So I'm sure you've all seen word clouds ala wordle, where it takes all the text from a word document or webpage and then uses word frequencies to generate a kind of infographic where you can see the most used words, the big ideas if you will.
Check it--someone made an app that you can input an author, it pulls all their pubmed abstracts, and then you can input that into wordle. It's called pubmed2wordle.
I decided to look up some of the PIs on my floor, in case I'm ever in the elevator with one of them, I can have some talking points.
For example,
I will know to talk about microRNAs with this dude, or
microRNAs but specifically let-7 with this woman, and also, oh look she works on C. elegans and development.
I think can be a great resource if there's a visiting faculty giving a seminar, or you're trying to pick a lab to rotate in, or you just want to know a little bit more about someone's research without spending hours poring over papers, this might be the first place I go from now on for all those things.
And just to mix it up a little big, because contrary to popular belief I'm not only interested in microRNAs...
That's my dad. He works on yeast and kinetochores and chromatin and microtubules!
It also makes for an interesting discussion of how much information do we actually need to understand something. And is relying on a tool like this, is that being lazy or being efficient? Obviously, it will never become a substitute for reading papers, but it's a pretty neat tool regardless.
Do you think you could find yourself using something like this? Could you see yourself directing a student to it?
