Okay, enough with the mysteriousness: LigerCat stands for "Literature and Genomic Electronic Research Catalogue," and is actually a search tool for PubMed, developed several years ago by a group of collaborators including the Marine Biological Library and Biology of Aging. LigerCat searches PubMed in real time and uses tag clouds to provide users with a visual overview of important concepts, trends, and research. In LigerCat, users can focus their searches on articles, journals, or genes.
Many users claim that LigerCat makes PubMed more user-friendly! It can help users view MeSH terms in an understandable way and help users actually build searches to send to PubMed.
This is one tool that I definitely want to play around with a little more. I can see a lot of interesting applications for instruction, but also in my own personal research. What do you think--how could this tool be used? Play around with it a bit!
Hi Rebecca,
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing a post about LigerCat. One of my favorite things to do with LigerCat is to search for a person or an institution. It is great for doing demonstrations. People love to see clouds of their work. Here is the cloud for Virginia Tech http://ligercat.ubio.org/articles/virginia%20tech%20%5Bad%5D You can also put a code snippet on a webpage or even this blog!