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A roundup of research tools

The medical journal portal is a valuable resource

THIS EDITION of NetSpeak takes a look at some of the new research tools appearing on the Net.

Whatever be one's subject of enquiry/area of research, Net's rich/varied information sources make exploring the Web an essential activity of a researcher. We have come across several tools/services meant for facilitating this process. As we know, in addition to general search engines, several special search engines meant for academic purpose are in place. Google Scholar, developed for helping you easily locate scholarly materials, the answer search engine Lexxe (http://www.lexxe.com/) are some such services profiled in the past.

Congoo (http://www.congoo.com/) is another search engine worth a look in this regard.

The advantage of this service lies in its facility for accessing priced content from its partner sources. Along with normal search output (from Yahoo), Congoo displays links to premium content relevant to your query.

To try out the service, just install the Congoo Netpass toolbar (http://www.congoo.com/netpass/install) and activate your NetPass by registering an account with it.

Zotero

A researcher, who collects a plethora of resources (both on-line and off-line), needs to organise them under appropriate categories with relevant notes/annotations attached to each of them. That is, a researcher needs a simple tool for managing the resources and generate a bibliography of the collected materials.

The bibliography creation software Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) is a valuable product that has recently appeared in this realm.

Zotero, a free/open source, Firefox plug-in, helps you organise resources and cite them. When you read an on-line article or view a book's web page, Zotero automatically senses the page's relevant components and places them into appropriate fields- of course, if you invoke it. If the page being viewed is from one of the sites supported by Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/index.php/translators /), the full reference information will be saved, otherwise only a few of the fields will be filled.

For instance, while you are on a book's page in Amazon (a Zotero supported service), Zotero displays its book icon in the right-end of the browser's address bar. By just clicking on this icon, you can get the book's full citation data added on to your machine's Zotero database.

You can add items such as books, articles, web pages and notes on to Zotero's database. To help you search/access the materials from its repository, Zotero allows you to tag the resources with labels of your choice.

Yet another facility worth a mention is Zotero's tool for generating bibliographic output in formats such as RTF and HTML.

Also, though Zotero runs on Firefox browser, you can add items to its repository even if you are not on-line.

Converting a PDF document into an editable text file has always been a major concern of students and researchers.

Besides good commercial packages, some free solutions, with limited features, are also in place. For instance, the free software PDF2text (http://www.pdf-to-html-word.com/pdf2text.exe) lets you extract text from a PDF document. Also, the latest version of Adobe PDF reader provides a facility to save a PDF document as a text file.

Now, if you are not satisfied with any of the aforementioned solutions, have a look at the web based PDF conversion application Media Convert (http://media-convert.com/).

To convert a PDF document with this free on-line application, you just have to mention the file name, input format (PDF) and the output format. The service allows you to convert a PDF document into a text or RTF or PS file. Of course, PDF format is just one of the several file formats that can be converted using this service. Media converter is a generic file conversion tool meant for converting files of a wide variety that include sound files (like mp3, ogg, wav etc), image files (png, gif and tiff etc) and text files (pdf, rtf, txt and html).

Free medical journals

The medical fraternity is one of the professional communities that exploits the Net rather extensively. Lots of medical journals are available in the free domain and many more may become free sooner. The medical journal portal `The Free Medical Journals' (http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/) is a valuable resource for identifying free medical journals.

This service provides a categorised list of medical journals currently on the Net. You will find links to journals pertaining to specialties such as Virology, Clinical Microbiology, Cell Biology and so on.

J. MURALI

He can be contacted at: jmurali@gmail.com

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A roundup of research tools

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