fivemack: (Default)
Tom Womack ([personal profile] fivemack) wrote2008-02-15 03:25 pm

Seeking a tool I know not how to name

I spend most of my Wednesdays looking for errors, from the blatant to the egregious, in recently-deposited protein structures in the PDB. Sometimes, I feel the urge to get in touch with the people who deposited the structure; the PDB lists this in the form

AUTHOR Y.T.MEHARENNA,T.L.POULOS

and it takes quite a lot of googling to track these authors down to their current institution and deduce, for example, their email address. In this case I've found them - Meharenna is not so common a name as to have multiple false-positives in Google Scholar, and has only changed institutions a few times.

I guess that some text-miner must have done a mining of affiliations, so you could click on 'YT Meharenna' and find 'Yergalem T Maharenna published nine papers between 1998 and 2007 (list); common collaborators include Thomas Poulos (2004-2007) and Gianfranco Gilardi (2001). Was affiliated with UC Irvine on papers published in 2004-2007 and Imperial College on papers published in 2001'.

What's the name of the site that presents the results of this mining?
ellarien: sunspot (astronomy)

[personal profile] ellarien 2008-02-15 05:21 pm (UTC)(link)
I've never come across such a thing, alas. If I were hunting that kind of information in my field, I'd probably be using some combination of the NASA ADS and the AAS membership directory. The former is wonderful but not quite as complete as I'd like, and the latter tends to be horribly out of date (and only available to members), but it's a start.

Some of the more useful literature-mining tools are for-money; it helps to be affiliated to a large university.