Thursday, February 26, 2009

Tables and Charts and Graphs, Oh My!

A student at the reference desk was asking about medical image resources the other day. 

I'm not sure this is what she was after, but will try to keep this interesting tool in mind another time: the Yale Image Finder

It searches the images in articles from open access journals available through PubMed Central, retrieving illustrations, tables and pictures based on captions, image text, titles and abstracts.

It's extremely simple to use -- enter some terms, select where in the article you want to search for them -- and retrieved results for most of my randomly chosen terms (nothing for 'freckles,' I'm sad to say).

I imagine it could be quite handy if you're looking to check out depictions of gene distributions or what not. It does only search 34,000 articles, which in the grand scheme of biomedical literature is not that many, but presumably it will grow dramatically along with PubMed Central in the future.

I salute SHR Medical Library for this discovery.

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