Synapse
The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Library has come up with a neat tool for tracking publications by authors affiliated with the organization.
What is Synapse?
Synapse is a self-service web interface and database supported and maintained by the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Library, providing access to an inventory of the published output of our researchers and clinicians. As the name implies, Synapse is the user’s point of “connection” to publications authored by Memorial Sloan-Kettering staff. You can search for specific author names or by journal title, keyword and other fields. The search will return a listing (bibliography) of publications that you can browse, print, export or connect to the fulltext of specific articles.
The term “synapse” was coined in 1897 by the English physiologist Charles Sherrington with help from some of his colleagues. They derived the term from the Greek word “synaptein” meaning to fasten together.
The interface for Synapse allows users to submit, search, and retrieve relevant information about MSKCC published literature that can be used for research, creating bibliographies, completing core grant applications and updates, journal club sessions, and future publications and presentations.
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August 12th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Hi, I’m the author of Synapse. Synapse is written in Python as a Django (http://www.djangoproject.com) web framework application. The code for Synapse is open source, GPLv3, and is available at http://code.google.com/p/synapse-bibliography/.
The code for the application is pretty tightly coupled to MSKCC at the moment, but I do plan to extract the app code from the surrounding web site and make it available as a more-reusable, generic application. That should happen in the next couple of months.