Star Picks
Search-engines search. Compare-stuff compares. You can dig out the number of papers in the biomedical literature archived by pubmed, in which any words or phrases coincide. So, perhaps you want to compare the number of papers looking at treatments for lung cancer and prostate cancer where there is a dietary connection... Easy. Slot into the appropriate boxes "testicular cancer" and "prostate cancer" as your first and second phrases to compare. Use the term diet as the thing to compare against and if you like add "treatment" as an optional global search term and click Go. The results provide an insight into where research might be heading in these areas. Bioinformatician Bob McCallum is to be congratulated on an innovative spin on the usual web crawl that could provide researchers with some useful lateral thoughts on their science.
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A neat round-up of several useful chemistry searchers from Chemfinder to the WileyInterscience and ACS online journals. ChemSpy is the virtual hobby of Glenn Rexwinkel although he told RR it is a hobby that 'got out of control'. For an out of control hobby though, it is a decent one-stop shop to dictionaries, journals, acronyms, spectral databases and much more.
 | One for high-school students looking to find out more about the role of the chemical industry in our lives. On site, "The Chem Files" provides a searchable encyclopedia about chemistry and the industry with a timeline dating slightly further back than the earliest days of the industry to the 1624 introduction of patent laws in England. The "Facts & Figures" section does exactly what it says on the box, while "Career Paths" likewise provides an obvious entry point to that particular subject. "TalkZone" offers visitors a forum where they can discuss chemistry-related issues. The site was created by the UK's Chemical Industries Association so is very much spun in favor but then with so much bias against the industry on the web, it is about time we saw something positive.
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