a look at the possibilities brought by the gadgets with a few examples:

• Insert a Document gadget on your Diabetes blog sidebar to keep readers updated on the most recent scientific publications.

Example: 10 latest publications for Diabetes.

• Insert a gadget to show the most relevant disease, pharmacological substances, genes & proteins, chemical substances, organisms, organs & body parts, tissues, biological functions, procedures-techniques, journals, authors -a combination of them or all of them- related to your query.

Example: Tissues, Biological functions and Procedures/techniques related to “chronic granulomatous disease”

• Match the gadget design to your blog’s.

The examples shown previously have a style by default but you can easily change the design colors, width and height during the creation of biomedical gadgets.

Last but not least, we recommend you to watch the tutorial video about the gadgets to see how easy it works.

We’d love to hear from you and know how you are using the gadgets, so feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.

Filter the results of a biomedical search by publication type is something users are really looking forward to finding on novoseek (as this request on uservoice shows, for example).

This inaugural post for tips pretends to help you improve searches in novoseek and especifically describes how to select the publication(s) type(s) you need to read for your search, step by step.

1. Perform a search in novoseek

In this example, we have searched weight loss and we have the following: 72,877 results.


2. Click on the Bibliographics tab at the top of the left sidebar

Clicking on the Bibliographics tab displays the relevant Authors, Journals and Publication Type to your search. Currently, there are 72,877 results for this search.


3. Look for Publication Type at the bottom of list

When you are there, we recommend to click on the more button to display the whole listing of publication types. In that case, we need to read the Review-related articles to weight loss. It’s the 6th concept in the Publication Type’s.


4. Click on the Publication Type you need to read for your search

Clicking on Review will automatically add it to your current search and display results for weight loss in the intended publication type. Here, we went from 72,877 results for weight loss search to 8,217 for weight loss review articles.


5. Modify your search to your needs

You can modify your search quickly and efficiently. If you want to go back to the results for weight loss, just click on remove next to “review”, click on the Bibliographics tab again and select the intended Publication Type.

We are aware that being able to filter by Publication Type is a key feature. We are working on making it easier for you to find it and perform quicker and more efficient searches. We are open to your suggestions in terms of tips needed in order to help you improve your searches so feel free to comment below.

Pablo and all the team from novoseek wish you the best for 2010 with the video below . We hope that watching it will delight you as much as preparing, filming and broadcasting did to us. Enjoy!