Firefox Add-ons for Scientists and Bitesize Bio's Molecular Biologist's Toolbar

This article was featured in Library Notes #55 (August 2009).

10 (more) reasons to use Mozilla Firefox as your Internet Browser

Nick Oswald, editor-in-chief of the Bitesize Bio blog and Editorial Manager of the journal Neuroendocrinology posted a blog entry on new Firefox Add-ons for scientists.  This is a follow-up to his post in 2007 that featured 10 great Firefox add-ons for scientists.  Readers are encouraged to also look at this earlier post and try out some of the add-ons.

The current post features i-cite, a mash-up search of content from PubMed, EBI and Google Scholar;  it also features such useful tools as a Mac pdf viewer for Firefox, a timer you can run in your browser (really handy for those incubation and rinse steps in your experiments) and a browser add-on link to labmeeting.com.

Bitesize Bio's Molecular Biologist's Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox

As a post-script to his blog entry, Oswald puts in a plug for Bitesize Bio's own Molecular Biologist's Toolbar.  This toolbar is a fabulous and handy addition to your browser: 

• It allows you to search the literature across PubMed, GoPubMed, Scirus, Google Scholar, patents and more using the Search box.  Results are returned in a Google page with links to results from each database at the top of the page.
• You can link directly to nucleotide and protein sequence tools in the Tools tab.
• The Databases tab has links for some of the most common molecular biology databases:  Entrez, BRENDA, Ensembl and SwissProt.
• The Useful tab has nifty links to pages with amino acid properties, the periodic table and BioCarta pathways.
• The Gadgets tab has features such as a unit converter and allows you to add your own gadgets, too.

I find myself using this toolbar more and more, because it has organized a lot of the links that I use regularly in very meaningful ways.  In other words, it's quite a bit more organized than my own "Bookmarks" menu in my browser.  However, you will get some unwanted commercial results when you use the Search box.  This is because the toolbar is a free application that runs searches in Google and is subject to advertising links that arise in a Google search.  For example, a search for "homeobox classes" in the search box will return sponsored links to the University of Phoenix online, but will also return web links to relevant PubMed results and to the blog Hoxful Monsters. The Molecular Biologist's Toolbar works with both Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

You may find that anything that helps you organize the vast quantities of available bioinformatics and molecular biology resources online is a welcome addition to your browser's interface.

Pamela Shaw
Biosciences Librarian
E-mail me by using the "E-mail Pam" link on my liaison page.

The Biosciences & Bioinformatics Blog highlights new tools and news items of interest to the biosciences research community at Northwestern University.