Dataset Information

Biomedical text mining for research rigor and integrity: tasks, challenges, directions.

ABSTRACT: An estimated quarter of a trillion US dollars is invested in the biomedical research enterprise annually. There is growing alarm that a significant portion of this investment is wasted because of problems in reproducibility of research findings and in the rigor and integrity of research conduct and reporting. Recent years have seen a flurry of activities focusing on standardization and guideline development to enhance the reproducibility and rigor of biomedical research. Research activity is primarily communicated via textual artifacts, ranging from grant applications to journal publications. These artifacts can be both the source and the manifestation of practices leading to research waste. For example, an article may describe a poorly designed experiment, or the authors may reach conclusions not supported by the evidence presented. In this article, we pose the question of whether biomedical text mining techniques can assist the stakeholders in the biomedical research enterprise in doing their part toward enhancing research integrity and rigor. In particular, we identify four key areas in which text mining techniques can make a significant contribution: plagiarism/fraud detection, ensuring adherence to reporting guidelines, managing information overload and accurate citation/enhanced bibliometrics. We review the existing methods and tools for specific tasks, if they exist, or discuss relevant research that can provide guidance for future work. With the exponential increase in biomedical research output and the ability of text mining approaches to perform automatic tasks at large scale, we propose that such approaches can support tools that promote responsible research practices, providing significant benefits for the biomedical research enterprise.

SUBMITTER: Kilicoglu H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6291799 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Biomedical text mining for research rigor and integrity: tasks, challenges, directions.

Kilicoglu Halil H

Briefings in bioinformatics 20181101 6

An estimated quarter of a trillion US dollars is invested in the biomedical research enterprise annually. There is growing alarm that a significant portion of this investment is wasted because of problems in reproducibility of research findings and in the rigor and integrity of research conduct and reporting. Recent years have seen a flurry of activities focusing on standardization and guideline development to enhance the reproducibility and rigor of biomedical research. Research activity is pri ...[more]

PMID: 28633401

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Project description:Biomedical and life science literature is an essential way to publish experimental results. With the rapid growth of the number of new publications, the amount of scientific knowledge represented in free text is increasing remarkably. There has been much interest in developing techniques that can extract this knowledge and make it accessible to aid scientists in discovering new relationships between biological entities and answering biological questions. Making use of the word2vec approach, we generated word vector representations based on a corpus consisting of over 16 million PubMed abstracts. We developed a text mining pipeline to produce word2vec embeddings with different properties and performed validation experiments to assess their utility for biomedical analysis. An important pre-processing step consisted in the substitution of synonymous terms by their preferred terms in biomedical databases. Furthermore, we extracted gene-gene networks from two embedding versions and used them as prior knowledge to train Graph-Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on large breast cancer gene expression data and on other cancer datasets. Performances of resulting models were compared to Graph-CNNs trained with protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks or with networks derived using other word embedding algorithms. We also assessed the effect of corpus size on the variability of word representations. Finally, we created a web service with a graphical and a RESTful interface to extract and explore relations between biomedical terms using annotated embeddings. Comparisons to biological databases showed that relations between entities such as known PPIs, signaling pathways and cellular functions, or narrower disease ontology groups correlated with higher cosine similarity. Graph-CNNs trained with word2vec-embedding-derived networks performed sufficiently good for the metastatic event prediction tasks compared to other networks. Such performance was good enough to validate the utility of our generated word embeddings in constructing biological networks. Word representations as produced by text mining algorithms like word2vec, therefore are able to capture biologically meaningful relations between entities. Our generated embeddings are publicly available at https://github.com/genexplain/Word2vec-based-Networks/blob/main/README.md.

Project description:Due to the rapidly expanding body of biomedical literature, biologists require increasingly sophisticated and efficient systems to help them to search for relevant information. Such systems should account for the multiple written variants used to represent biomedical concepts, and allow the user to search for specific pieces of knowledge (or events) involving these concepts, e.g., protein-protein interactions. Such functionality requires access to detailed information about words used in the biomedical literature. Existing databases and ontologies often have a specific focus and are oriented towards human use. Consequently, biological knowledge is dispersed amongst many resources, which often do not attempt to account for the large and frequently changing set of variants that appear in the literature. Additionally, such resources typically do not provide information about how terms relate to each other in texts to describe events.This article provides an overview of the design, construction and evaluation of a large-scale lexical and conceptual resource for the biomedical domain, the BioLexicon. The resource can be exploited by text mining tools at several levels, e.g., part-of-speech tagging, recognition of biomedical entities, and the extraction of events in which they are involved. As such, the BioLexicon must account for real usage of words in biomedical texts. In particular, the BioLexicon gathers together different types of terms from several existing data resources into a single, unified repository, and augments them with new term variants automatically extracted from biomedical literature. Extraction of events is facilitated through the inclusion of biologically pertinent verbs (around which events are typically organized) together with information about typical patterns of grammatical and semantic behaviour, which are acquired from domain-specific texts. In order to foster interoperability, the BioLexicon is modelled using the Lexical Markup Framework, an ISO standard.The BioLexicon contains over 2.2 M lexical entries and over 1.8 M terminological variants, as well as over 3.3 M semantic relations, including over 2 M synonymy relations. Its exploitation can benefit both application developers and users. We demonstrate some such benefits by describing integration of the resource into a number of different tools, and evaluating improvements in performance that this can bring.

Dataset Information

Biomedical text mining for research rigor and integrity: tasks, challenges, directions.

Publications

Biomedical text mining for research rigor and integrity: tasks, challenges, directions.

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