How The Paper Database Works

There are thousands of topics related to and affecting obesity.  Google Scholar and PubMed are amazing search engines but how many times have you found yourself searching for an answer that you just cannot seem to find?  Frustrating right.  We thought there had to be a better way and this is why we created The Paper Database. 

Instead of searching for keywords, we started building out tables containing paper citations in the same topic area.  Building out these tables takes an incredible amount of upfront work but we have found that referencing these tables saves us time and frustration in the long run.  We created The Paper Database to make the process of finding, organizing, and retrieving papers on obesity a little easier for you. 

To explain how The Paper Database works let’s first talk about how it is organized.  There are thousands of topics related to and affecting obesity but how do you organize them into something that makes sense? After much consideration we chose to organize the database into ten primary topics (found in Database Categories).

For a more detailed description of the topics in each category and the types of studies they contain (i.e. randomized controlled trials versus observational studies) please click here.

Next, within each of the ten primary categories there are links to multiple sub-topics.  As an example, here are some of the topics within the Diet Types < 6 Months category.

Clicking on one of the topics (Ketogenic in the example found below) will take you to a page containing a table listing all the relevant research papers on that topic by link, first author, year, journal, and paper title.  Freely accessible papers have a link labeled “full” for full access to papers (html webpage and/or PDF) whereas the research papers that require a journal subscription and are behind a publisher’s paywall are labeled “abs” for abstract only.  The tables can be sorted by link, author or year by clicking on the little triangle next to each column title, enabling you to find the most recent (or oldest) papers in each topic.

Ketogenic Diet < 6 Months

Collectively, The Paper Database contains > 1000 topics/webpages/tables and > 5,000 papers from  >150 scientific journals!  To keep the latest and most relevant research papers in the database we will be continually updating it as often as new papers relevant to our topical areas become available.  Finally, to demonstrate that we won’t be missing many papers from our database we wanted to share a link with you showing some of the academic journals we have referenced in our database as well as the frequency with which they come out.