How have information and communication technologies changed the way academics conduct research and understand findings in biomedicine?
Increasingly, large raw datasets are data published alongside research results. The availability of these datasets makes it possible for anyone, anywhere to access and analyze the information. This means that we can all benefit from the hard work put into generating these datasets. The same dataset is often used to address different questions by different scientists. Another big development is the efforts of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and other organizations to assemble user-friendly databases of protein structures, DNA sequences, human genetic diseases, pharmacological tools, and other resources. It is easy to move back and forth between these databases and that can be a hugely powerful research tool. Through NLM’s PubMed, you can also link to relevant journal abstracts. PubMed Central provides free full-text articles, but unfortunately at this point only a small proportion of the literature is freely available in PubMed Central in full-text form.
