Whether applying for a postdoc, a grant, or a tenure position, you will need to compile a publication list every now and then. There can be many ways to do so, from maintaining an Excel sheet, to building your profile on a faculty page. One option, however, requires minimum effort from your side and keeps […]

Jo McEntyre, EMBL-EBI; Thomas Lemberger, EMBO; Mark Patterson, eLife; Kristen Rattan, Collaborative Knowledge Foundation; Alfonso Valencia, Barcelona Supercomputer Centre. The use of preprints in the life sciences offers tantalising opportunities to change the way research results are communicated and reused, and the work of ASAPbio has been key in engaging the scientific community to promote […]

Modern scientists are busier than ever. Their typical days are filled not only with experimental work, but also with teaching, supervising, mentoring, grant applications, budget planning… The list goes on and on. No wonder there is barely any time left to stay on top of the field. Keeping track of published literature is made easier […]

Imagine you are exploring a new topic. You start by searching for relevant papers in the field. You type your query, click the search button, and end up with thousands of scientific articles, waiting to be read. How do you identify which papers to focus on? In Europe PMC, search results can be sorted differently […]

This has been a very busy and fruitful year for Europe PMC. With holidays approaching we take a look back at some of the Europe PMC achievements and milestones of 2016. We kicked off in January with a new, mobile-friendly homepage and information pages. The final design was based on user research in which we […]

What exactly is Europe PMC? How is it different from PubMed Central? What can I do with Europe PMC? Those are some of the questions I had myself when I first heard of Europe PMC. And now my task is to make sure that everyone can answer them easily. My name is Maria Levchenko and […]

Manual curation is vital for maintaining quality information in biological databases. However, with the exponential growth in biological data this approach is both challenging and time consuming. We wanted to create a scalable and sustainable process which could complement manual curation.    We recently launched a new service – SciLite – that allows text-mined annotations to be […]

We’re delighted to announce that the Academy of Medical Sciences has joined Europe PMC as a new funder, bringing the total funders to 27. The Academy of Medical Sciences represents the diverse spectrum of medical science – from basic research through clinical application to healthcare delivery. Their mission is to promote medical science and its […]

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke Sometimes the changes we release on Europe PMC are not immediately obvious! For the last few months we’ve been working hard to migrate our search to a technology called Solr. Our search has been using a Lucene-based index and customised query handler for […]

We’ve recently launched a re-designed Grant Finder on Europe PMC. You can use the Grant Finder to search over 56,700 biomedical research grants, awarded to the 23,000 Principal Investigators supported by the 26 Europe PMC funders. Learn 5 ways to use the new Grant Finder: 1. Find a collaborator As a researcher, or student, you can find potential […]

Since our blog post last summer on the inclusion of Wikipedia as an external links provider, we have been lucky to host an intern, Tom Arrow,  who has spent the last few months investigating possible further connections between Wikimedia projects and Europe PMC. This post highlights some of the ways Tom has been exploring these […]

We are excited to announce the launch of the Europe PMC author profile pages! Based on your ORCID record, they provide a graphical overview of your publications in Europe PMC and your citation rate over time. With over 2.2 million articles in Europe PMC linked to about 172,000 unique ORCIDs, we expect this feature to […]

You may notice that the Europe PMC website looks a little different. Perhaps a little clearer, neater, bolder? More importantly, we also hope that it is easier to use and to find key information about Europe PMC. Yes: we have given the Europe PMC website a makeover to celebrate the New Year! In particular, we […]

For Open Access week 2015, we tweeted some number-related facts about Europe PMC, reproduced with a little additional context here. 1.  #EuropePMC has over 3,447,632 full text articles, with over 1,134,397 in the #openaccess subset http://europepmc.org/FtpSite #OAweek #OAinNumbers As well as full text articles, Europe PMC contains all of the 25.4M PubMed abstracts, plus additional […]

Europe PMC Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life sciences, healthcare and medical humanities. It includes full text reports from government agencies, like the UK’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the US’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and content allowed by participating publishers. Importantly it also includes scholarly monographs […]

Title quote from ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’, Sonnet 43, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Our relationship with ORCID personal identifiers blooms in a number of ways: ORCID Wizard Europe PMC was an early adopter of ORCIDs allowing researchers the ability to link articles to an ORCID using our easy-to-use article claiming Wizard. Not only can this […]

“Education doesn’t make you happy. And what is freedom? We don’t become happy just because we are free, if we are. Or because we have been educated, if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears. Tells use where delights are […]

Europe PMC has a new provider of External Links: links from articles on Europe PMC to related content on 3rd party websites. Our most recent addition provides links from over 300,000 articles to entries in Wikipedia: the free encyclopaedia. For example, from the article ‘Spinal subdural abscess following epidural steroid injection’, you can link (via […]

Peer review is the cornerstone of how we decide what research to publish. As currently implemented, it generally consists of two or three referees giving anonymous comments on a research article prior to publication … or … rejection. Much has been written about the failings of this process (a very small sample of illustrative references […]

We’re delighted that 2 new funders have joined Europe PMC, bringing the total to 28! The new funders are: Alzheimer’s Society is a membership organisation, which works to improve the quality of life of people affected by dementia in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Many of their 20,000 members have personal experience of dementia, as […]

With the Access to Understanding awards ceremony just about wrapping up, we can now announce the winners… First place was awarded to Philippa Matthews for her entry ‘Rolling back malaria: A journey through space and time’, which described research exploring the changing patterns of malaria risk across Africa. The piece was praised by our judges […]

We are excited to announce voting has now opened for Access to Understanding’s People’s Choice Award! The People’s Choice Award is an important part of the competition – since the entries are written for the public, we think they should be judged by the public. Click here or on the image below to read and vote […]

More than 300 Cochrane Systematic Reviews, funded under the 2007 and 2010 UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Programme Grant programmes, are available on Europe PMC. This has been a collaborative project between Cochrane, Wiley, and the Europe PMC team, and has enabled us to make this subset of full-text reviews available to access […]

Access to Understanding is getting bigger and better every year. The 2015 science-writing competition attracted over 300 entries from all over the world. But don’t take my word for it, explore the map below to see where they came from and what they were about. Globalised Science With 227 submissions, the lion’s share of entries […]

Guest post from Lisa O’Sullivan, Director, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health By now it’s axiomatic that the digital world poses new opportunities and challenges for researchers, libraries, educational institutions, and publishers, which must be engaged with digital formats in a sustained and thoughtful way. The realities of this landscape encompass challenges to […]