Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF)

From NIF:

Neuroscience researchers should definitely take a look at the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) site. NIF, an initiative of the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, includes a variety of free web-based neuroscience data, resources and tools – a lot of them!

Try out NIF by going to the main search page and doing a search. Then click on *NIF Registry* to see the web resources that match your search, or *Databases* to see the hits in databases that have actually been searched in full, or *Literature* to see both Pubmed and Textpresso literature results.

The full features of Textpresso, created at Cal Tech, include a system that searches the full text of over 100,000 articles from the main neuroscience journals and indicates which sentences in an article contain your search terms. Sentences before and after the match are also displayed so you can see the context of your search results. You can even use Textpresso to search for statements that one researcher made about another. There are links from within the Textpresso record to PubMed and you can also link to the full text of the article, if UCSD subscribes to that journal or if it’s free on the web.

The NIF creators encourage everyone to help make this a richer resource.

NeuroLex (Neuroscience Lexicon) is a resource that lists the neurosciences vocabulary, their properties, and relationships to one another. NeuroLex is a wiki so if you have ideas for additional terms that should be added, go ahead and add your recommendations. As NeuroLex improves, so will your ability to search NIF.

Another way that you can participate in NIF is by recommending web resources for both the NIF Registry and Data Federation sections. If you have any questions about NIF or have resources you want to recommend, please contact Anita Bandrowski at abandrowski@ucsd.edu or Erin Reid at erin@brainvis.wustl.edu

The tutorials are especially helpful.