Biomedical Literature Alert Service

State University New York Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): BioMail (www.biomail.org) is a free literature alert service for biological and medical professionals. It is useful for people who repeatedly perform the same search at the Medline or PubMed database. BioMail allows one to refine and to save the searches once. Then BioMail automatically queries the PubMed database on regular basis and sends results of the searches to its users by email. References from the BioMail searches can be automatically exported to formats compatible with popular reference managers, spreadsheets and databases. Also a user may keep references in a rudimentary online reference manager embedded into BioMail. The service is useful to biomedical researchers, librarians who make searches for their patrons, physicians, patients with chronic diseases, and lay people interested in biomedical science. The requested funding for this application will be used to enhance the BioMail program. A number of BioMail subscribers use the 'Reference Treasury' as their online reference manager. Therefore we will provide features common to desktop reference managers (uploading papers to the Reference Treasury, sorting, searching, customizable views), and add new features which are unique for online systems, such as paper ratings, recommendations of highly rated papers, the most popular papers. As a result we believe BioMail will be not only a literature alert system, but also a place to keep one's references. We will improve packaging to ease installation. We will expand the alert engine to support multiple biomedical databases in addition to PubMed. We also plan to bind the information about the holdings in local libraries directly to the references in the BioMail emails sent to US and Canadian users. We believe these objectives can be accomplished using the suggested funding. In parallel we will continue development of other BioMail features by means of voluntary contributions to the program code by the Free Software programmers