Too hot to handle

Generating new research ideas requires a detailed knowledge and awareness of the subject area. Thankfully, due to the availability of text mining services, literature can be ‘intelligently’ mined for relevant articles. GoPubMed allows you to mine PubMed abstracts using specific search terms. Four options are available including an ontology-based literature search that annotates the PubMed abstracts with your keywords and then groups the articles into a hierachy based on the gene ontologies. An advanced semantic search allows you to search using actual GO terms such as ‘protein biosynthesis’ or ‘apoptosis’.

The HotTopic feature is a really useful system for retrieving statistical data based on the biomedical literature. This feature performs a bibliometric analysis graphically displaying the growth of literature chronologically. Key authors and journals are highlighted along with geographic information based on the publications.

The figures below represent the trends related to copy number variation in the human genome as this has generated widespread interest over the last few years. These variations have been largely overlooked in previous studies and are believed to be associated with a number of genetic diseases.

Fig.1. A graph displaying the growth of literature related to copy number variation per year over the last 20 years.

Fig.2. A pie chart diplaying the authors from countries active in publishing on “copy number variation”.