Entries Tagged 'News releases' ↓

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.

There has been quite a surprise yesterday on the world wide web as the redesigned version of Pubmed was released once and for all all of a sudden, like said Stephanie Fulton on twitter. However this was almost a non-surprise as it was taken off almost right away and made Librarian EagleDawg write about it. In fact, it looks like Pubmed expected technical difficulties releasing the redesigned version of its search engine.

Guys,  we would like all of the Pubmed users to know that we -novoseek- are not responsible at all for this and that we did not touch or unplug Pubmed at any moment .

You can click the image to view it in 1280 x 800 pixels and save it to your computer.

If you are a fellow reader of the blog, or more simply have come once in a while to read us, you must be aware that we are not used to talking about our product on the blog.
However today we feel entitled to make an announcement about novo|seek. Indeed, we have just released new features to the system and we feel the need to share them with you. This new features release is called my novo|seek.

Why « my » you’ll ask ? Simply because now, novoseek takes into account what you are doing when you are using the search engine, thanks to your personal account on novoseek.

Sign up and enjoy your personal space on my novo|seek. You shall enjoy some of the functionalities we have developed for you. What are these new functionalities? They are features you have been asking for since novoseek has been launched and since you have been involved in the development of your new biomedical search engine.

As soon as you are subscribed, you will discover these features :

• Search history
• Save searches and create alerts
• Manage labels
• Manage your account

Users are really enthusiasts regarding these new options as they allow them to go beyond regular searching and make their daily tasks much nicer. Let’s step into each of them to know more about their functionality and their use.

• Search history : no matter what you look for in novoseek, your searches will be marked there. Should you need to retrieve that search where you read that paper, just look for it in your search history.
• Saved searches & alerts : once you are satisfied with a research, you can chose to save it simply by clicking the « save search & create alert » link. Chose the name for saving this search and you are done. Additionnaly, you can set up an alert for this search. Why is this great ? because the alert will let you know when new articles are released in that field.
• My labels : another great option that will allow you to organize one or several set of documents. Imagine that you are working on that research you must prepare for Dr Bradley. Well, you just have to tick the documents you want and apply them the desired label by clicking on « label » and chose one of create a new one.

These are not the only new functionalities you can now enjoy as now you can export citations in the *.RIS format or select articles by publication type.

Signing up is as simple as these 3 steps:

Now, if you want to discover my novo|seek through a tutorial video, watch below:

The idea for this post came to me while I was conversing with a relative. She is a medical resident and informed me that she had to start using Pubmed overnight and happened to find it a bit complicated. Consequently, I could confirm that Pubmed is pretty hard for novices to use and took advantage of the opportunity to pitch novoseek to her. Should I remind you that novoseek is a free, easy and intuitive biomedical search engine? Anyway, this discussion with my relative reminded me that some time ago, I heard (thanks to fellow followers present on the MLA in Hawaï) that Pubmed was about to enhance its interface this summer.

This announcement is actually big news for the life sciences community as Pubmed, the search engine of the National Institute of Health, is one of the most used among the choices offered on the web today. Due to the amount of queries it has every day, improving the user experience was something normal and expected. Alisha Miles (a medical librarian for a non-profit hospital in Georgia) declared: “these all sound like wonderful improvements. Hopefully, we will get to a point where we can provide input to NLM before some changes are rolled out“.

Interestingly, these changes aim to make it “easier to use“, will “simplify the interface” and “refresh the look” and offer “better organized text on screen“. It is interesting that Pubmed is moving towards a simpler user interface, as novoseek has been doing this from the beginning.

If you are not familiar with Pubmed, let’s have a look at the screenshot below in order to realize how the layout organized currently.

We acknowledge that a change -as slight as it can be- was necessary. Indeed, Pubmed is difficult to use. It requires learning, training and improving skill to handle it properly. This is why there are many resources (Check this for instance: 18 ways to improve your pubmed searches) and classes about it. The changes will be the following:

1. The tabs will disappear
2. A narrower top banner
3. Combination of Abstract and Abstract +
4. “+” below each citation
5. “Send to” option a lot more visible
6. The right column will be wider and occupies almost 25% of the screen. It will show: the related articles, “Also try” option and recent activity

If you want to have a sneak preview of what it’ll look like you can check directly on David Gillikin’s presentation, although the images are not optimized for viewing on purpose. To make a long story short: Pubmed is about to go a bit more social and current.

Obviously, I have to compare these changes to novoseek’s features. Pubmed currently has more functions than novoseek. However, novoseek has been developed from the beginning with the goal of making it an easy to use, simple and fast biomedical search engine. Now Pubmed seems to be going that way, too.

In addition, we are adding new functions according to your needs. You can now check your search history, save searches and articles, create alerts and manage labels through my novoseek. These are functions we have developed according to the users’ expectations. Indeed, being close to users through twitter, uservoice make interactions and quick answers to their questions possible. We believe it is one of our strenghts against Pubmed.

Should you need to discover how to use novoseek to the best of its ability, you should have a look at the presentation below:

There was much concern some time ago when the swine flu pandemics began to spread from Mexico to the USA and Europe. Then we somehow got overwhelmed by other information such as the Air France flight crash in the Atlantic or Michael Jackson’s death. Now it seems that the swine flu has come back again (or are the medias putting more emphasis on it?) as everyday more people get infected and die. The WHO (World Health Organization) increased the Pandemic level to Phase 6 -equal to widespread human infection- as shown in image below.

At the same time, a strange phenomenon is going on: the swine flu parties. What’s a swine flu party, you’ll ask? It consists of organizing a party where one of the attendee is someone infected with the Swine Flu virus. Therefore it pretends to help healthy people catch the virus and consequently grow immune against it. This very strange and unexpected practice is growing popular among people as we can read on this article on the Independant where this 15 year old girl states that she would “prefer to get it now, rather than next year which is my final GCSE year, and because apparently it’s going to be the winter version of the disease that will be more dangerous“. Reading this I started to look for further information and happened to be very surprised at people starting to organize parties and looking for infected people. A first look at Facebook (a reference when dealing with organizing a party) left me speechless…

Obviously, this practice is growing popular. People argue that they are used to doing the same with Chicken Pox for their children. But are they? Do people really do that?

Let’s get things straight and explain why I think this is an irresponsible behavior. It is understandable that some of the people think it is better to catch it now before it mutates and become stronger. Nevertheless there are way more risks than benefits to this kind of behavior:

• Nobody knows how will the virus act on every single person. We can’t yet plan its consequences and development so it is very risky. As declared Richard Besser (Head of US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ) “…how an individual person will be impacted by the infection is not something that we know“.
• We shouldn’t forget that once someone is infected, he’s likely to infect more people. Among them, some may be weaker: children, elderly people, pregnant women, with health condisions, etc and be seriously injured by the virus.
• …

For more information on the spread of influenza virus, have a look at this study “Modeling the Worldwide Spread of Pandemic Influenza: Baseline Case and Containment Interventions“.

Now I’m asking you: Would you go to one of them?