Firefox is great browser used by many and what makes it even more useful is the fact that it comes with an option of some very handy Add-ons. Some days back, Nick Oswald, editor-in-chief of the Bitesize Bio blog posted a blog entry on new Firefox Add-ons for scientists and that was a follow up to his famous post from 2007. He describes some very useful Add-ons for the research scientists and I would encourage to read his blog posts for all possible add-ons from Firefox. Today i just describe some which i am using quite often for my everyday work.

1) Molecular biologists tool bar from Bitesize bio :I find this tool bar very useful as it allows you to search Pubmed, Patents, Google Scholar and more from the same search box and get quick links to useful tools, databases and gadgets.

2) Zotero : is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension which will help you to collect, manage, and cite your research sources. What more you need as It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.Its really a wonderful add-on and Word Processor Plugins makes it even more useful.

This plugin is available for Microsoft Word and OpenOffice/NeoOffice, create dynamic bibliographies: insert a new in-text citation in your manuscript, and the bibliography will be automatically updated to include the cited item.

3) i-cite : i-cite offers enhanced web search for life scientists and currently mash up content from PubMed, EBI and Google Scholar and think of adding life science-specific search (e.g. protein structures, gene sequences, microarray/PCR results) and text mining.

4) Timerfox : Its one of my favorite, sits in your browser,keeps counting and alerts you when the time is up. Believe me its turns out to be very useful and allows you to browse at ease during incubation steps.This extension is a simple timer. You enter the hours, minutes, and seconds, as well as a message to display, and the timer counts down to it. The time left is displayed in the icon for your convenience. When the timer is complete, the message you selected pops up in an alert box.

5) Lab meeting : This add-on helps colecting the pdf’s faster using Labmeeting.com.After installing this Add-on, you will need a user account for labmeeting.com to take advantage of the full functionality (available free for academics at http://www.labmeeting.com/signup).

Hope you find this article interesting and useful. Dont forget to share your other useful add-ons (which are not mentioned here).

Check another post by pamela shaw on add-ons from firefox for scientists.

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