Today we’re introducing our latest search tool, Find Postdoctoral Researcher. As you can guess, it’s about finding (biomedical) postdoctoral researchers.

Why do so? Postdocs are perhaps the main engine of biomedical research, and contacting a postdoc is often essential to a project. Want to learn a technique? Discuss the suitability of an instrument? Compare notes on a set of results? Postdocs are ideal for such.

Problem is, there are very few ways of finding postdocs, especially if a refined list is desired, i.e., not returning every postdocs at an institution.

This is where ResearchScorecard’s Find Postdoctoral Researcher comes in. With it, you can find postdocs based on:

• their area of research expertise, based on publication record.
• the research products they use. We’re particularly proud of that one.
• a PubMed record (i.e., identifying which of the authors of paper are postdocs).
• their family name.

We’ll be adding an additional function shortly, namely, retrieving postdocs by institution. You’d think we would already have that one, but no.

The tool is in its beta phase, and you can let us know how useful you find it by answering the one-question survey at the bottom of the page that comes up once the search is finished. You can access the tool by going to Toosl→Find Postdoctoral Researcher.

Currently, the main limitation is the difficulty of inferring who is a postdoc, so there are a lot of false negatives (folks who are postdocs but are not identified as such). I’m sure ya’ll find lots more additional problems, so please let us know what they are!