LIMSWiki:Resources/Research and reference

About these tools

Not all of these knowledge bases and research and reference tools directly relate to laboratory and other types of informatics. However, they all could be considered useful tools for anyone researching either informatics or other scientific disciplines. Note: some of the resources found here may be repeated in other section of the resource guide. Additionally, there may be tools useful for research not found here but found elsewhere in the resource guide. For example, many open-access journals may make for great research tools, but they appear elsewhere in the LIMSWiki:Resources guide.

Knowledge base, research, and reference

Knowledge bases and portals

• AmericanEHR Partners: "dedicated to the creation of an online community of clinicians who use information technology to deliver care to Americans"

• Bioinformatics.ca Bioinformatics Links Directory: "features curated links to molecular resources, tools and databases"

• Coiera.com: Your Health Informatics Headquarters: a portal to general knowledge about health and other types of informatics, presented by Coute Enterprises, Inc.

• Directory of Open Access Journals: a search tool for finding open-access journals

• DLINE: a "scholarly portal to access journals, research services, alerts, register for meetings and renew your membership" with DLINE

• Electronic Health Record Resources: a collection of online electronic health record and informatics resources, presented by Moya K. Mason, MLIS

• FreeBookCentre.net: Free Medical Books: "free medical books and resources ... [that] are highly beneficial for doctors and students"

• FreeBooks4Doctors: "created to promote the free availability of medical books on the Internet"

• Free Medical Journals: "created to promote the free availability of full text medical journals on the Internet"

• Health Informatics World Wide: a health and medical informatics portal

• Health Information Technology Toolkit, Rural Assistance Center: "provides federal resources to help guide rural health facilities and providers through the phases of choosing, implementing and operating [health information technology] systems"

• Health Mash: a "health knowledge base and semantic search and discovery engine for trusted health information"

• Health-e-Directory: "a comprehensive listing of products and service solutions for e-Health"

• ipl2: "supports and enhances library services through the provision of authoritative collections, information assistance, and information instruction for the public"

• Journal Watch: a web portal "providing brief, clearly written, clinically focused perspectives on the medical developments that affect practice"

• KLAS Enterprises: "helps healthcare providers make informed technology decisions by reporting accurate, honest, and impartial vendor performance data"

• MedExpert/WWW: "intends to be a comprehensive source for world-wide available medical expert and knowledge-based systems;" not clear if still actively being supported

• MedicalStudent.com: Medical Textbooks: links to free medical textbooks

• Medknow Publications - Journals: a medical journal search engine

• Nursing-Informatics.com: "a place to learn, explore, plan, reflect, and dialogue about nursing informatics"

• Open Directory Project: The following informatics and healthcare categories may be of interest...

Informatics categories

Bioinformatics software

Bioinformatics online services

Healthcare software

• OpenClinical: aims to "publicise and disseminate development tools and techniques for building healthcare applications that comply with the highest possible quality, safety and ethical standards"

• OpenHelix: a relevancy search tool of "tutorial suites and hundreds of bioinformatics resources"

• Science Knowledge Domain Links: a large collection of science- and research-related web links, many of them dealing with informatics

• SearchingMed.com: a search engine "searching medical peer-reviewed information" from numerous sources

• SearchingRadiology.com: a search engine "searching radiology peer-reviewed information" from numerous sources

• TILE.NET - E-Mail List Directory: "an email newsletter, email discussion lists, email alerts and Internet Service Provider (ISP) directory"

• WorldWideScience.org: "a global science gateway comprised of national and international scientific databases and portals"

• Zetoc Research Database:" provides Z39.50-compliant access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC)"

Research tools

• Archives Hub: a search hub for discovering the archived content of over 220 institutions in the U.K.

• BioMed Central: access to over 250 peer-reviewed open access journals

• British Library - Public Catalogue: "a one-stop solution for the discovery and delivery of local and remote resources, such as books, journal articles, and digital objects"

• CiteSeer: "an evolving scientific literature digital library and search engine that has focused primarily on the literature in computer and information science"

• Cogprints: "an electronic archive for self-archive papers in any area of psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, and many areas of computer science," biology, and medicine

• Data.gov: a U.S. initiative "to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government"

• Directory of Open Access Repositories: "an authoritative directory of academic open access [data] repositories"

• Education Resources Information Center: "unlimited access to more than 1.4 million bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials"

• Embase: a "database covering the most important international biomedical literature from 1947 to the present day"

• FindTheBest.com - Software: a comparison tool for software, including medical and EHR software

• getCITED: "an online, member-controlled academic database, directory and discussion forum"

• Health Information Technology, National Conference of State Legislatures: health informatics documents via the U.S. NCSL

• Health Services and Sciences Research Resources, U.S. National Library of Medicine: "information about research datasets and instruments/indices employed in health services research, behavioral and social sciences, and public health"

• HealthCyberMap: a collection of information related to an effort to map "the health cyberspace using Hypermedia GIS and clinical codes"

• HighWire Press - Free Online Full-text Articles: an archive of free full-text science articles and papers

• HINARI: provides "free or very low cost online access to the major journals in biomedical and related social sciences to local, not-for-profit institutions in developing countries"

• INFOMINE: "a virtual library of Internet resources relevant to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level"

• Library of Congress Online Catalog: contains over "15 million catalog records for books, serials, manuscripts, maps, music, recordings, images, and electronic resources in the Library of Congress collections" (alternate URL)

• LIMS Resource Center: "literature, publications, and free white papers on a multitude of LIMS applications," via ChemWare; registration required

• LIMSpec: "a template to help you gather your laboratory's information management system requirements," via the Laboratory Informatics Institute (additional info)

• myExperiment.com: "a collaborative environment where scientists can safely publish their workflows and in silico experiments, share them with groups and find those of others"

• The National Academies Press: "publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative information on important matters in science and health policy"

• National Archives and Records Administration: a U.S. record keeper of important legal and historical documents and materials

• NHS Evidence - Journals and Databases: "enables access to authoritative clinical and non-clinical evidence and best practice through a web-based portal"

• Publications and Letters Library Search: "find publications, letters, circulars and related documents that have not been archived," via the Department of Health, U.K.

• PubMed and PubMed Central: citations and searches for standard and open-access biomedical literature

• Registry of Open Access Repositories: "promote[s] the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world"

• ResourceShelf: a collection of free web resources, "including databases, lists and rankings, real-time sources, and multimedia," including editor comments and observations about those resources

• SCImago Journal and Country Rank: "a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database"

• Science.gov: "searches over 55 databases and over 2100 selected websites from 13 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results"

• Scirus: "allows researchers to search for not only journal content but also scientists' homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information"

• WikiCFP: a wiki for calls for papers

Reference material

• Bioinformatics.org Wiki: a bioinformatics wiki set up by Bioinformatics Organization, Inc., containing more than 900 pages of content

• ClinfoWiki: the clinical informatics wiki: a wiki devoted to biomedical and other types of informatics, containing more than 800 pages of content

• Deciphering Medspeak - Medical Library Association: a resource "to help translate common 'medspeak' terms" (includes link to an alphabetical list of terms)

• "Designing Consumer Health IT: A Guide for Developers and Systems Designers": released by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, this guide is "designed to highlight key strategies that have been used to produce outstanding consumer IT products" (note: link leads directly to a PDF file)

• Epocrates - Mobile Products: provides the free iPhone and iPad application "Rx," a drug and interaction reference guide

• Find-A-Code: "an online database of medical billing codes and information"

• Glossary of Public Health Informatics Organizations, Activities, and Terms: a collection of health IT terms and information, supported by the National Association of County and City Health Officials

• Healthcare Interoperability Glossary at Corepoint Health: a collection of healthcare and HL7 vocabulary and definitions, supported by Corepoint Health

• The History of Health Informatics: a brief history of health informatics as presented by the Department of Health Informatics and Health Information Management, University of Illinois at Chicago

• HONselect: a "search integrator for strictly medical and health queries"

• L-Soft: CataList, the official catalog of LISTSERV lists

• LIMSbook: a reference guide to popular LIMS, comparing them and listing prices, via the Laboratory Informatics Institute

• LIMSuniversity: an open-access learning site with a few general laboratory informatics courses

• LIMSwiki: the laboratory, health, and science informatics encyclopedia: a laboratory, health, and science informatics wiki set up by the Laboratory Informatics Institute, containing more than 900 pages of content

• LOINC: Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes: "a universal code system for identifying laboratory and clinical observations"

• MedlinePlus Medical Dictionary: online medical dictionary, supported by the U.S. National Library of Medicine

• MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia: online medical encyclopedia, supported by the U.S. National Library of Medicine

• The Merck Manual: "a series of healthcare books for medical professionals and consumers"

• Multi-Level Healthcare Information Modelling: reference material relating to multi-level information modeling, "an approach to software development to create semantically interoperable applications by using a generic reference model as a basis for software and then defining concept models as restrictions on the reference model"

• NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices: "a dictionary containing unique identifiers (codes) and associated textual descriptions for representing medicines and medical devices in information systems and electronic communications"

• UMLS: Unified Medical Language System: "integrates and distributes key terminology, classification and coding standards, and associated resources to promote creation of more effective and interoperable biomedical information systems and services"