Happy New Year!
5
Min Read
In this blog:
- We reflect on the changes we saw in 2021
- The team shares some highlights
- We thank researchers and suppliers who use and partner with CiteAb!
A very happy new year from CiteAb!
In spite of the continued challenges and restrictions of 2021, CiteAb celebrated a fair few milestones, changes and achievements in our most successful year yet. This included new team-members, new features and awards!
To the researchers who continue to use CiteAb, thank you for your feedback and for spreading the word about our search tool, and to our supplier partners thank you for the continued positivity and support in 2021.
From the whole team
As a team, we were very pleased to reach some significant milestones. Firstly, the data we collect has now surpassed 10 million individual, well annotated reagents.
Our reagent search engine saw its most popular month, meaning more researchers were able to easily find reagents that work for their experiments. We ultimately hope that by increasing our user base, we are helping to accelerate research!
We also launched the 2022 CiteAb Awards – marking their eighth year. We were very excited to introduce a number of new categories including: ‘Acquisition of the Year’, and some familiar favourites such as “Researchers’ Choice’ and ‘Image of the Year’.
As well as our own awards, we were the recipient of the Vesalius Innovation Award as first runner up. Shortlisted with some fantastic and forward thinking companies, this recognition validated our approach as a company.
Finally, 2021 ushered in a growing CiteAb team, with the arrivals of Justin (associate product manager) and myself (associate scientific communications manager).
The team shares some personal and professional highlights from 2021 below.
Andrew Chalmers – Founder of CiteAb
“It is challenging to pick a single highlight from this year! However, I was particularly proud of the Innovate UK funded Covid reagent search platform launch, which required a lot of hard work from the entire team.
It was also a really exciting year behind the scenes, with the beginnings of some new and unique partnerships being established. We hope to announce and launch these projects fully in 2022!
My personal highlight would have to be finally returning to parkrun after 18 months – it was worth the wait and I would highly recommend giving it a go!
Product Management Team
Alicia Cooper
“It has been really exciting to expand published images to include ELISA kits and knockout/knockdown validation. The success of this expansion paves the way for adding further reagent types in the future.
Personally, I have been working hard to improve my Italian! Taking two online classes a week with an Italian school based in Milan has been really enjoyable and I hope to keep on improving this year.”
Justin Ngai
“I was very pleased to work on a fascinating project last year, helping ProteinSimple build their antibody database. Joining CiteAb in 2021, it was also particularly exciting for me to be able to go into the office in September and work with the team in person!
Being able to see my friends in person and enjoy going out for good meals again brought me a lot of joy outside of work!”
Rebecca Sadler
“I’ve been thrilled with the leaps forward we have made with the protein dataset: we’ve almost doubled the number of citations since 2020, and added seven new columns to the dataset. It is so rewarding to see this growth and be able to add data that is valuable to researchers and clients.
Outside the office, I discovered a new hobby: gardening! My vegetable patch has turned an unusable space into a project I’ve really enjoyed – I’m excited to keep growing more veg over winter and I have ambitious plans for next summer!
Rhys Williams
“For me, a stand-out work highlight has been the antibody data hitting over 2 million citations! This marks a massive milestone for this dataset, which I’ve managed for many years, and adds further value and insight to researchers and suppliers.
On a personal note, I returned to the beautiful beaches of Gower for the second year in a row!
Rhys Bowen Morris
Last year I was delighted to launch CiteAb’s Antibody Market Insights package. This package includes quarterly themed datasets with useful data on the performance of the antibody market, as well as listing on CiteAb. On top of this, I was very excited to continue working on and growing our experimental models dataset.
I really enjoyed being able to go to live music events this year once restrictions eased. It is something I really missed in the COVID lockdowns, so it was amazing to be able to enjoy this in person again!
Communications
Skye Longworth
“Since starting my role this September, everyone has been extremely welcoming and made learning the ropes at CiteAb really enjoyable and interesting. So far, my highlight has been my involvement in the awards launch with Alicia. I am excited to see all the amazing entries over the next couple of months!
Outside of CiteAb, my family and I managed to travel around my namesake, the Isle of Skye for the first time. This is something I’ve always wanted to do and it did not disappoint!”
Development Team
Rob Willison
In 2021 a lot of work I did was focused on our published image service, so it was really rewarding to see the service grow and for images to start appearing on suppliers’ websites!
Last year I was also able to go mountain biking in the Yorkshire Dales over Summer which was great fun.
Matt Helsby
Like Andy, my highlight has got to be the Covid reagent search tool going live. This platform provides a further resource to help researchers and suppliers in fighting the pandemic.
It has been a pretty exciting year for me personally as well, as I got married!
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To end, we would like to reiterate our thanks to all the researchers and suppliers who worked with CiteAb in 2021.
Here’s to a great 2022!
- Skye and the CiteAb team