What is novoseek?

What is it?

novoseek is an innovative biomedical literature search engine that performs "entity identification" (defined below) on PubMed records, thus vastly improving filtering and understanding of search results. It also searches NIH's database of extant grants, CRISP, and does so in a much more elegant manner than CRISP itself.

What is it for?

novoseek is particularly effective when trying to make sense of a large set of search hits quickly and accurately. It does so by providing the user with powerful filters that operate on the entities mentioned in the record set, e.g.:

• genes and proteins
• chemicals (including drugs)
• medical procedures
• authors
• body parts, tissues, subcellular components

What's in it?

• All records in PubMed.
• All records in the CRISP grant database of NIH grants.

How does it work?

novoseek applies artificial intelligence techniques to perform "entity identification", such that the types of entities (genes, techniques, people) referred to in a PubMed abstract can then be enumerated and used for filtering.

Unique characteristics

• novoseek delivers capabilities for searching PubMed that had been limited to commercial providers until now. The only other search engine that provides similar capabilities is NextBio).
• novoseek is the only search engine to provide capabilities based on entity indentification for CRISP, and indeed, is one of vew few alternatives to querying CRISP itself. Since the CRISP interface is primitive and somewhat painful, novoseek provides a valuable alternative.

Drawbacks

At the time of writing (March 2009), the principal drawback of novoseek is the extra processing time required to perform entity identification. Note that the search hits themselves are returned nearly instantaneously.

Key references

• Short video demonstrations.

Need help?

Two options are available, depending on the type of question:

1. For immediate answers to simple "point" question (e.g., "does this program run on MS Vista?"), you can contact the Bioresearch Informationist using instant messaging (Stanford affiliate only).
2. For more involved questions, is much preferred and more likely to return a usable answer.

Source

Lane Librarian

ypouliot, September 14, 2009