ArticleNucleic acids research2020
On the lifetime of bioinformatics web services.
Article in Nucleic acids research, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Designing reproducible large-language-model-assisted scientific analyses.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Review
- Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Cancer Drug Discovery: Promise, Challenges, and Emerging Opportunities.Cancers · 2026Review
- Human Periodontal Ligament Transcriptomes Under Orthodontic Extrusion and Intrusion: An Exploratory Pilot RNA-Seq Study With an Interactive Public Web Tool.Orthodontics & craniofacial research · 2026Article
- Eras of bioinformatics technologies from command-line interfaces to artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2026Review
- Ten quick tips to SNIFF out sustainable and secure scientific software.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- CAMP: a modular metagenomics analysis system for integrated multistep data exploration.NAR genomics and bioinformatics · 2026Article
- Ten common misconceptions about Galaxy (and why they are wrong!).PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Quest for Orthologs in the era of Data Deluge and AI: Challenges and Innovations in Orthology Prediction and Data Integration.Journal of molecular evolution · 2025Review
- Recent advances in the investigation of the regulatory network underlying reactive nitrogen species-mediated tumorigenesis: molecular mechanisms and targeted therapeutic strategies.Redox report : communications in free radical research · 2025Review
- Galaxy single-cell & spatial omics community update: Navigating new frontiers in 2025.Cell genomics · 2025Review
- Value of Bioinformatics Models for Predicting Translational Control of Angiogenesis.Circulation research · 2025Review
- HiOmics: A cloud-based one-stop platform for the comprehensive analysis of large-scale omics data.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2024Article
- The goldmine of GWAS summary statistics: a systematic review of methods and tools.BioData mining · 2024Article
- Combining machine learning with structure-based protein design to predict and engineer post-translational modifications of proteins.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- For long-term sustainable software in bioinformatics.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Beyond blast: enabling microbiologists to better extract literature, taxonomic distributions and gene neighbourhood information for protein families.Microbial genomics · 2024Article
- Beyond Blast: Enabling Microbiologists to Better Extract Literature, Taxonomic Distributions and Gene Neighborhood Information for Protein Families.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- SynBioTools: a one-stop facility for searching and selecting synthetic biology tools.BMC bioinformatics · 2023Article
- Computational Approaches to Enzyme Inhibition by Marine Natural Products in the Search for New Drugs.Marine drugs · 2023Review
- Web Services for RNA-RNA Interaction Prediction.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Web services are used through all disciplines in life sciences and the online landscape is growing by hundreds of novel servers annually. However, availability varies, and maintenance practices are largely inconsistent. We screened the availability of 2396 web tools published during the past 10 years. All servers were accessed over 133 days and 318 668 index files were stored in a local database. The number of accessible tools almost linearly increases in time with highest availability for 2019 and 2020 (∼90%) and lowest for tools published in 2010 (∼50%). In a 133-day test frame, 31% of tools were always working, 48.4% occasionally and 20.6% never. Consecutive downtimes were typically below 5 days with a median of 1 day, and unevenly distributed over the weekdays. A rescue experiment on 47 tools that were published from 2019 onwards but never accessible showed that 51.1% of the tools could be restored in due time. We found a positive association between the number of citations and the probability of a web server being reachable. We then determined common challenges and formulated categorical recommendations for researchers planning to develop web-based resources. As implication of our study, we propose to develop a repository for automatic API testing and sustainability indexing.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.