Imagine you are exploring a new topic. You start by searching for relevant papers in the field. You type your query, click the search button, and end up with thousands of scientific articles, waiting to be read. How do you identify which papers to focus on? In Europe PMC, search results can be sorted differently to help you navigate through the literature. By default, results are sorted by relevance.

This has been a very busy and fruitful year for Europe PMC. With holidays approaching we take a look back at some of the Europe PMC achievements and milestones of 2016. We kicked off in January with a new, mobile-friendly homepage and information pages. The final design was based on user research in which we gathered lots of feedback from you to come up with design concepts, which were thoroughly tested again before release.

What exactly is Europe PMC? How is it different from PubMed Central? What can I do with Europe PMC? Those are some of the questions I had myself when I first heard of Europe PMC. And now my task is to make sure that everyone can answer them easily. My name is Maria Levchenko and I am a recent addition to the Europe PMC team.

Manual curation is vital for maintaining quality information in biological databases. However, with the exponential growth in biological data this approach is both challenging and time consuming. We wanted to create a scalable and sustainable process which could complement manual curation.

We’re delighted to announce that the Academy of Medical Sciences has joined Europe PMC as a new funder, bringing the total funders to 27. The Academy of Medical Sciences represents the diverse spectrum of medical science – from basic research through clinical application to healthcare delivery. Their mission is to promote medical science and its translation into benefits for society.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke Sometimes the changes we release on Europe PMC are not immediately obvious! For the last few months we’ve been working hard to migrate our search to a technology called Solr.

We’ve recently launched a re-designed Grant Finder on Europe PMC. You can use the Grant Finder to search over 56,700 biomedical research grants, awarded to the 23,000 Principal Investigators supported by the 26 Europe PMC funders. Learn 5 ways to use the new Grant Finder: 1. Find a collaborator As a researcher, or student, you can find potential collaborators / PIs working in a related research area.

Since our blog post last summer on the inclusion of Wikipedia as an external links provider, we have been lucky to host an intern, Tom Arrow,  who has spent the last few months investigating possible further connections between Wikimedia projects and Europe PMC. This post highlights some of the ways Tom has been exploring these connections.

We are excited to announce the launch of the Europe PMC author profile pages! Based on your ORCID record, they provide a graphical overview of your publications in Europe PMC and your citation rate over time. With over 2.2 million articles in Europe PMC linked to about 172,000 unique ORCIDs, we expect this feature to be of wide interest to publishing researchers, journals, funders, and others interested in scientific credit.

You may notice that the Europe PMC website looks a little different. Perhaps a little clearer, neater, bolder? More importantly, we also hope that it is easier to use and to find key information about Europe PMC. Yes: we have given the Europe PMC website a makeover to celebrate the New Year! In particular, we have redesigned the homepage and navigation, and the website is now responsive for use on mobile devices.

For Open Access week 2015, we tweeted some number-related facts about Europe PMC, reproduced with a little additional context here.