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Estimating the scale of biomedical data generation using text mining

Gabriel Rosenfeld, Dawei Lin
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/182857
Gabriel Rosenfeld
1National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Division of Allergy (NIAID), Immunology, and Transplantation (DAIT)
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Dawei Lin
1National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Division of Allergy (NIAID), Immunology, and Transplantation (DAIT)
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Abstract

While the impact of biomedical research has traditionally been measured using bibliographic metrics such as citation or journal impact factor, the data itself is an output which can be directly measured to provide additional context about a publication’s impact. Data are a resource that can be repurposed and reused providing dividends on the original investment used to support the primary work. Moreover, it is the cornerstone upon which a tested hypothesis is rejected or accepted and specific scientific conclusions are reached. Understanding how and where it is being produced enhances the transparency and reproducibility of the biomedical research enterprise. Most biomedical data are not directly deposited in data repositories and are instead found in the publication within figures or attachments making it hard to measure. We attempted to address this challenge by using recent advances in word embedding to identify the technical and methodological features of terms used in the free text of articles’ methods sections. We created term usage signatures for five types of biomedical research data, which were used in univariate clustering to correctly identify a large fraction of positive control articles and a set of manually annotated articles where generation of data types could be validated. The approach was then used to estimate the fraction of PLOS articles generating each biomedical data type over time. Out of all PLOS articles analyzed (n = 129,918), ~7%, 19%, 12%, 18%, and 6% generated flow cytometry, immunoassay, genomic microarray, microscopy, and high-throughput sequencing data. The estimate portends a vast amount of biomedical data being produced: in 2016, if other publishers generated a similar amount of data then roughly 40,000 NIH-funded research articles would produce ~56,000 datasets consisting of the five data types we analyzed.

One Sentence Summary Application of a word-embedding model trained on the methods sections of research articles allows for estimation of the production of diverse biomedical data types using text mining.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. This article is a US Government work. It is not subject to copyright under 17 USC 105 and is also made available for use under a CC0 license.
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Posted September 01, 2017.
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Estimating the scale of biomedical data generation using text mining
Gabriel Rosenfeld, Dawei Lin
bioRxiv 182857; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/182857
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Estimating the scale of biomedical data generation using text mining
Gabriel Rosenfeld, Dawei Lin
bioRxiv 182857; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/182857

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