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FAQs about novoseek  




  • What is novoseek?

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    novoseek is a free biomedical search engine with a revolutionary technology for more efficient searching.


  • How is novoseek different to other search engines like PubMed or Google?

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    Traditional search engines only provide a list of documents that contain the search terms but leave it to the user to wade through ever increasing amounts of data. novoseek processes the documents with intelligent agents that detect biomedical concepts like genes, diseases, drugs or chemical substances. Using this information novoseek offers details about concepts that are related to a search. If a user searches for example for a disease novoseek not only returns the documents where this disease is mentioned but also leads the user to information about drugs that cure that disease, genes that may cause it, or symptoms that are induced by the disease.


  • What can I search in novoseek?

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    Because novoseek indexes Medline abstracts, full text and US Grants, whatever you would search in Medline and Grants you can search in novo|seek. Typical queries include diseases, drugs or genes.


  • Which document sources are indexed in novoseek?

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    Currently novoseek indexes Medline abstracts, US Grants for over 75 institutions including the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) and Full Text open access articles. Soon new sources will be available.


  • Does novoseek index full text?

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    Yes, novoseek indexes the full content of the publications when these are available. There are publications from open access journals in PubMedCentral. When available, the link "FULL TEXT AVAILABLE" is shown below the title.


  • Can I try some sample searches in the different databases?

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    Try the following sample searches to see how novoseek is able to look for publications in Medline, US Grants and Full Text Publications. Try Spasmodic Dysphonia in Medline, Cerebral Palsy in Grants, Parkinsonian disease in Full Text Publications.


  • Is novoseek free?

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    Yes, novo|seek is free and current functionalities will remain free. However, we don't discard to add premium functionality in the future.


  • In which fields of the documents does novo|seek search?

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    By default novoseek searches in the title, abstract, affiliation, authors and MeSH terms of a document. Searches can be restricted to specific fields in the advanced search section.


  • How do the search filters work?

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    novoseek processes the documents your search returns and extracts a list of concepts that are significantly related to this set of documents. These concepts help you navigate efficiently through the results of your search. Clicking on a concept name adds it to the search, this means that now only those documents that contain your original query and the added concept are shown. The list of concepts is also refreshed and shows now the most important concepts for the new document set.


  • How is the relevance of the search filters calculated?

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    The relevance is calculated using a statistical measure that estimates how unlikely it is to find a certain number of documents in the results for a search.


  • What is a bioentity?

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    The biomedical concepts in the search filters represent entity classes with a relevant biomedical meaning like genes, proteins, chemical compounds, diseases, etc.
    A specific entity includes terms that represent the same concept, e.g. a gene symbol and its description will only correspond to one bioentity. When the user includes the terms “breast cancer” and “mitoxantrone” in the search query, novoseek will not only consider those documents that include these exact terms, but also those containing “malignant neoplasm of the breast” and “novantrone”, as both terms are synonyms of “breast cancer” and “mitoxantrone”, respectively.


  • What should I do if I find errors in some annotations of biomedical concepts?

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    We work hard to perfect our technology to correctly detect biomedical concepts. But because of the inherent complexity and ambiguity of natural language there can be errors that are inevitable in an automatic process. If you believe that you have spotted and error please let us know ns_support@novoseek.com.


  • How is the document relevance calculated in the “Sort by”?

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    The relevance is calculated based on how often the search terms occur in a document. The more times they appear the higher the document will rank. We also take into account how frequent terms are in general (terms of higher frequency will have less impact on the rank of a document) and the length of the documents to normalize the term occurrences.


  • Why are there different ways to visualize documents?

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    visualization of results in novoseek
    Clicking on the icons you can choose to visualize to show just the title and bibliographical information, add short extracts of the text where the search terms were found, show all the sentences of a document where the search term appears or show the full abstract of a document. The first two options are best if you just want to quickly find relevant documents for your search whereas the sentence and abstract view will be more useful if you are looking for specific information.


  • How can I use the API & gadgets?

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    Using the API and the gadgets is totally free provided you have to agree to the terms & conditions. Detailed information is available on the API homepage.


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