SMAFIRA is a free online tool that is intended to support biomedical researchers and animal welfare officers in their efforts to screen the literature database PubMed© for candidate alternative methods to animal experiments. SMAFIRA DOES NOT judge on the suitability of retrieved methods as alternatives. This judgement is reserved to human experts. Anyway, SMAFIRA decreases the time needed to search the literature for candidate alternatives. All you need is a PubMed® identifier (PMID).
Quick Tutorial |
Search for a PubMed® identifier that describes an animal experiment with the research goal of your interest. Insert the PMID in the field. By clicking on the "Search for PUBMED similar articles" button, SMAFIRA will first let you confirm if it is the correct reference article. By clicking on the the green arrow, SMAFIRA will retrieve a list of similar articles. The processing might take a couple of seconds. SMAFIRA automatically classifies the similar articles to different labels according to the described experimental method. You can then filter the provided list for different methods. Move the mouse slowly over an icon to get more information about it. Details about our methods are described in the FAQ page. SMAFIRA ranks the similar articles according to their similarity. You can give a feedback about the similarity and the labels associated to an article. If you want to help us to improve SMAFIRA, please contact us. By selecting a specific article from the list, you will be able to compare the abstract with the reference article. You can annotate the similarity between the reference article and any article from the list, and change the labels associated to the article. Any changes are automatically saved. This is also a feedback that you provide us concerning the quality of the result. |