Elsevier pilots award-winning research tool in journal Cell

The Cell-Reflect pilot is the next step in the publisher’s ongoing Content Innovation effort with the scientific community to determine how a scientific article is best presented online. The initial feedback on the project and will determine whether and when the tool will be rolled-out across Elsevier’s portfolio of life sciences journals on its digital assets.

‘Reflect’ was initially developed at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany. The tool identifies the proteins, genes and small molecules mentioned in Cell articles, and generates pop-up windows containing relevant contextual information, with additional links, about those entities.

Inside an article, it tags and colors gene, protein, or small molecule names on any web page, showing a concise summary of contextually important features, such as sequence (for proteins) or 2D structure (for small molecules).

The initiative follows Elsevier’s recent launch of an initial ’Article of the Future’ prototype with Cell, where the traditional linear journal article is displayed in a much more useful format for life scientists.

IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, vice president of Content Innovation for Elsevier science & technology Journal publishing, said: “Whereas the ‘Article of the Future’ prototype focused on the internal presentation of an article, the Cell-Reflect pilot connects the scientific article to its external scientific context. Tools like these have the potential to revolutionise the use of scientific research.”

Sean O’Donoghue, who is coordinating the ‘Reflect’ project said: “We wanted to design a system that would enhance the reading of scientific papers on the web. Reflect has already received a lot of positive user-feedback and its user-base is rapidly increasing.”

Elsevier’s Grand Challenge is a competition to find innovative tools to improve the process of creating, reviewing and editing scientific content; interpreting or connecting the knowledge more effectively, or measuring the impact of these improvements.