Those of us who live, breathe and bleed medical search spend our time looking for articles produced by well, scientists. Occasionally, we need to search for details about front-line clinicians and so might try newer tools like Emphasis Search that help us determine who the leading practitioners are in certain fields.

But what about the back end of science? How do those who work in basic science establish their reputations, get hired in academia, get tenure, get the grants that help them run their labs or get hired away from cash-strapped universities by big pharma or biotech? The answer is still, to a large extent, publish, publish, publish and present at conferences. But how do you, promising, gifted but still unknown scientist, wangle your way into the pages of the prestigious journals and leverage the social networking tools of Science 2.0? How can the rest of us determine who is the most productive and brilliant and up and coming among the new generation of science and medical research? Who is who?

ResearchScorecard is one such one tool in the making. Some caveats are in order. Just as Emphasis Search at present covers only specialists at the University of San Francisco, ResearchScorecard.com’s coverage is currently limited to the 2000 – 2006 period [although some data for 2007 has just been added], extending mostly to biomedical scientists associated with: Stanford University and The University of California, San Francisco. Now that is not exactly the universe of science of today. But this is a start-up, after all, and you have to start somewhere. I like what I see so far. Good concept, handsome interface, straightforward, cogent presentation of the raison d’entre of the site.

Here is ResearchScorecard on its aims:

“ResearchScorecard is a data mining tool to help scientists find and evaluate potential collaborators by providing a quantitative portrait of academic researchers in the life sciences.

Finding: Identifying a potential collaborator, colleague or employee, or any kind of expert is a difficult task. Yes, one can find scientists by other means, but this is a tedious and haphazard process, because the underlying data are meant for browsing, not data mining. We bring all the data you need together, already analyzed.

Evaluating: Assessing scientists is even harder than finding them, because the lack of data integration hinders rigorous evaluation. By integrating and cleansing researcher data, ResearchScorecard provides you with a quantitative portrait of these academic researchers.”

Now, I am not a working scientist myself. I work in a medical library and also spend hours looking for grants to list on a free online grants listing sites. Many of the grants I list discuss in detail what the grantors are looking for from the researchers hoping to land the funding on offer. The interdisciplinary nature of science these days makes simply determining what fields to look to for potential collaborators daunting. For instance, I just looked for an example in the “Basic Science” category of my site and found this wording about the interests of the sponsors of a fellowship program:

“Molecular and cellular investigations related to cardiovascular physiology and pathophysiology, neural control of cardiovascular function, cell transport and metabolism, cellular electrophysiology and ion channels, and excitationcontraction coupling
* Molecular and cellular biology of cardiac, skeletal, and smooth muscle
* Regulation of cell growth, growth factors, cell cycle genes, programmed cell death, cell surface and nuclear receptors, gene transcription, and molecular signaling Vascular biology, lipoproteins and lipid metabolism, endothelial and smooth muscle cell biology, inflammation, cytokines, cell adhesion, regulation of extracellular matrix, and regulation of thrombosis and platelet function
* Angiogenesis
* Clinical investigations related to atherosclerosis and arterial injury, arrhythmias and conduction abnormalities, cardiac failure and myocardial preservation, hypertension, peripheral vascular disease, stroke, and thrombosis
* Animal models of cardiovascular disease
* Cardiovascular imaging
* Molecular and human genetics”

Now, you could do huge amounts of emailing colleagues and calling around and browsing through PubMed and citation engines, attending conferences and so on to put together a team that would establish your bona fides with grantors like that. Or, as more tools like ResearchScorecard enter the Science 2.0 arena, you could harness them to quickly determine who has the expertise you need and the track record that would impress funders. Oh, and be someone whose abilities you respect and with whom you could make path breaking discoveries.

ResearchScorecard asks of scientists hoping to land grants and establish the kind of multi-site projects that characterize so much medical research:

How do you…

* find experts?
* find and assess collaborators?
* pick your postdoctoral lab?

And of departments:

how do you…

* assess research strengths?
* determine their core research?
* benchmark them?

Those are good questions and I wish the developers of ResearchScorecard the best of luck in fostering the kinds of relationships among scientists and research administrators that should spare them the tedium that is hampering the expeditious writing of and submission of grant applications. Anything that can fast track science is to be applauded.

Indeed, we are very lucky to live in time when new firms are creating innovative services like this and the clinical trials software suite of Private Access: As we gaze in dismay at the behemoths of the old economic order on their knees and sucking in ever more tax money to little avail, it is heartening to know that there are nimble firms coming up with clever ideas and making the most of Science 2.0 for the benefit of all.

I signed up for a free account and searched for information about the leading researchers on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. I did get some results and was quite impressed by the detailed info presented on the researchers I clicked for more data about. Nice graphs and useful data (e.g., Number of major research areas in last 7 years, Number of research articles in last 7 years, Number of grants in last 7 years, Number of collaborators in last 7 years, Number of US patents in last 7 years).

A particularly useful feature of ResearchScorecard is “Find comparable researcher.” That feature alone would save scientists hours and probably lead to fruitful collaborations.

As I looked at this powerful tool, I kept thinking of who else might use it. How about community hospitals, more and more of which are establishing research offices and need to connect workaday physicians engaged in clinical trials of new drugs and non-drug treatments with academic researchers with know-how in that arcane world? And hospital administrators who need to better understand the research interests and abilities of those they are seeking to recruit (the opportunity to engage in research even in non-academic settings is a selling point for many health care organizations these days). And offices of research and tenure committees could employ the capacities of ResearchScorecard to cost-effective, edifying effect.

At this point, ResearchScorecard focuses on the life sciences, but I would think it could develop into a key tool in the social sciences. After all, much of health research is related to health economics and the intricacies of public policy and reimbursement.

ResearchScorecard is still in its infancy. As noted above, it covers only Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco. But as word gets around about it, it should gain the credence that will enable it to hire the staff to fully develop the relationships in the research community that will lead to data being delivered to its door, given that is in the interest of scientists and their departments to develop reputations and relationships and a high profile in a user-friendly, quality tool like ResearchScorecard would be a cost-effective way to do so.

As impressed as I am with the start ResearchScorecard has made, I should say that it still has some way to go. As someone who spends hours clicking through site after site in the disease community and foundation world hoping to find a grant of $50,000 here for a basic science project and maybe another $10,000 there for one in clinical research the coverage of grants in ResearchScorecard struck me as still somewhat on the anemic side. It says, “What funding sources does ResearchScorecard cover?

ResearchScorecard.com relies on funding data derived from the following agencies:

* National Institutes of Health (NIH)
* National Science Foundation (NSF)
* US Department of Energy (DOE)

“Some data about grants issued by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation are also included.”

That pretty much excludes the vast number of small foundations such as some of the members of the Genetic Alliance: and the grants awarded by professional societies. There are thousands of useful projects funded by from everything from tiny family-funded foundations dedicated to rare diseases to massive projects of the big grantors like the Commonwealth Fund to professional groups in the sciences that fund research by their own members and outsiders with similar interests. Let us hope that some smart venture capitalists will recognize the merits of ResearchScorecard and pour money into it so that it can allocate staff to cultivating its ties to such funders so that they will provide data on the projects they have sponsored. These foundations do noble work that should be better known. I work very hard, for instance, trying to locate such grants and ensure that as many researchers as possible hear about them. There is money out there for worthwhile science. It is just that a biochemist or a molecular biologist may never have heard of a certain condition and may not realize that there is a grant available for research about it. It would be in the interest of both the disease advocacy groups and the scientists to have such data pooled, through such tools as ResearchScorecard and the admirable work of such effective organizations as the Genetic Alliance.

And for those of a less altruistic bent–ResearchScorecard has a “Researcher patenting history” feature, too. That feature might be of interest to headhunters in industry and academia as more and more universities and entrepreneurs try to capitalize on the brain power in the life sciences.

Check out ResearchScorecard.