Sites of interest on the World Wide Web–edited by Rick Neubig and David Roman
A Clearinghouse for Product Information, Literature Searches, and Protocols
Labvelocity is a supplier-supported Web site that makes many of the routine tasks in the research world quickly accessible at the click of a mouse. Labvelocity’s creators have developed a Web site called ResearchLink (http://researchlink.labvelocity.com) that, after free registration, allows users to take advantage of a plethora of scientific information ranging from literature searches to product information to protocols and calculators. Although other sites provide access to similar features, ResearchLink stands apart because it allows the user to store information––said literature searches, product ordering information, and protocols––in his or her own “file cabinet” for use at a later time. For instance, a user could find a handful of different protocols for cell fixation, and copy them to her file cabinet for quick, ready access. Perhaps even more useful is using the file cabinet tool to store the product (and ordering) information that we all have “somewhere” in the lab. This feature could act as a virtual lab database, where everyone could view a particular preferred product. A favorite feature of this Web site is the Medline Alerts. Medline literature searches can be saved in a file cabinet, but if you set up a Medline Alert, future published citations identified through the Alert search filters (e.g., keyword, title, or author name) will save the new citations to your personalized ResearchLink homepage for immediate access. Furthermore, the Medline Alert function can be set to send E-mail to a designated address when new articles matching your search criteria appear. Labvelocity is set up with links to commercial suppliers, and the wide array of functions that are provided to researchers for free make this site definitely one to visit.
Feed Your Brain – A Great Site for Neurotransmitter Information
Neurotransmitter.net is an effort by Shawn Thomas to provide access, in a very convenient format, to scientific information about neurotransmitters. This Web site (http://www.neurotransmitter.net) offers a compendium of descriptions and links to neurotransmitter and receptor function reviews, and has many other features. A detailed table listing of Endogenous Neuroactive Extracellular Signal Transducers is fully annotated with literature links and even links to relevant Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=OMIM) entries. Furthermore, separate subsections on disorders also provide information about reviews of various neurological diseases. Other links lead to online medical text-books, and a great section of links point to images of neurons from a variety of sources. Additionally, Neurotransmitter.net contains several links to abstracts, full text, and schematic drawings related to neural correlates of reasoning, consciousness, and mechanisms of psychoactive drugs. This Web site is an excellent place from which anyone can learn about neurotransmitters and neurophysiology in general.
Handy Biomedical Tools: Lexicon and Jargon
Quick! What does “preeclampsia mean?” A variety of online medical dictionaries are available, but two stand out for their uniqueness. Medilexicon (http://www.medilexicon.com) is a supplier-supported site that features entries for over 70,000 medical and scientific terms, all available from a front-page search window. Also notable for its usefulness is the abbreviation dictionary available at http://abbreviation.stanford.edu, which can provide multiple results and associated quality scores for each result. Another convenient dictionary is CancerWeb’s online medical dictionary (http://www.cancerweb.ncl.ac.uk/omd/index.html), which provides quick searches for commonly used medical terminology.
- © American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Theraputics 2004
