What websites do medical researchers use?

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  • Thread starter Thread starter FallenApple
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    Medical Websites
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Discussion Overview

The discussion centers around the resources and websites that medical researchers utilize to access scientific literature, data, and methodologies. Participants explore various platforms for finding numerical data, methodologies, and source code relevant to their research, highlighting the challenges associated with reproducibility in scientific studies.

Discussion Character

  • Exploratory
  • Technical explanation
  • Debate/contested

Main Points Raised

  • Some participants express dissatisfaction with Google, suggesting it yields low-quality responses from non-experts.
  • PubMed is frequently mentioned as a primary resource for biomedical literature, though it requires users to extract data from published articles themselves.
  • Other platforms like Google Scholar and Web of Science are noted as useful search engines for scientific literature.
  • Participants discuss the utility of filtering searches with specific prefixes (e.g., "nih:" or "pubmed:") to improve the quality of results.
  • There is a shared concern about the lack of accessible source code for data analysis, which complicates reproducibility in research.
  • Some researchers mention using specific databases like NCBI GEO for genomics data, while acknowledging the challenges of following methodologies from papers due to potential missing details.
  • Interactive tools like Jupyter notebooks are mentioned as potential resources for analysis, but some participants express skepticism about their applicability in handling large datasets typical in certain research areas.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants generally agree on the importance of PubMed and other scientific literature databases, but there is no consensus on the best methods for accessing and utilizing data. Disagreements exist regarding the effectiveness of various tools and the challenges of reproducibility in scientific research.

Contextual Notes

Participants highlight limitations related to the accessibility of data and methodologies in published papers, as well as the reliance on proprietary software that may not be available to all researchers.

FallenApple
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Google is pretty much useless. Most items entered are just responses by non MDs or PhDs with no rigor whatsoever.

I'm looking for a website that is scientific with an abundant source of numerical figures/values. (p-vals, methodology, source code for their data analysis etc.)
 
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PubMed. But you won't find any data in it, you'll have to do the work yourself of going back to the published articles.
 
Usually, one would consult the scientific literature to find data, methodology, and source code for particular studies (though more specialized subfields may have specific depositories for data). As DrClaude mentioned, PubMed is the main portal biomedical researchers use to search for papers. Google Scholar and Web of Science are other good search engines.
 
If you prefix your search with
Code:
nih: [search pattern]

Or pubmed:, etc., you filter out most useless references. You will also get some few publications meant for non-professionals. These are quality content.
google scholar gets me too many references behind a paywall, NIH (pubmed) does that a lot less.
 
I predominantly use Pubmed, Embase, Cochrane and Uptodate.
 
FallenApple said:
source code for their data analysis
Ha, I wish such a resource for this existed. Would help with reproducibility. But a lot of science is also done with expensive proprietary software, so even if you had the code or saved project, you may not necessarily be able to run it.

The reality is you read a paper, download their data (at least in genomics we got things like NCBI GEO website for that!), then try to follow the written methodology from the paper/supplements using whatever tools you have (not necessarily what was used in the paper, but even if you do, they may not spell out all the parameters) and hope for the best.

Reproducible science is a problem.
 
onoturtle said:
Ha, I wish such a resource for this existed. Would help with reproducibility. But a lot of science is also done with expensive proprietary software, so even if you had the code or saved project, you may not necessarily be able to run it.

The reality is you read a paper, download their data (at least in genomics we got things like NCBI GEO website for that!), then try to follow the written methodology from the paper/supplements using whatever tools you have (not necessarily what was used in the paper, but even if you do, they may not spell out all the parameters) and hope for the best.

Reproducible science is a problem.

For analysis done in python, some researchers will put their analysis into an interactive python notebook (like a jupyter notebook) and provide a link to the notebook in their paper.
 
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I've never encountered that. I did attend a workshop for R that used jupyter notebooks. I suppose one could use that, using the script to download the data and run a simple analysis. I just don't see this happening with the area I'm in with terabytes of omics data, processing that takes hours on relatively big machines, and tools probably not even installed/accessible on the machine running jupyter (e.g. proprietary IPA for pathway analysis is pretty popular). I suppose a jupyter notebook for a microarray experiment could work where the script downloads data from GEO or whatever and use a bunch of BioConductor R libraries to do the analysis. That usually isn't very intensive.
 

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