Scientific Image Search Engine – CiteAb Introductory Guide
5
Min Read
In this blog:
- How to start a search for relevant images
- How to use filters and linked data to guide your search
- How you can use scientific images to find the right reagents
At CiteAb, we’ve spent over a decade collecting data on reagent use from publications, powering our Explore Platform to help researchers find the right reagents, faster.
Last month, we were excited to launch the CiteAb Explore platform, bringing together our improved Reagent Search and new Image Search Engine.
Today we give you an introduction to our Image Search tool, including a step by step guide of how you can use it to accelerate your research.
You can read our reagent search guide here.
How searching scientific images can help you save time planning experiments
Our Image Search Engine is a powerful new way to explore 850,000+ experimental images, extracted from the scientific literature and cropped to the panel of interest – all in one place.
Scientific images are a critical part of experimental planning: they help you understand how a product works, what results look like, and how others have approached similar experiments.
Example use cases
Imagine you are studying a cancer research target with an IHC experiment. You want to understand what work, if any, has been done in the past; which markers are commonly studied alongside your target to build panels; the expected staining patterns you’d be looking for; and experimental protocols that work. Plus, you’d need to identify reagents that produce quality data when studying your target.
Similar stories exist for researchers across many applications. For example, those looking to do western blotting may want to see how a protein will run, what apparent size others have reported and check the experimental conditions that produced high quality data.
Finding such information manually can be incredibly time-consuming. Images that contain this data are scattered across multiple publications, supplier websites or buried within multi-panel figures.
Our new search tool makes it easier than ever to find images relevant to your disease, cell line, protein, application and more, and then dig directly into the experimental context and reagents used.
“I used it to search for western blots of specific targets. It is great to visually see hundreds to thousands of excerpts of signaling pathway western blots, filtered down to my specifications.” – – Kristina Hamel, Associate Scientist, aTyr Pharma, Inc.
A Step-By-Step Guide to Using the CiteAb Image Search Engine
1. Start with a search related to your field of interest
Begin by typing in what you’re interested in:
- A cell line (e.g., HEK293)
- A protein (e.g. CD44)
Our image search engine retrieves relevant images, ranked by recency.
2. Narrow down results using powerful filters
Just like our reagent search engine, the image search engine includes filters to help you zero in on the most relevant images.
Filters include:
- Application (e.g., ICC, IHC, western blot)
- Reactivity (e.g. Human, Rat)
- Cell line or organ (e.g. Brain, HeLa)
- Research area or Disease (E.g. cancer research, Alzheimer’s)
Use these to refine your search and quickly surface images that are directly applicable to your research.
3. Dig into experimental results
Once your filters are applied, you will see a list of images which are:
- Cropped to the panel of interest
- Linked to the original publication
- Linked to the reagents used
We link out to open-access, pre-print and closed-access journals for maximum coverage.
You can navigate to the publication to access protocols and further experimental details.
This streamlines experimental planning – with valuable information such as conditions, dilutions and expected results easily accessible.
4. Evaluate reagent performance through real data
By linking to reagents used in each image, you can find reagents for targets of interest, as well reagents for targets that are commonly studied alongside them.
You are also able to click on the reagent used in an image and be taken to a CiteAb product page, containing supplier-provided data, third-party data (e.g. YCharOS validation data) and internal data – through our new ‘private data sharing’ team feature – if available.
We also link to further citations and experimental images on these pages.
You can filter citations by application, validation and more, and view handy summary graphs covering common dilutions, applications or reactivities for the product.
Evaluate all of this data to determine if the reagent is likely to produce the results you’d expect in your experimental set up.
You can then visit supplier sites directly from our product pages for easy procurement.
Try the CiteAb Image Search Engine Today
Give it a try for faster decisions and fewer failed experiments – fueled by high-quality experimental information.
The image search engine is free for academics, and we offer a free two week trial for commercial users.
