Vizit is a powerful new way to search the scientific bibliography and a great complement to PubMed. Through its graphical interface, Vizit helps scientists get a quick overview of a research area, discover non-obvious biologically relevant interactions and drill down to the published literature to read on the details. It also supports sharing and collaboration among researchers in the same team or working on the same scientific problem.
Here are some of the more common questions we have been asked by the Vizit user community.
- What is the supporting literature underlying Vizit links?
Vizit is based on PubMed . PubMed abstracts are analyzed using text mining algorithms that extract the names of genes, pathways, diseases and over 20 other biomedical categories from industry standard resources, such as NCBI Gene, Uniprot, MeSH, UMLS, Gene Ontology, etc. From this analysis, Vizit constructs its database of relationships which is what you navigate when you explore Vizit graphs. - How recent is Vizit’s information?
Vizit information is always up to date . PubMed articles are downloaded on a regular basis, relationships are then extracted and added to the Vizit database. - With what priority are publications displayed in Vizit?
Publications are listed in reverse chronological order meaning that most recent publications are shown first. So you always get to see the most recent research results first . - Is there any bias when displaying publications and biomedical connections in Vizit?
There is no bias when showing any information in Vizit . Links between related concepts are ranked based on co-occurrence. Other types of strength calculation might be added in the future based on demand. - Is Vizit free to use?
Absolutely, yes! Not only that, but Vizit users can freely save or share their graphs on a number of popular social networks keeping ownership of the data they save or share.