Carrie Iwema
Carrie is an Information Specialist in Molecular Biology for the Health Sciences Library System at the University of Pittsburgh. She has a PhD in Neuroscience and a Masters in Library Science.
Articles by Carrie Iwema:
Navigating the Sea of Human Genetics, Part I
Ahoy mateys! At my workplace we’ve recently become EXTREMELY excited about a resource called the HuGE Navigator. It’s so great that it’s going to take me a couple of articles to highlight its features. Hop on board to learn a little about it! So What is HuGE Navigator? HuGE Navigator is an integrated set of…
Get PDFs ASAP with Pubget
After quite a long hiatus (which included a conference in Hawaii, whoo hoo!), I’m back to highlight a cool and relatively new search engine for scientific literature that is going to make you squeal with glee (ok, it made me squeal at least). I’m assuming that you’re very familiar with how to identify relevant research…
A Video is Worth a Million Words
If a picture is worth a thousand words then video and audiovisual presentations must be worth millions. So Jing, a free piece of software that allows users to easily create annotated visual communications, should be an essential tool in your communications palette. Jing allows you to capture videos of onscreen activity and easily share them…
What is Your Favorite Gene?
Today I’m going to tell you about another new genetics resource that’s only been available for a couple of months. This gem is “YFG (Your Favorite Gene) powered by Ingenuity” and it’s freely available thanks to a partnership between Sigma-Aldrich and Ingenuity Systems. You read that right, these two for-profit companies are giving researchers something…
Navigating the sea of human genetics, Part II
Avast, me hearties, I’m back with Part II of our exploration of the HuGE Navigator. To get up to speed, be sure to check out Part I. In Part II I’m going to go over the HuGEtools, which are used to mine the human genome epidemiology literature. The tools are: HuGE Literature Finder HuGE Investigator…
Biology + Computers + Education
I just finished reading an Opinion article by Dr. Lincoln D Stein in Genome Biology entitled “Bioinformatics: alive and kicking” which inspired me to do some sharing. No, I’m not going to start a debate on whether “bioinformatics” is a discipline or a tool (although that would be a potentially lively discussion). Instead I’m going…
From the Lab to the Library…
This may be a familiar story for some of you. I started my PhD program in Neuroscience full of hope and excited about where my future would take me. Like many of you, I assumed I would follow the traditional path – grad student postdoc, then tenure track faculty at a research university. Well, I…
Taming the Data Stampede with Wikis
Since you’re a Bitesize Bio reader, you’re well aware that there is an abundance of both broad and specialized bioinformatics tools freely available for researchers – if you know where and how to find them. Recently emerging is a push to combine or link some of the most important concept-related databases as well as create…
Be A Bio-Rockstar with ClusterMed
Back in October, Nick wrote about the scientific literature searching resource GoPubMed. Today I want to introduce all of you to another rocking PubMed search engine called ClusterMed. Freely provided by Vivisimo, Inc. (“Search Done Right”), ClusterMed uses the Vivisimo Velocity Search Platform “to organize PubMed’s extensive inventory of medical research articles into dynamic categories…
Free Online Bioinformatics Tools
PapersIn recognition of a fresh new year and a fresh new direction for Bitesize Bio, I thought I’d start my tenure as the fresh new Bioinformatics “guru” by introducing you to a handful of websites that will help you locate established as well as fresh new and (mostly) free online molecular biology and bioinformatics databases…
18 Ways to Improve your PubMed searches
Do you *really* know what you’re doing when you search for articles in PubMed? Are you familiar with Boolean operators? What does “MeSH” mean to you? Can you locate (and use) the Limits tab? History? Details? Have you set up automatic updates with MyNCBI? Do you know how PubMed relates to the other NCBI databases?…