Name: 2013 Beyond the PDF2
The vision of the Neuroscience Information Framework, NIF, is that catalogs of research resources are important to science, but the creation of these deceptively simple catalogs is not trivial. Whereas after hundreds of years of refinement, scientists have some idea of what types of information we can ask bibliographic catalogs (e.g., PubMed), transgenic mice, cell lines, MRI data sets or academic databases that are the output of scholarly research have been tracked in various catalogs, but with very different types of information that is considered in each. Author fields do not always apply to databases, in the same way as they do to books and articles. For example, the cell line may have a patient whom the cell line derives from, the surgeon who removed it, and an organization that maintains the cell line. In this case, the question of who is the author of the cell line makes little sense. NIF at its' core is a catalog of research resources, and is setting out a vision for a unified catalog of these research resources that can help to track this scholarly output in literature and beyond.
Bandrowski, Anita
