Google recently introduced the customized search feature. This allows you to basically decide what sites a particular search page is going to search across. You can use to add in particular keywords to every search and/or select which webpages are crawled.
Lets say, for example, that you are interested in kinases. You could choose 20 or so sites that you regularly check out and add them to your kinase customized search engine. Then you, or anyone else who you give the URL to, can search across just those sites.
What’s the advantage – well if you commonly search for a common term and get false drops then limiting what you are searching will help.
Anyway, here’s my attempt at a kinase site…(first pass, probably needs some refinement…)
Kinase search engine
Categories: Google · Search Engines · Searching · kinase
One of the services I provide to clients is citation searching – i.e. identifying papers that cite a paper of interest. This is often in support of Visa applications to prove a person’s scientific credibility.
Over the last few years I’ve come to use Google Scholar more and more over the traditional Science Citation Index. I have to admit that Google Scholar does a much better job than I had imagined it would. My only quip with it is that there is no simple way to output your results – which means that if like me you need to send out a report you end up doing a lot of cutting and pasting.
So I have to hand it to Google – Scholar is a great service content wise but it could really benefit from some TLC on output and format.
Here are some results that I recently had using both services and some general comments about the Pros and Cons of each.
Science Citation Index vs. Google Scholar
Categories: Citation searching · Google · Search Engines · Searching
If, like me, you often want to check a drugs status on a companies website you probably waste a fair amount of time finding where the pipeline is hiding. For most companies it’s fairly obvious – but others take a bit of hunting down.
To aid in this matter I’ve put together a list of links to company pipelines. For starters it contains links to top companies plus a few others – I’ll be adding smaller companies in as time goes by.
Hopefully you’ll find it useful. Let me know if you have other links or corrections that you’d like me to add.
Pharma Pipeline Locator
Categories: Datastar · Dialog · Uncategorized
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
