Dear friend,
We wanted to share significant progress with our Search Portal. A new version of the interface was released recently. And the underlying database continues to grow.
New Portal
We first released a new-look portal in Dec 2019 and that has been considerably overhauled in the last month including changes that respond to your feedback. We hope you like the new look.
Please take a look, test the new release and let us know your thoughts. We look to simplify where possible but do not want to lose important details. You can help us get the balance right. We’ve changed the underlying infrastructure and hope to respond to your ideas more quickly now.
Version 8 of MPNS Resource
This version contains over 0.5 million plant name records and includes
- records from 153 pharmacopoeia and medicinal plant publications including 227 separate monographs
- c. 27,000 plants from 383 families
- 247, 000 different scientific (Latin) plant names in use for those 27,000 plants
- 104,000 herbal drug, pharmaceutical or common names linked to those plants
We remain astonished at how many names are used for each species and the huge disparities in how particular names are employed in different countries, disciplines or publications. This underlines how difficult it can be to
- find all publications referring to a particular plant (when publications use different names)
- safely interpret published research wheSn names (especially herbal drug names) are used inconsistently to refer to different plants or drug formulations.
Our next newsletter will offer some guidance as to how to overcome these issues when searching published literature or online databases.
We are now working on Version 9 of MPNS and this will represent a very significant growth in the numbers of species, names and medicinal publications covered.
All the best,
the MPNS team |
