Authoratory.com is an interesting site for finding authors, or, as they spin it, experts on a particular subject area. It mines the PubMed database and uses algorithms to analyze the author information. By doing searches you can find out how often someone is a first or second author, what funding they might have received and their publishing history. From what I can make out it only goes back to 2000…so from a historic perspective its not going to give you a very good background on a particular persons history, but then 5 years is an eternity in medicine so maybe that doesn’t matter.
I guess if you are looking for an expert in a particular area then it might be of use, although I’ve played around with it a little and I’m not sure it makes the job of finding experts any easier, after all if people write more papers on an area it doesn’t mean they are necessarily an expert right? They just have more time on their hands and work for an institution that allows you to publish your work. Also I’m not sure how it deals with the old issue of people with the same name. 
When I am asked to find experts I usually look at review articles and find experts that way - I figure if someone has time to write a review that is peer reviewed in a journal then they must be reasonably knowledgeable in that area. I also check conference speakers using the same logic.
Anyway, if you are a scientist and/or author you may have some fun checking yourself out on this site and seeing what information they have mined on you.
Categories: Authors · PubMed · Searching
Fairly new to Google is the Google Book search. If like me you’ve taken only a quick look at it you may have only gotten mediocre results. Now I know a little more about it and what you can get so let me fill you in…
The books are scanned/uploaded from two main sources - associated publishers and libraries. Publishers provide the text of their recent in print books and Google has been scanning the libraries of major institutions such as Princeton and Harvard.
But what can you actually get? Well it’s all down to copyright. Here’s what I’ve learnt:
Pre-1923 - Copyright is not applicable and therefore full text is available and searchable e.g. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
1923-Books in Print -The copyright situation is unclear and therefore only snippets are available e.g. What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger
Books in Print - Generally the publisher will allow a “limited preview” and you can look at 20% of the book. Random pages are posted - so you cant search the whole book but you can search the pages that are posted. e.g. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
So, now that I know a little more about this project I have to say I am pretty impressed. I don’t often have to search in books but its good to know that this resource is available.
Categories: Books · Google · Search Engines · Searching
I’ve just returned from a conference where I’ve learnt lots of cool tips and tricks re searching Google. I’ll outline them here as I remember them and go through my notes but for starters let me introduce the tilda ~. If you put the tilda before a word on Google then you will retrieve synonyms. I’ve tried it out and it works pretty well for regular English - it doesn’t seem to work on scientific terms yet though - which is a problem that we in the scientific community so often face.
As an example here I typed in ~phone and retrieved the following
Categories: Google · Search Engines · Searching
I was recently in New York and got to see the Bodies Exhibition which is touring the US right now. For those of you that don’t know its an exhibit featuring preserved, dissected, bodies. They are preserved by a method known as polymer preservation whereby the tissues become saturated with polymer resin so that they look like plastic.
There is a lot of controversy about this, and similar exhibitions, regarding where the bodies come from. They are from China and dissected at the Dalian Medial University, however it is believed that some maybe executed prisoners used without informed consent, which is of-course unethical and against Chinese law.
Regardless of what you think though it was a fantastic exhibit to see. As a biologist who is no stranger to what body parts look like, seeing the whole body with organs in situ was something else. My only complaint is that I wish that there had been more educational background material posted alongside the bodies.My favorite section was the cardiovascular section where the whole system was injected with polymer and then the tissues dissected away - truly a site to behold. Also of interest was the reproductive section with fetuses of various sizes and even a female body with a fetus inside.
So, if you get a chance to see the exhibit I highly recommend that you go.
Categories: Anatomy · Bodies exhibition
