NextBio is ooooooh so slick and ohhhhh so promising. This is a real advance in medical and health science search.

I like it tremendously and I am only a few minutes into taking a spin in it.

First of all, it features the screencasts dear to the hearts of those of us who review search engines. Those are so key to winning over potential customers and reviewers. And the registration process was a dream.

The interface is clear, handsome and user-friendly to the max. This is a powerful, powerful tool. Kudos to the developers.

I don’t usually like auto complete. But in this case, it was a relief not to have to spell out my search term of choice, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. I got really superb results on that. There was a nice clear definition of ALS. There was a useful graph showing that that vast majority of experiments have been done on mice.

All is not perfect, of course. I wanted to see what some of the clinical trials of creatine in ALS have been, but when I clicked on the word “creatine” in the tag cloud, I got results for many other compounds (e.g., growth hormone, pioglitazone). Interestingly, when I tried tamoxifen I got one result and that on tamoxifen. When I tried riluzole (the one drug that seems to be of some use in prolonging survival in ALS), I got quite a few only peripherally related results. Those were interesting in and of themselves, but not directly relevant to my search. Not much point in clicking on a term in a tag cloud, if you get results only slightly relevant. But the results, if somewhat far afield from the original query, were useful. Mousing over each term in the cloud calls up useful info bits (chemical structure of the compound in question, definition of the disease, etc.).

A useful feature for patients and their loved ones is the feature, “hide studies that are not seeking new volunteers.”

There is a community feature, but not much activity at this point and it was not clear to me what the benefit of joining one would be—the communities are about as beta as beta can be. I joined the Alzheimer’s Disease and Hepatitis C groups but appear to be all alone in those for now. But as word gets out about NextBio those could become lively fora.

NextBio is useful not only for serious scientists, but for proactive patients, health science students and medical librarians. I urge them all to take a look at it. I found it a useful resource for understanding the basics of some of the gene-related issues of ALS, for instance. I got a very useful explanation of what the SOD1 gene is, for instance, and an entry on an upcoming trial of a drug connected with it.

Navigating around in NextBio was very easy and results pop up with lighting speed. For instance:

sod1 and als
studies (5) | genes (1) | literature (9,200) | clinical trials (10)

It has nice bookmarking features and so forth.

 

As enamored as I am of the many tools of the National Library of Medicine like NLM Gateway, there is always room for alternative interfaces and new search tools. Welcome to the world of medical/life science search NextBio. You are most welcome!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.