Hi all,
SciBite 1.8 is now with us and as ever there are a host of bug-fixes and internal improvements you probably wont care about.. But there are three new pieces of functionality that have gone in, namely:
- SciBite Central
- Grant Indicator
- News Rate – quick overview of a topic’s activity
A couple of other features have gone in too… I’ll write a separate blog post on these shortly:
- NewsPlot – graphical representation of inter-topic relationships
- Utopia Documents Integration
SciBite Central
This is a landing page to access feeds and other data that cut across topics. Newsletters that cover things like “Biomarkers” or “Regulatory approvals” etc. can be found here. As we increase the number of services available, you’ll find more links on this page and we’ll post things on this blog too, so you know they are there.
So, lets say you want to keep up with new and interesting drugs. The “New Drug To SciBite” feed may well be of interest – it shows articles mentioning drugs that SciBite hasn’t seen before. Really useful for staying on top of very new developments.
If you care more about the later stage of the pipeline, then the “Regulatory Approvals” feed might be interesting. It streams all the articles we see regarding FDA or EMEA approval. The corresponding “Regulatory Issues” link will take you to articles that seem to discuss challenges to drugs by regulatory agencies. In this way you can cover both bases easily.
Grant Indicator
As you may recall from previous posts, we have added NIH Grants as a feed source into the system. However, there can be many of these and when we first added them in, the completely overwhelmed the other news. So, now we don’t automatically show them. But how do you know if there are any available? Well, once you load a page on a topic and indicator will appear after a short time:
So, now you know you can click on the “G” icon and view these.
Also, we have now created an RSS feed specifically for grants on a topic:
So, now you can choose whether you also want to take this feed.
News Rate
This is just a simple visual image, but its quite powerful. For single topic newsletters you’ll now see a little rate chart
This shows you the article flow into SciBite over the last 90 days (most recent on the right). You’re able to see whether the news on this topic is spread out, or there is any form of “spike”. For example, this is Votrient, which just got FDA panel backing and you can clearly see its really spiked this week.
OK, thats it for now. I’ll write up the other features in separate posts soon.
Finally, There are now over 11 thousand users of scibite, in only a month and a bit of launch. This is fantastic, thanks to everyone who has used the site and got in touch, we hope we can continue to provide useful information as we continue to enhance the system.