AMSTERDAM, April 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Elsevier, a world leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced the availability of a new application, Reflect-Network, on SciVerse Applications beta. The application was developed in partnership with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Germany, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research (CPR), University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Reflect-Network application is integrated within the life sciences journals on SciVerse Science Direct via Reflect, a tool that tags proteins and chemicals in a document. The application recognizes genes, proteins, and chemicals mentioned within SciVerse ScienceDirect articles, and generates a graphical representation displaying the interactions or 'network' between the entities. From the graphic, researchers can then link to the STITCH network, which provides additional details about the entities and offers different ways to view the 'network' such as color-coded lines revealing modes of action, or drilling down to examine the evidence supporting each interaction.

"For researchers working in the life sciences, as in other areas, a major challenge is sifting through an extraordinary amount of information," says Dr Sean O' Donoghue, Research Scientist at EMBL. "Our goal while developing this application was to provide data in a clear and concise way for researchers to quickly understand relationships among molecular biological entities within an article."

"Today's web-based tools help researchers get a better overview of the existing scientific knowledge. By integrating two such tools - Reflect and STITCH - with scientific literature, we aim to make both the tools and the literature more useful to researchers," says Lars Juhl Jensen, Professor and Group Leader at CPR.

"The Reflect-Network application within SciVerse Applications and SciVerse ScienceDirect addresses the workflow challenges of life sciences researchers by helping them quickly understand and visualize the content of an article," said Rafael Sidi, Vice President, SciVerse Applications and Developer Network at Elsevier. "We continue to collaborate with organizations like EMBL and CPR to advance the scientific search and discovery process."

EMBL and CPR won first prize during the 2009 Elsevier Grand Challenge for Reflect, the application that powers the Reflect-Network Application.