Free Resources for Biomed and Biotech Research
Posted on Thu, Jan 12, 2012
Free-of-charge resources are crucial for Article One Researchers who commonly perform searches across a wide range of scientific, technology, and medical fields. Free content exists online in abundance. The tricky part with the "wild west" world of free Internet content is finding high-quality sources that will produce high-quality results. In many cases, the more specific the database, the better the results, and the higher the chance of winning.
The following are great resources, each completely free, that focus on biomedical and biotechnical fields. They are some of the most popular among our Researchers. Article One has featured dozens of studies in the bio/med/pharmaceutical sphere, including three currently on the site:
- PHARM 1151 - Analyte Monitor
- DEV 1134 - Detection of Prokaryotic Organism by DNA Hybridization
- DEV 1140 - Nucleic Acid Ligand Inhibitors to DNA Polymerases
These free resources can be a valuable part of your research process, in addition to your local library, personal collection, and other favorite tools!
PubMed/MEDLINE
PubMed is a widely renowned resource for medical literature. It is part of a network of databases collected and managed by the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). In particular, PubMed search includes access to MEDLINE, a database of biomedical literature, including abstracts, citations, and full text articles from over 5000 sources in nearly 40 languages. Conveniently, all search activity can be conducted through the MyNCBI portal. The portal allows you to save searches, results, and otherwise organize your process. (NCBI stands for National Center for Biotechnology Information, an entity within the NIH). For more information on these resources, read our guide to PubMed.
ChemSpider
ChemSpider is a project of the Royal Society of Chemistry that allows users to search through 26 million chemical compounds. It offers creative ways to search, such as drawing the structure on the web page. For the non-chemist prior art researcher, the results are far from jargon. The intuitive results pages offer a broad swath of information on each structure, including, importantly for AOP Researchers, links to articles that cite the compound. The articles are collected from sources like PubMed and Google Scholar, and offer full text articles whenever possible. For more information on ChemSpider, check out Intellogist’s Community Report.
Omni Medical Search & BioMed Search
Omnimedicalsearch.com is a free search tool with categories for general Web, news, images, forum posts, and scholarly articles. It’s like Google in terms of its search service offerings, but each category is customized in the back-end specifically for medical searches. The categories enable quick, simple searches across a range of media, making the source potentially valuable for any stage in the Research Process.
Another tool that can be used in conjunction with Omni, or on its own, is BioMed-search.com. This site is specifically for image search, but unlike Omni’s image search function, which pulls images largely from websites, BioMed only takes images that appear in scholarly articles. The images include detailed diagrams, flowcharts, graphs, and datasets that have all been fully indexed for search capability.
For help finding more medical resources online, try using the Intellogist Resource Finder.