IntoPub: A Directory Server for Bioinformatics Tools and Databases

Bioinformatics tools and databases are useful for understanding and processing various biological data. Numerous resources are being published each year. It is not a trivial task to find up-to-date relevant tools and databases. Moreover, no server is available to provide comprehensive coverage on bioinformatics resources in all biological fields. Here, we present a directory server called IntoPub that provides information on web resources. First, we downloaded XML-formatted abstracts containing web URLs from the NCBI PubMed database by using ‘ESearch-EFetch’ function in the NCBI E-utilities. The information is obtained from abstracts in the PubMed by extracting ‘www’ or ‘http’ prefixes. Then, we curate the downloaded abstracts both in automatic and manual fashion. As of July 2011, the IntoPub database has 12,118 abstracts containing web URLs from 174 journals. Our analysis shows that the number of abstracts containing web resources has increased significantly every year. The server has been tested by many biologists from several countries to get opinion on user satisfaction, usefulness, practicability, and ease of use since January 2010. In the IntoPub web server, users can easily find relevant bioinformatics resources, as compared to searching in PubMed. IntoPub will continue to update and incorporate new web resources from PubMed and other literature databases. IntoPub, available at http://into.kobic.re.kr/, is updated every day.