NextBio is a phenomenal resource employing the best features of new search and retrieval technology to serve researchers dependent on complex, emergent and rapidly expanding information. It describes itself as “a life sciences search engine for exploring genes, pathways, diseases and compounds across curated data”. The materials indexed by the site include clinical trials, research data (both that which is publicly available, such as the gene data from National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), and unique sets uploaded by researchers to the NextBio site), and literature (which appears to be drawn primarily from the PubMed database, but with NextBio search terms and data structures layered on top). While, with the exception of materials uploaded by users, all of the data is publicly available this resource brings a massive amount of material together and makes it searchable through a single, very intelligent, interface.
The search features of NextBio have been very well designed to accommodate users with different information needs, using a simple, intuitive interface that allows easy navigation through the materials on the site. Searchers can combine concepts using AND and use truncation – either the * or the ? seem to work – for instance, searching “measles and africa* and vaccin*” brings up links to relevant literature and clinical trials. There is also an autocomplete feature that works as a user types to suggest relevant terms – searching the snca gene brings up experimental, literature and clinical trial data. It is also possible to search by institution to see what clinical trials or research may be happening at a university. The search engine is powerful, and the controlled vocabulary applied in the background ensures excellent results.
Results are displayed very clearly, generally starting with a definition of the term searched, followed by information, in the case of genes, that clearly lays out what organisms have been involved in research, and ranked associated terms for normal tissues, diseases, and treatments; searches for diseases allow the user to drill down based on terms for genes and biogroups. Clicking on the narrower terms offered restricts the results displayed. Users can further choose to see literature, clinical trials or experiments within the retrieved results. Each of these techniques brings further enhancements of the database to light. Clicking on literature brings up a tag cloud, allowing further navigation; hovering over the tags brings up definitions, chemical structures or links to further gene definitions and information as appropriate. Citations in the literature are not linked to an institution's holdings, but do provide PMID numbers to facilitate cross checking in PubMed. Each citation displays the tags associated with it, making it easy to skim through the database following particular aspects of a gene or condition. Choosing the Experiments results for a search brings up either data in a standard format to facilitate comparison or links to more information about data sets held outside of NextBio such as on the NCBI site. The Clinical Trials results appear to be drawn from the http://clincialtrials.gov site, but searches in both show the power of NextBio's indexing, as more relevant results appear there than on the original site.
In addition to a clean interface and very slick technology, the site offers an excellent FAQ file, which – unique in this reviewer's experience – actually has questions the user would want answered. There are also useful video introductions to the site and to searching. Going beyond a mere search tool, NextBio is using a Web 2.0 mindset to establish a community of users, encouraging researchers to upload and share data sets and reports in text, csv or Excel formats, and has coined the term “in‐silico lab” for this collaboratory space. Users can set up free accounts to bookmark search results, and these bookmarks can be shared with other users; these accounts enable the users to set up profiles allowing people to identify researchers with similar interests. The community appears quite active and there are notices of seminars and webinars. NextBio has also set up a very smart business model, offering the enhancement of secure, private space for paying enterprise clients.
The only features that the reviewer can suggest to add to this resource are links into institutionally held full‐text journals, perhaps through using a Google Scholar‐like interface, and the ability to search the community of users by interest, as well as by name. Other than that, the developers of NextBio seem to have thought of everything a researcher or librarian could wish for. It is to be hoped that other fields will benefit from this model of an intelligent search tool.
