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that Scrazzl is able to provide companies with detailed insight into how their products are used in, for example, different geographical regions or different research areas, and how they compare with their competitors’ products.


Kavanagh anticipates that this aspect will become particularly interesting once scientists begin using the tool and Scrazzl is


able to provide anonymous real-time


information about which products researchers are looking at.


How it works


Scrazzl can provide detailed analytics on, for example, how products are used in different areas of the world


the data, should come from manufacturers of equipment and materials paying to have a click through from the details of their products to their websites. ‘We have spoken to a lot of companies


and they are all very keen. It is very easy to measure impact and we would expect the sales conversion rates on these hits to be very high,’ said Kavanagh. ‘A very simple “buy now” button is not going to do much, but because we provide supplementary information this tools feeds into solving problems in science.’


Insight into research This researcher-facing aspect of Scrazzl is planned for launch in the Summer. However, there is another facet to the company’s technology


that is laboratory suppliers.


Companies that make laboratory equipment have no easy way of knowing how that equipment is being used, without trawling manually through whatever published literature they can access. One of the Scrazzl product family launched in February meets this need by providing manufacturers with citation feeds, enabling them to keep track of and promote the ways that their products are used. However, it can go further than that and Kavanagh is particularly excited about another aspect of the February launch – business intelligence or analytics. The matching between papers and products means


www.researchinformation.info already available to


The Scrazzl database currently contains details of 300,000 laboratory products, but the company aims to expand this. ‘There is the functionality to add any brand you want and we work with companies to get structured data and catalogues. Building this up is part of the reason for the staggered release [before the researcher-facing product launch],’ explained Kavanagh.


The process of matching these laboratory


products with scientific papers is not trivial of course. No two papers are written in exactly the same way and they use very complicated language. However, Kavanagh pointed out that there are some common themes. Product names and the names of their suppliers tend to be mentioned in the same sentence. And there is a limit to the number of possible sentence structures. For example, a paper might say ‘Analysis was carried out using Instrument X from Manufacturer Y’ or ‘Manufacturer Y’s Product X was diluted to a concentration of ...’


The Scrazzl developers have created filters


to identify such pairings automatically and then verification is done manually. ‘We can guarantee greater than 95 per cent accuracy


FEATURE


on matching,’ said Kavanagh. This is helped by the level of detail that Scrazzl requests from suppliers. ‘We are very specific about how we receive company data,’ he explained. ‘Product name, company and catalogue number are not enough. We need to know everything that could be used to identify products.’


It is still early days and the company is still small – seven people at the last count and most of those have joined the company since a funding round in August 2011 – but Scrazzl has big plans. Firstly, the company is working on building further publisher partnerships. ‘Elsevier is the first step, but ultimately we want cooperation with every publisher and are actively seeking other partnerships,’ said Kavanagh. Then there are developments planned in what information the company can unearth


‘Companies that make laboratory equipment have no easy way of knowing how that equipment is being used’


from published experimental details. ‘We have been quite focused on one-to-one matching, but the next stage is relationships,’ said Kavanagh. ‘We want to unlock how best to use products, for example by providing details of the dilution used with a particular antibody in previous experiments. This information is not usually in the same sentence as the product name, but is very useful to researchers,’ he added. ‘And I’m sure that as we move forward there will be other opportunities too.’


The Scrazzl team – including Kavanagh, CTO Paul Phillips and senior engineer Daniel Hunt APR/MAY 2012 Research Information 29


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