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