Bioz: More Data, More Citations, Better Decisions

With a new tool baked into the website, you can quickly access primary data from research papers to help you decide if a reagent is right for you.

It can be daunting when the time comes to choose a brand-new reagent. You’ve only got finite research time and budget and so you don’t want to spend precious hours at the bench on something that isn’t right for your work. That’s why we all rely on published research so heavily: if you can see a reagent work in someone else’s hands putting trust into it becomes a lot easier.

It’s just that, quite often, that data’s a pain to find. Even if a vendor has a link to papers the reagent’s cited in, it’s not always convenient to head over to the journal’s website, download the paper (if it’s open access), scroll down to the methods section, find the reagent you’re interested in, and then match that up with data in the results section.

Not an impossible task by ant measure, but it’s far from convenient. What about, instead, if you could see the exact snippet of data that relates to a reagent you’re interested in, right there in a vendor’s search results?

Introducing Bioz

Well, that’s exactly what you can now do on our website. And it’s thanks to a plugin that’s baked into the website called Bioz.

Let’s say the sodium channel Na_v1.8 is your research focus, and you’re looking for a new antibody to target it. You head over to the Alomone website, search for “anti-nav1.8” and you land on the datasheet.

In addition to the usual application and testing data at the top, the “Citation” section now hosts Bioz and gives you an interactable UI with all the papers a product has been cited in. What’s more, you can see the data from those individual papers right there on the page, and it’s accompanied the relevant text – again, directly from the paper.

If you want to read more, you can expand the section to show the full figure legend or click on the citation text to open the full paper in a new tab. Right there are then you can see real data from published research without ever having to leave your search result.

You can even filter those citation results by list of techniques on the right. Perhaps you’re only interested in immunofluorescence. In which cases you just click on that box and it instantly filters all of your results.

Fighting Bias with Bioz Stars

Every vendor wants to say that their product is the best. Obviously, that can’t always be the case and vendors are always going to have a degree of bias when it comes to rating their products.

Bioz fixes that by working as a neutral party. It does this by giving products a “Bioz Stars” score. This rating is out of 100 and is generated based on several parameters, such as the publication’s impact factors, the citation count to product mention ratio, search frequency, and popularity to name just a few. The multi-parameter model is wholly objective and doesn’t rely on human reviews at all, since these are inherently biased.

More importantly, vendors cannot influence the Bioz Stars scoring algorithm in any way. This means that any score a product receives is completely objective and should help to guide you in making an informed decision.

Citation Searching

You can also use Bioz for a more detailed search of papers on a particular target, gene, or techniques using the Citation Search Tool. It’s worth checking back here from time to time as we constantly improve the search accuracy and add more filtering options.

There are a few ways to reach the dedicated Citation search page. First, you can find the Citation Search Tool from the Resources tab in our navigation menu:

Or, you can find the page using the dedicated button at the top of the homepage:

Clicking that will take you to https://www.alomone.com/citations.

From here, you start your search. Let’s put in a general search term like “nav 1”. This brings up a host of citations. You can then narrow this now with filters to select papers based on technique or gene.

We’re going to filter by the gene SCN1A in this example. Now you can start to look through all the papers that have cited a product from us that targets that specific gene.

You can go on the filter this further by technique, giving you even more control over the types of research you want to see. And you can do all of this from the Citation Tool within our site – you don’t need to go off opening a string of new pages.

Transparency and Control

The point of this is to give you more insight into the products you choose for your research. We don’t think you should be swayed by anyone’s biases. Instead, your decisions should be guided by the data.

With the addition of Bioz to our site, serving a neutral party linked to millions of research papers, we’re being wholly transparent about the products – all of which we make and QC in-house – and giving your more control.

If you have any questions or concerns about Bioz, or would just like to know more about how it works, you can get in touch with us at any time. You can also head over to the Bioz website to learn more about its creation and implementation directly from them.