There is an interesting article on BioMed Central, BMC Bioinformatics 2007, 8:287, "OReFiL: an online resource finder for life sciences", which alerted me to this new online resource for finding life science web resources. The authors created a database which crawls out to gather the web pages whose URLs appear in MEDLINE abstracts and full text papers in open access journals.

OReFiL is kind of neat in that it is attempting to collect the URLs of online resources mentioned in the literature. To my knowledge this hasn't been done before. They are using the MeSH indexing, linking the sites to the citing papers, and linking to the PubMed entry. I did a very quick and dirty search on apoptosis which gave me 80+ sites. What was also kind of cool is the search result's MeSH terms are displayed as a tag cloud. Frequently used terms are depicted in bigger and bolder font than lesser used terms. More detailed information about the database and how it is searched can be found in the article.

I just think it is kind of neat.