CiteAb Awards Highlights: Digital Science Tool of the Year
5
Min Read
In this blog:
- Find interesting new digital tools to help in your research
- Discover how we partner with digital tools
- Get in touch to partner with CiteAb!
The CiteAb Awards are unique life science industry awards, now in their tenth year, created to celebrate the very best companies and individuals in the research reagent industry.
Reagent companies are crucial in supporting wider research progress and through our years in this industry we have found they are often undervalued. Our awards try to provide some of that recognition!
Each year, we launch a variety of nomination-based categories to reflect the breadth and innovation in the sector.
A fantastic panel of independent, specialist judges determine our winner from all the entries we receive.
Creating the Digital Science Tool of the Year Award
One such category that we introduced for the very first time this year was the Digital Science Tool of the Year Award.
As a search engine created to help researchers, and having partnered with some pioneering platforms over the years, we brought in this category to showcase the range of innovative tools out there helping researchers.
We recruited three impressive independent judges from some of the fantastic platforms that we already partner with, including Springer Nature, JAGGAER and Fluorofinder. We give full details of these judges later in the blog, as well as how we partner with their platforms!
Introducing our winner: Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Stain iT tool
Claiming the win in this category was Thermo Fisher Scientific, with their new Stain iT tool!
By enabling the creation of a digital mockup of cell structure and organelle staining, Stain iT allows scientists to explore staining options, select instruments, visualise the spectrum of selected dyes, choose different reagents and then purchase the best products for their experiment.
This tool is a novel way for cellular imaging scientists to visualise staining and select the most suitable reagents for their work.
Our judges felt it had great potential impact to aid researchers in their work, scoring it highly for its quality, originality and wider impact to the life science community.
Congratulations to the team at Thermo Fisher for their work in creating this valuable tool! Steve Titus, Senior Manager Product Manager, said:
“I am immensely proud of being a member of the team that envisioned and developed the Stain iT tool. This innovative tool has revolutionized the way researchers work by allowing them to virtually stain their cells and accurately select the most suitable products for their experiments. The recognition that our team received through the prestigious CiteAb award further validates the impact and importance of our creation.”
You can try out the tool here: https://www.thermofisher.com/order/stain-it/#!/
And see a video of it in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8W53TLR2U4
Highly Commended: eLabNext
Also scoring very highly against strong competition, eLabNext were named as Highly Commended in this category.
Their tool eLabJournal helps researchers with their experimental workflows through a user-friendly platform.
The interface allows scientists to document and organise experiments, boosting efficiency and team-work with real-time collaboration, version control, and secure data sharing. It also helps researchers with data management and can integrate with laboratory instruments – all really valuable features to help accelerate research!
You can learn more about them here: https://www.elabnext.com/
And see a demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKDvG6EtKc8
Highly Commended: Abcam – Biophysical QC
With many strong nominations, we found ourselves with a tie for highly commended! Congratulations to the team at Abcam, who were also named as Highly Commended in this category for their Biophysical QC toolkit.
Biophysical QC is a digital analysis toolkit designed to confirm antibody identity at a molecular level. Given the importance of antibody validation in improving research reproducibility, this initiative caught our judges eye.
The tests involved in this process provides a unique profile or ‘fingerprint’ of each product that’s compared against strict pass criteria, which can also be compared against subsequent batches to ensure consistency, eliminate lot-lot variability and save researchers time.
You can read more here: https://go.myabcam.com/BiophysicalQuality
And see a webinar on the tool here: https://go.myabcam.com/webinar-biophysical-characterization-of-protein-reagents-for-batch-to-batch-reproducibility
The judges and our partnership with their platforms
To judge nominations in this category, we called on our current partners who work for some fantastic digital tools themselves. Read more about the judges this year and how we work with their companies below:
- Robin Padilla, Director of Product Management at Springer Nature.
We partnered with Springer Nature to unlock the power of their full text content with our data mining expertise; they use data that we collect for their publications in the Springer Nature Experiments platform. You can read more about how reagent data collected by us supports their experimental tool here.
- Tom Russell, General Manager at JAGGAER
Partnering with the JAGGAER Research Materials Management Platform enables researchers to search for reagents in CiteAb, before being transferred seamlessly to JAGGAER for purchasing and further evaluation. You can read more about our search, evaluation and research reagent purchasing solution here.
- Daren Young, CEO of Fluorofinder
Flurofinder are an experimental design platform for flow cytometry. On their site, scientists can see citation counts for antibodies they are considering for their flow experiments, collected by us. You can try out their fluorescence experimental tool here.
Our judges certainly had no easy task in determining our winner. We received a fantastic range of entries from many types of tools, ranging from lab notebooks to experimental planning platforms and more.
Thank you to everyone who nominated and congratulations to our winners once again!
Calling digital science tools!
Learning about these fantastic tools through our awards was really exciting and eye-opening for us here at CiteAb. Thank you to all nominators and our great panel of judges for their time and expertise – and congratulations once again to our winners.
If you have a digital science tool you think could benefit from integrating or working with either our reagent data or search engine platform, do get in touch with us here.
And finally, look out for the launch of the CiteAb Awards next year for your chance to nominate your company or product! Sign up to our mailing list below to be kept up to date.
- Justin and the CiteAb team
