Developing Extensible Web-Portal Increasing Visibility, Communication and Dissemination for Biomedical Research Projects

Researchers spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours get¬ting doctoral degrees, applying for research grants, conducting research, giving presentations to colleagues, writing journal articles, and publishing books, but does any of this research ever reach the intended audience – other researchers? The Internet is one of the most widely used forms of research dissemination and many recent authors admit that the Internet is a low-cost, easily available dissemination channel, and most research centers maintain an active website. The main objective of developing this project is to provide an appropriate and comprehensive space for biomedical researchers. Not just a portal for publishing the latest research, but along with project information, complete updates on team members, events, workshops, related articles and also non-academic posts. Another significant feature is to provide an easy way to communicate with the researchers of the project as soon as possible, which can facilitate related collaborations, acquaintance and communication more easily through investors and project enthusiasts. Moreover, as the platform contains all the information in one place, the investors can contact directly and easily. Having a portal for publishing information and updates of a biomedical project is a need of today. A portal for managing the content without needing knowledge of programming but accessible for the researchers that takes the heavy burden off the shoulders of researchers. The development of such a portal requires the use of modern technologies to adapt to the latest devices and user needs. The design and implementation of the project has been done using open-source tools and languages. The back-end part is responsible for all operations related to storage and supply of data, security, controlling and optimization of internal functionalities. NodeJs takes control over all the requests and respective operations to validate, prepare and present the responses. To keep the database agile, scalable and flexible, MongoDB is used which is open-source and exploites JSON-like documents that is the native and compatible data structure for NodeJs. Defining the end users of the web portal contained knowing well who the users are and what they need. User Interface (UI) developed in this project aims supporting user’s needs through exposing all aspects of a web site or service in a good manner, beside User Experience (UX) that focuses on enriching the quality of the user’s experience perceived while using the web site. Next.js is an open-source built on top of NodeJs, makes a combination of powerful tools on both sides. As NextJs generates the web pages on server side, it is optimized for search engines like Google. On the other side, because of the responsiveness design, the users are not limited and can use the platform on any desired device which is one of the pillars of UX. This portal lets the project owners (researchers) to have a dedicated communication channel to talk about themselves, demonstrate their papers, the events, and their team. Management of publishing these data to the Internet, is easily done via a custom dashboard designed for the project owners. Ultimately, comprehensive statistics and analytics of the visitors help the project owners to have panoramic view on measure of online traffic, user’s behavior, bounce rate, marketing campaigns and so on.