ScienceDirect enhanced through partnership with NextBio

Elsevier and ScienceDirect entered into a partnership with NextBio enabling life sciences, health sciences and chemistry researchers to simultaneously search and dive deeply into ScienceDirect content alongside publicly available sources improving scientific discoverability and research productivity.

The challenge

Like all researchers, researchers in the life sciences, health sciences and chemistry are faced with information overload. While most scientific information on genes, pathways, diseases, tissues and compounds is available online,...

it currently resides in various, disconnected, locations. As a result, researchers must spend a lot of their valuable time locating key information and searching and refining the data so that they may get up to speed quickly on new and related subject areas, or dive further and learn more about their field. Of utmost important to any researcher is that they are not missing out on any relevant information.

How does ScienceDirect help?

In spring 2009, Elsevier and ScienceDirect entered into a partnership with NextBio. Through the integration of NextBio on ScienceDirect, researchers are able...

to dive more deeply into ScienceDirect content and find correlating results from high-quality publicly available data sources in the fields of life sciences, health sciences and chemistry. NextBio’s unique set of ontology-based semantic tools allows for text mining of both ScienceDirect content and approved publicly available research data from PubMed, clinical trials, experimental data correlations and studies, and news articles. By enabling researchers to dive more deeply into their research topic, they can become more efficient and increase their productivity and discovery.

Benefits for Researchers

This enhancement on ScienceDirect provides researchers working in target disciplines a number of powerful benefits, including:

1. Speed of research – The enhancement highlights key pieces of information that will enable researchers to find key content more quickly, thereby accelerating the research process.

2. Discoverability – The managed combination of peer-reviewed literature and publicly available sources will help promote new discoveries. Researchers will find fresh linkages between literature and associated data sets.

3. Value – Sophisticated searching via NextBio’s ontology-based semantic framework will enable researchers to easily extract more insight from existing content. While the enhancement broadens research, it deepens it as well.

4. Convenience – Researchers will be able to access results from clinical trials sources, experimental data correlations and studies, news, ScienceDirect and PubMed literature all at once and in one location.

5. Breadth – In conjunction with the superb coverage of life sciences information already available on ScienceDirect, scientists will be able to access >70% of the world’s open data sets. The functionality will also provide a means of obtaining quick, subject wide updates.

In more detail:

While viewing an article or book chapter (published from 1995 and excluding Major Reference Works) on ScienceDirect, the keywords from that selected article or book chapter are matched against NextBio’s biomedical ontologies. Directly on the article page, researchers will find the NextBio application which presents key terms found in the selected article or book chapter.

By clicking on the underlined key terms w>ithin the article, the researcher can zoom in on that term and find an overview of where the key term appears in the article, a description of that term, and related content, based on a combination of the article and selected key term, from ScienceDirect, PubMed clinical trials, news and genomics data source,. The in-context pop-up allows the researcher to quickly gain an overview of the article from the perspective of their chosen term, and to quickly link through to other information.

Clicking within the NextBio application box on the right hand side will allow for further exploration of the subject based on the trustworthy and publicly available sources collected and compiled by NextBio, alongside additional ScienceDirect literature.

On selecting a category and source, results can be further sorted and refined, e.g. locate key authors and their affiliations, view only tissue-related results, and/or select the full set or a limited number of results to name just a few options.

To return to the original article in ScienceDirect the pop-up window can be closed. Researchers can also connect back to other ScienceDirect full-text articles from links within the application.

What are researchers saying?

“It is very powerful to be able to search all of ScienceDirect text with NextBio’s solution…the ability to take hold of a topic and get up to speed on it very quickly is extremely powerful as it is tough to sit and manually read through 100 articles…

I would definitely use ScienceDirect more often and recommend this enhancement to a colleague” - Research Fellow, Merck

“This [integration of NextBio in ScienceDirect] is a quantum leap. I don’t know of any other systems that do this meaningfully…for me, this integration rises to the point where I would consciously change my habits to use ScienceDirect first as the value proposition would be so much higher than at PubMed, even at the risk of possibly missing papers” - Bioresearch Informationist, Stanford