The OpenHelix Blog

Usually, we do our own tips for the week (in fact, up till today, always) and today I was going to do one on the Firefox Biobar, an excellent Firefox addon that allows you to search and retrieve data from dozens of databases and resources at one time right on your browser bar. I just rediscovered the biobar since I’ve been using a different browser (not Firefox) for a long while and recently returned to Firefox for most of my browsing. I remember why I liked Biobar. Nice quick way to search a lot of databases from PubMed to Wormbase. Well, I was going to do a tutorial, but in my search about the BioBar, I see user Simont from Scivee already did an great tutorial on installing and using Biobar, so I’m linking to that here! Ok, so it saves me time, but why duplicate efforts? He did a fine job. Check it out.

PubMed has added a few features to it’s search capabilities including a new Automatic Term Mapping and Citation Sensor, both help make the search a bit more powerful and simple.

I’m liking the citation sensor. If you enter a last name and year, the search will sense that it is a citation and give you the citations that match. So, if you search “lathe 2001” you’ll find 8 citations by someone with the last name of Lathe in the year 2001, 3 of them mine . These are listed with a yellow backround at the top of the search results. Of course you could just also type in “lathe[Author] AND 2001[Publication Date]” and get the same 8 citations, but why type in the added 27 characters when you could just type 9. Makes searching a bit nicer.