About the Research Assistant
The AidsinAfrica.net Research Assistant has two purposes: The first is to provide visitors with a fast and intuitive graphic interface for navigating through citations on articles about AIDS in Africa. The second is to provide the full-text of as many of the articles as possible, so that visitors will be able to download complete articles through this site. Because this project has just been launched, there are no full-text articles available at this time.

This assistant is designed to aid people doing research on AIDS. Additionally, we hope that by making the act of research less daunting or cumbersome for the general public, people will be more likely to go beyond major news periodicals and read works published in academic journals. Journal literature is not always available to those without access to a university or large library, and even for those with access, tracking down articles is often a chore.

The process of building our own collection of articles has just begun. We will be sending automated emails requesting submissions to authors or publishers when citations are entered into our database. It is becoming more common for researchers to include an email address with the citations. We are also asking that users of this site submit articles that they find helpful to us. We will of course ask for the permission from the publisher before putting an article online.

Sources
The information presented through this research tool has been obtained by downloading bibliographical data from the PubMed website. PubMed was developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Pubmed provides access to citations from biomedical literature, including literature catalogued in MEDLINE, NLM's premier bibliographic database.

The information in Pubmed and other websites is made available via the Entrez Retrieval System, which was also developed by the NLM and the NCBI. Entrez is the text-based search and retrieval system used at NCBI for all major databases including PubMed and several others.

This research assistant will also use LinkOut, a service that provides access to full-text articles at journal Web sites and other related Web resources. Using Link-out often costs money, so we will try to provide users with other legal methods of obtaining articles.

Volunteers Wanted
AidsinAfrica.net is looking for volunteers who are interested in helping to build the library of articles. Work would involve communicating with authors, publishers, and users about submission requests, formatting articles that have been submitted, and entering information into the database. Don't worry, only basic technical skills will be required.