Elsevier, a provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, has launched TargetInsights, an online decision support tool.

The tool enables scientists to search, monitor and stay up-to-date with the latest biological insights reported in scientific literature. It provides extensive information coverage and data contextualization, supporting users to identify, prioritize and validate biological targets faster and with less risk.

TargetInsights was designed to overcome information challenges during the discovery process of target identification and validation, when scientists need to support ideation and findings with extensive reviews of scientific literature. The tool enables full text entity and relationship searching of over 5,000 international biomedical journals covering over 800,000 journal articles and conference abstracts per year.

Recognizing the need for information immediacy among these users, articles are indexed and appear in TargetInsights 10 days after publication. To support search accuracy, tools are provided to hone and visualize index term relationship searching.

"We have designed this online support tool to operate at what is widely regarded as a mission-critical phase of drug development," said Jabe Wilson, senior product manager at Elsevier. "Many failures in drug development can be attributed to improper target selection. For scientists focusing on a biological target, it is imperative to be able to search and screen crucial information. Incomplete or inaccurate information can result in unnecessary experiments and poor business decisions."