The function of research journals is to disseminate recent findings. In biology and medicine, it takes a while for a piece of published research to become accep

The function of research journals is to disseminate recent findings. In biology and medicine, it takes a while for a piece of published research to become accepted, as such recent findings are usually only of interest to other researchers. When something becomes accepted it enters text books and the like. Between the original papers and text books lie scholarly reviews and online databases. Some examples: For individual genes, the established canon can usually be found online at places like Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) [0]. Furthermore, a lot of genetic data is now made available through what might be called "aggregators", such as Ensembl [1], which provides both a free web interface to explore genetic variation and also allows downloading of primary data. Similar resources exist for other types of data. So, to answer your question, there are indeed a number of bioinformaticians who are trying to do exactly what you propose, some sources have become "aggregators of aggregators", for example Bioinformatic Harvester [3]. [0] www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/omim [1] www.ensembl.org/index.html [3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatic_Harvester