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Publibee was created by Guillaume and Stelios, “two physicians with experience in Medicine, Clinical and Fundamental research.” They wanted to create a platform where biomedical scientists, students, and researchers could easily find the information they needed and discuss scientific articles as a community. Publibee acts as a search engine for articles from PubMed, SJR, and more.
Guillaume and Stelios knew what the scientific community needed from their project, but they didn’t have the tech background to create it alone. They had a minimally viable product done, plus a designer and some designs to work off of. They needed to add more, new features to make Publibee exactly what they envisioned, so they came to Amplified.
We needed to:
We also needed to add features to help users organize documents into categories, such as:
“The Amplified team was easy to work with,” Guillaume reports, despite the time difference between Palo Alto and Romania, where most of our team is located. They would join weekly calls with us in the early morning (California) to go over what had been done, look at changes, and decide on the next steps. The entire project took about 7 months, running from September 2019 to May 2020.
“We had to work with big sets of data, which was interesting and taught us a lot,” our developer on the team shared. “Guillaume and Stelios are very smart and knew exactly what they wanted, which helps us in our work.”
The biggest challenge for this project was simply the fact that the search engine had to scan 30 million articles at once, gathering details from third-party sites and displaying them in a uniform way that also made sense for the user. We wanted to display information for each article, such as industries, indices, ratings from different websites, and how many times an article was cited. We set up several servers, each of them running multiple threads, to gather that much information at a high performance.
Another challenge was customizing the results to medical researchers. We wanted them to be able to have 50+ industry-specific filters, including sex, age, species, clinical trials, journals, publication date, ranges, years, and more, based on Guillaume and Stelios’ interviews with physicians and scientists.
Five months into the project, COVID-19 struck in full force. In order to help the medical community in a more immediately relevant way, we created coronavirus.publibee.com, which compiled all the latest articles and information on COVID-19. This site was updated more frequently, gathering information from WHO and other reputable sources. The site had gathered 10k articles in 2 months. At the time, you couldn’t find a platform that gathered that many articles on coronavirus in one place.
Since then, the COVID-specific articles have been included in the main application, and we removed the sub-site. However, the sub-site responded to what was happening at the moment worldwide in a meaningful way.
The final product has a clean interface and intuitive design and incorporates all the features that Guillaume and Stelios wanted to see for this version of the project. The search bar suggests possible searches like other search engines, and search results appear in just a few seconds.
After searching, users can easily see the article’s title, topic, author, how many citations the article has, and a rating. They have the option to pin, share, or open in a new tab. Users can also expand to see the abstract and even find similar articles.
In the expanded view, users can also leave a question or comment below the article, encouraging open conversation in the medical and scientific communities.
