By Hope Leman

 

It is high time that I took a look at Novoseek. I have been very remiss in not examining it. My excuse is that I have been endeavoring for the past several months not to flunk out of library school. Hampered thus, I am way behind on the subject of medical/health-related search. But now I am sitting at my computer and about to poke around in Novoseek.

 

Interestingly, it not only calls itself a search engine but also, “an information extraction system.”

 

I rather like the plucky tone of the company’s blog:

 

Here it is on Wolfram Alpha for instance, “Wolfram Alpha is not a resource for biomedical information. Despite what you’ve heard about it, Alpha doesn’t provide life science publications as novoseek does.”

 

My own personal hobbyhorse is the free grants and scholarship site I work on, ScanGrants. (See how I shamelessly sneaked in a mention of it here?) I am fascinated by everything to do with grants in the health sciences. Therefore, I immediately clicked on US Grants, when presented with this wording on the home page, “Search engine for biomedical literature in Medline, US Grants and Full Text publications…”

 

I got immediately confused (which is, admittedly, not an unusual state of affairs) because a search for cerebral palsy had been preprogrammed in. I clicked on a link for, “More info” in order to determine what was being searched under the US Grants rubric and didn’t really get very more information, “Currently novo|seek indexes the well known Medline content, U.S. research grants and full text open access articles.”

 

Now except for the grants part–and ResearchScorecard is an up and comer in that realm, slowly and steadily expanding its searchable databases do I really need to search “well known Medline content” using Novoseek? It needs to differentiate itself from GoPubMed and PubMed itself.

 

And Novoseek doesn’t seem to offer the powerful capacities to search the Deep Web that DeepDyve and Mednar do.

 

I decided I needed to get a better understanding of Novoseek so decided to watch some of the screencasts. Now, Kudos for Novoseek for featuring screencasts. I always advocate for those—it is imperative for new search engines to feature how-tos. Text-based explanations go only so far.

 

I was little frustrated because I didn’t catch on to the fact that I could toggle between older and newer screencasts so wasted around five minutes watching one on how to install Novoseek’s widget in various environments when I really needed just to understand its basic worth as a search engine. I finally did find and watched the helpful presentation on how to use the grants feature, which Novoseek needs to discuss in much more detail. As I understand it, Novoseek’s grant search is like that of ResearchScorecard in that it searches grants made and does not list grants open for application, which is what ScanGrants does.

 

I tried the grants search and was quite impressed—very, very useful way to learn about completed projects and those still underway. The source of the data seems to emanate from the sources mined by SciSight which says, “By using proprietary data mining techniques, we aim to provide the best overview of life science research grants from US and Canadian sources. Currently, we have almost 500,000 grant records from over 75 sources. We obtain information from public sources and cannot verify its accuracy. If you are a provider or grant recipient and identify missing or incorrect information, contact us and we will correct it. If you are a provider of scientific grants, we can work with you to obtain the best information about your grants and investigators. With all the potential investigators searching this information, we want to provide the most accurate information possible on your important research projects. We acknowledge the source of the data for each grant along with the specific information.”

 

In other words, we see in Novoseek the information that SciSight is able to get, which is strong but not comprehensive and somewhat iffy on accuracy.

 

Still, I am grateful to both SciSight and Novoseek to learn about the following studies now underway about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

 

Identification of misfolded proteins associated with sporadic ALS through innovative proteomics approaches.

         

Canadian Inst of Health Rsch (CAN) 2009,Jan,01;; (Grant Number: CRIS-CIHR-023783)

Gros-Louis, Francois;

Canadian Inst of Health Rsch (CAN)

 

Project Start Date: 2007-01-01

Project End Date: 2009-12-31

 

And

 

Clinical Trial of Ceftriaxone in ALS.

         

National Institutes of Health 2008,Dec,11; (Grant Number: 5U01NS049640-05)

Cudkowicz, Merit E.;

National Institutes of Health

 

Project Start Date: 2004-09-30

Project End Date: 2009-11-30

 

It is edifying and very useful just to be able to so easily determine what is already being studied and where. This will be a boon to medical librarians and research administrators trying to assist graduate students, hardcore researchers and frontline clinicians new to research work who have no idea if their proposed research projects would be pointlessly duplicative.

 

And some of the information about grants in Novoseek is simply moving and inspiring such as this project:

 

Translational refinement of adaptive communication system for locked-in patients.

         

National Institutes of Health 2008,Dec,04; (Grant Number: 1R01DC009834-01)

Fried-Oken, Melanie;

National Institutes of Health

 

Project Start Date: 2009-02-01

Project End Date: 2014-01-31

 

I was immediately intrigued by that given how vital it is to research technologies to enable ALS patients and others with locked-in syndrome to communicate. I immediately did a Google search on Melanie Fried-Oken and was very proud to see that she works and does her important work in my own state of Oregon: http://www.ohsu.edu/health/meet-our-staff/doctors/doctor.cfm?id=11095

 

It may seem that I am getting a little off the subject of Novoseek here and heading out into my personal interest in ALS. But that is what a great medical search engine should do. It should enable the user to discover and get excited and fascinated—to learn about admirable, brilliant people (like Dr. Fried-Oken) doing important things and engaging in noble behavior. And Novoseek did that for me—and that was just its grant search feature. I have not even explored in depth its other features—nor even in sufficient depth the grants search feature. That alone is a wonderful contribution to medical search and I will explore Novoseek further. I urge medical librarians and anyone in the health sciences and research administration to take a look at it.

 

It empowers patients, too, in that they can see what is happening right now vis-à-vis research on their conditions. More and more laypeople are moving beyond the world of MedlinePlus and launching their own clinical trials under the auspices of online patient communities such as Patients Like Me and connecting with researchers via secure services such as Private Access.

 

Novoseek is rendering the cause of biomedical research a great service by enabling the general public to see how its tax dollars are being used by the NIH and other government funders. Those skeptical of the money that the Obama administration is earmarking for medical research need spend only a few minutes looking at grants related to neurodegenerative diseases to address the question, “Do I want money directed at projects like that of Dr. Fried-Oaken? You bet I do!” A good search engine is one that helps you make a case and Novoseek does that, too.

 

Check it out.