ResearchBuzz

Clinical research company Quintiles has launched Clinical Research at http://www.clinicalresearch.com, a Web site that, well, makes it easier to find clinical research.

The front page of the Web site asks you to provide the condition for which you’re searching and a location. If you enter something ambiguous (like “cancer”) the site will suggest topics. The location can be as narrow as a zip code, or a city (Madrid, Spain is one of the examples) or as encompassing as USA.

I did a search for autism in USA. I found 81 global studies but two within 150 miles of my stated point — one in Kansas City and one in Oklahoma City. When you look at the results for your search you’ll get a screen that looks like this:

You’ll notice that there are many ways to filter your search results — by age, gender, type of study, etc. — if you happen to get more than two search
results. Each map pointer has a brief amount of information about the study, but to get more data you’ll have to click on the title of a study, when the map will center on that study and present more context and additional details in a pointer bubble. You’ll also be able to get study contact information, find similar studies, or e-mail the study to a friend. (It kind of bugs me that you have to register to get study contact information.)

What you’ll find really depends on what you’re researching — I found one study of thyroid disorders, and that was in the context of breast cancer. When you review the available clinical trial studies please be sure to check the last time they were updated. Of the two autism studies I looked at, one was last updated in 2005. (The other was updated in the last week.)

The registration thing bugs me but this site has a lot of information and the search is easy to use. Worth a look.

You might have heard about Futurity; it launched in beta in March, but did not have its official launch until a couple of weeks ago. Futurity, available at http://futurity.org, contains information on lots of research from lots of different universities.

Before you go to the front page, go ahead and visit http://futurity.org/about/. You’ll see a list of participating universities. There are a lot of big names here — participating institutions include Stanford, Duke, Yale, and Berkeley. So as you might imagine there’s a lot to see here.

From the front page you can look at releases in several different categories: Earth & Environment, Health & Medicine, Science & Design, and Society & Culture. Releases when I liked at it were all over the map, including things like “A better way to turn out turbine blades” and “Gene bends rules of brain development” and “It’s not a monster. It’s Frankencamera.”

The stories are more academic than the headlines would leave you to believe (thank goodness — the headlines are too “teaser-oriented” for my taste) and have a lot of information. Unfortunately I didn’t see any stories that had direct links to researchers/writers/academics; all the stories I saw linked back to a university news stories. Frustrating; how could you go to so much trouble to get so much social media on the site and then making readers jump through an extra hoop to get in touch with researchers or academics?

Each section has its own page, with lists of stories. Stories can be commented on, as well as submitted to Digg, Facebook, Twitter, etc. (Futurity has been seriously social media rev’d up.) You can sign up to get a daily digest of stories but I also appreciate the RSS feeds — there’s a general one and one for each category.

The site’s only been up since March, but I can already tell that I could spend a lot of time browsing this site. Despite my complaint about the links back to news sites, the general RSS feed’s in my browser and I’m looking forward to reading it.