DocumentLens – A Revolution In How Researchers Access Information & Colleagues
From the post:
Keeping up with the flood of scientific information has been challenging…Spotting patterns and extracting useful information has been even harder. DocumentLens™ has just made it easier to gain insightful knowledge from information and to share ideas with collaborators.
Praxeon, Inc., the award-winning Boston-based leader in delivering knowledge solutions for the Healthcare and Life Science communities, today announced the launch of DocumentLens™. Their cloud-based web application helps scientific researchers deal with the ever increasing deluge of online and electronic data and information from peer-reviewed journals, regulatory sites, patents and proprietary sources. DocumentLens provides an easy-to-utilize environment to enrich discovery, enhance idea generation, shorten the investigation time, improve productivity and engage collaboration.
“One of the most challenging problems researchers face is collecting, integrating and understanding new information. Keeping up with peer-reviewed journals, regulatory sites, patents and proprietary sources, even in a single area of research, is time consuming. But failure to keep up with information from many different sources results in knowledge gaps and lost opportunities,” stated Dr. Dennis Underwood, Praxeon CEO.
“DocumentLens is a web-based tool that enables you to ask the research question you want to ask – just as you would ask a colleague,” Underwood went on to say. “You can also dive deeper into research articles, explore the content and ideas using DocumentLens and integrate them with sources that you trust and rely on. DocumentLens takes you not only to the relevant documents, but to the most relevant sections saving an immense amount of time and effort. Our DocumentLens Navigators open up your content, using images and figures, chemistry and important topics. Storylines provide a place to accumulate and share insights with colleagues.”
Praxeon has created www.documentlens.com, a website devoted to the new application that contains background on the use of the software, the Eye of the Lens blog (http://www.documentlens.com/blog), and a live version of DocumentLens™ for visitors to try out free-of-charge to see for themselves firsthand the value of the application.
OK, so I do one of the sandbox pre-composed queries: “What is the incidence and prevalence of dementia?”
and DocumentLens reports back that page 15 of a document has relevant information (note, not the entire document but a particular page), highlighted material included:
conducting a collaborative, multicentre trial in FTLD. Such a collaborative effort will certainly be necessary to recruit the cohort of over 200 FTLD patients per trial that may be needed to demonstrate treatment effects in FTLD.[194]
3. Ratnavalli E, Brayne C, Dawson K, et al. The prevalence of frontotemporal dementia. Neurology 2002;58:1615–21. [PubMed: 12058088]
4. Mercy L, Hodges JR, Dawson K, et al. Incidence of early-onset dementias in Cambridgeshire,
8. Gislason TB, Sjogren M, Larsson L, et al. The prevalence of frontal variant frontotemporal dementia and the frontal lobe syndrome in a population based sample of 85 year olds. J Neurol Neurosurg
The first text block has no obvious (or other) relevance to the question of incidence or prevalence of dementia.
The incomplete marking of citations 4 and 8 occurs for no apparent reason.
Like any indexing resource, its value depends on the skill of the indexers.
There are the usual issues, how do I reliably share information with other DocumentLens or even non-DocumentLens users? Can I and other users create interoperable files in parallel? Do we need or required to have a common vocabulary? How do we integrate materials that use other vocabularies?
(Do send a note to the topic map naysayers. Product first, then start selling it to customers.)