Biomedical
Research Projects at Your Fingertips
By Larry Morton
You
can access for free more than 2.4 million federally funded projects
from 1986 to the present covering research on a vast number of diseases
and disorders.
The Computer
Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects (CRISP) website
is an excellent resource if you wish to keep abreast of new and
ongoing biomedical research funded by the National Institutes of
Health (NIH). CRISP search results provide project titles, abstracts,
as well as contact information for principal investigators working
at universities, hospitals, and other research institutions throughout
the U.S. and abroad.
By building
a powerful, user-friendly web interface, the NIH has significantly
expanded access to an enormous amount of biomedical information
along with sophisticated text retrieval tools. From an Oracle relational
database, you'll be able to perform both text and fielded retrieval
in a single query. A basic and advanced search form supports Boolean,
phrase, and stem retrieval.
The search
results or displayed records are created "on-the-fly" thus eliminating
the need to store millions of static html pages. Instead of writing
or calling the NIH to make a request for scientific information,
you can simply search the CRISP web site and get quick results.
Easy access to the CRISP database provides a huge time and cost
savings for everyone. It's a re-invented way of doing business.
About the Author
Larry Morton
is Chief, CRISP Information Resources Section at the National Institutes
of Health in Bethesda, MD. You may contact him by email: mortonl@od.nih.gov
or phone: (301) 435-0657.
August 11,
1999
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