SciCrunch  

About SciCrunch

SciCrunch was designed to help communities of researchers create their own portals to provide access to resources, databases and tools of relevance to their research areas. A data portal that searches across hundreds of databases can be created in minutes. Communities can choose from our existing SciCrunch data sources and also add their own.  SciCrunch was designed to break down the traditional types of portal silos created by different communities, so that communities can take advantage of work done by others and share their expertise as well.

SciCrunch adds value to existing scientific resources by increasing their discoverability, accessibility, visibility, utility and interoperability, regardless of their current design or capabilities and without the need for extensive redesign of their components or information models. Unlike more general search engines, SciCrunch provides deeper access to a more focused set of resources that are relevant to its communities, provides search strategies tailored to its communities, and also provides access to content that is traditionally “hidden” from web search engines. To accomplish this, SciCrunch has deployed an infrastructure allowing a wide variety of resources to be searched and discovered at multiple levels of integration, from superficial discovery based on a limited description of the resource (SciCrunch Registry), to deep content query (SciCrunch Data Federation).  It is currently one of the largest sources of biomedical information on the web, currently searching over 13,000 research resources in its Registry, and the contents of 250+ data resources comprising more than 800 million records in its Data Federation.

SciCrunch Relationship to NIDDK Information Network

dkNET (NIDDK Information Network, https://dknet.org), is a research resource information portal funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK, U24DK097771), built by the FDI (FAIR Data Informatics) Lab at the University of California San Diego. dkNET is built upon, and has developed, a number of core SciCrunch components. Especially those focused on Research Resource Identifiers.