PubTrawlr’s 2021 Milestones and Looking Ahead!

by Jon Scaccia December 31, 2021

It’s the last day of 2021, so we’d want to look back at our achievements for the previous year and preview what you’ll see in 2022 at PubTrawler.

Although the website was live in beta testing in late 2020, PubTrawlr was officially incorporated in early January 2021. Since then, we have had a number of amazing experiences, seen amazing growth, and implemented amazing improvements.

Over 7000 Unique Users

PubTrawlr has no online marketing. It’s something we’re working on and plan to spin up next year. Though even without this online presence, relying solely on our social media accounts and word of mouth, we were able to pull in over 7000 unique users!

To these users, thanks! It’s your feedback that has helped PubTrawlr improve rapidly.

Four Days in Denver

Matt Scaccia and I exhibited at the American Public Health Association’s conference in Denver this past October. With the rise of Omicron over the past few months, it was a wonder that we were able to squeeze it in.

I made a presentation on the need for and promise of PubTrawlr, which you can check out on Youtube below.

Grants and Fellowships.

Through our partnerships with many academic support institutions, we were able to make it to the finals of the TecBridge Business Plan Competition. We didn’t win, but it provided a huge kickstart for us in helping to formalize many of our internal structures.

We also recently were honored to receive an award from the Villanova IIE Innovation Fund to help expand some of our technological improvements.

Technical Improvements Galore

Working with colleagues at Mind Design and Development and Weidenhammer, we were able to significantly improve our retrieval time for PubMed records, add predictive text to improve searching, improve our visualizations of scientific abstracts, and improve the overall design and UX of PubTrawlr’s website. If you haven’t checked out all the neat improvements, be sure to swing by.

5335 Days of Implementation Science

Dr. Victoria Scott and I published an article in the high-impact journal, Implementation Science, on some of the methods that drive PubTrawlr. As of this date, it has been accessed more than 2100 times. This article is open access, so click below and get in the weeds.

I also published a spin-off article in the Journal of Community Psychology that looked at how community psychologists have been talking about health equity, a topic very close to our mission.

What coming up in 2022?

To be short, a ton.

Speed Speed Speed

We know, it takes time to synthesize the data. We’re committed to pushing through these barriers by improving our server architecture to devote more processing power so you can get results on demand.

Launching 101 Days of Science.

People can’t stay up to date with recent findings, even though they would like to. We will be provided a synthesis of recent peer-reviewed and news articles to help you know what going on. Although we’ll be launching with Health Equity and Implementation Science, we have literally hundreds of other topics in development, including Sleep therapies, Endometriosis, and more.

We’ll also be pulling from the premier language model, GPT-3, to make results as interpretable as possible.

Additional content areas.

Is 50 million articles not enough for you? We’ll be adding additional databases in the year to help you stay on top of the physical sciences and the educational literature.

Marketing and More Conferences!

You’ll be seeing us a lot more as we dial up on web content and promotion. And yet, there is something to be said for face-to-face contact. Omicron permitting, look for us at the Medical Library Association conference in May and the IHI Forum in December. Possibly a few more!

Summing Up!

PubTrawlr is looking forward to a great year in 2022. We will be launching more content areas, improving our database of articles, digging deeping on health equity and implementation science, providing summaries of recent research findings, attending conferences all over the world – if Omicron lets us out again!

If you want to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in PubTrawlr’s work or just learn about what we’re doing next, sign up for our newsletter below.