WorldWideScience.org is a well-intentioned, multinational attempt to disseminate scientific information internationally.

That is a worthy goal. I know, for instance, that when I do a search I often find the most useful materials in English language journals of other countries such as the Journal of The Medical Association of Thailand or The Indian Journal of Pediatrics.

Here is the skinny from the organizers:

“What is WorldWideScience.org?
A federation of national science portals where research results are made available by participating nations.

Who will use the gateway?
Citizens and scientists in all nations … indeed anyone interested in science.”

“WorldWideScience.org is maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information as the Operating Agent for the WorldWideScience Alliance.”

So, that is the background. This is a case where tax dollars are being put to good use.

And there is a crying need to render the huge amounts of potentially useful gray literature moldering underutilized in the dark corners of the deep Web, silent, unknown but to the dedicated, under funded archivists and librarians who oversee institutional repositories and to the often brilliant but unheralded scholars who authored the papers and produced the datasets. What could be more tragic than good science neglected?

Now, how does WorldWideScience stack up as a search tool?

Well, the interface is kind of blah. But one can live with that.

The results are quite interesting in that they draw on such standard sources as PubMed but are slowly reaching beyond US shores. And you can easily search by year. I tried “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” and then “2008” and got a pretty standard PubMed results, but also got a result for an interesting study from ClinicalTrials.gov of this study: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Tissue Donation Program which was way down at number 47 when I tried the search in ClinicalTrials.gov section of the NLM Gateway.

But US-based medical librarians and power searchers in science know our American Web resources well enough. What about results from other countries? That is the whole point of the project, after all: adding to the worldwide sum of accessible scientific knowledge.

Now here is an example of why this project can lead to improvements in the quality of life for the ill worldwide. One of the results I got for ALS was from the journal Internal Medicine published by the Japanese Society of Internal Medicine. Now, I am quite interested in Japanese views of ALS, given that they have a much higher rate of full ventilation of patients than is true in the US. That is an interesting phenomenon in itself, suggesting that Japanese caregivers and clinicians have a greater willingness to care for patients under these often demanding conditions. And the article I found, “Salivary Chromogranin A: Useful and Quantitative Biochemical Marker of Affective State in Patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis,” might sound arcane. But it actually had the very moving conclusion that it is imperative that ways of measuring mood be found for ALS patients, many of whom lose the ability to speak and some of whom become locked in. “Useful biochemical markers of the affective state in advanced patients have not yet been developed.” What a wonderful world we live in where search engines like WorldWideScience render findable scholarship produced in societies not one’s own that sets you to thinking about issues that had not before entered your ken.

One thing I found a little frustrating and confusing about WorldWideScience is that so many of the results seemed to be taken directly from our own US government’s Science.gov, which renders the worldwide cast WorldWideScience still negligible. But as more partners of the caliber of the People’s Republic of China (see http://worldwidescience.org/news.html)  (and anyone who is fearful of the rise of China and India doesn’t care about science) sign on, WorldWideScience should grow in scope and interest.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 11:49 am and is filed under Health, Reviews. 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.