10 Bookmarklets to Quickly Search NCBI Resources
Spend a lot of time using the web interface to NCBI BLAST or other NCBI services? Want to minimize the time you spend opening BLAST or PubMed search pages? Bookmarklets ? are a handy way to quickly search for information. Save these bookmarklets for easy use by dragging any of the links below to your bookmarks bar, as pictured here:
Then, there are 2 ways to use the bookmarklet:
- Highlight text within a webpage, then click the bookmarklet, and a NCBI search will be started using the selected text as the search parameters.
- Click the bookmarklet and a pop-up window will appear, into which you can paste your search term(s) or sequence. Click “OK” and the specified search will load in your current window.
- Search Pubmed–The starting point for any biomedical scientific literature search.
- Search PubMedCentral–A great tool to find articles that may only mention your term of interest in the discussion, methods, or figures of the paper.
- BLASTN–Find nucleotide matches to your nucleotide sequence.
- BLASTP–Find protein matches to your protein.
- BLASTX–Find protein matches to the 6 frame translation of your nucleotide sequence in Genbank.
- Search All Entrez–Find all references to a set of terms in all NCBI Entrez databases
- Search Entrez Protein–Use accession numbers, protein functions, and other keywords to find proteins of interest.
- Search Entrez Nucleotide–Use accession numbers, gene identifiers, and other terms to find nucleotide sequences.
- Search Entrez Genome–Use variety of terms to find genomic sequences, integrated genetic and physical maps, and sequence maps.
- Search Entrez Gene–Search the NCBI database of genes from RefSeq genomes.
Obviously, NCBI and NLM provide dozens of resources, but hopefully these search tools will be useful to you. I have tested these in Firefox 2.0 and Safari on Mac OS X 10.4.9.
These bookmarklets were adapted from those available at Jesse’s Bookmarklet Site.