PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Sylvain Poux
AU  - Cecilia N. Arighi
AU  - Michele Magrane
AU  - Alex Bateman
AU  - Chih-Hsuan Wei
AU  - Zhiyong Lu
AU  - Emmanuel Boutet
AU  - Hema Bye-A-Jee
AU  - Maria Livia Famiglietti
AU  - Bernd Roechert
AU  - The UniProt Consortium
TI  - On expert curation and sustainability: UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot as a case study
AID  - 10.1101/094011
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 094011
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/12/14/094011.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/12/14/094011.full
AB  - MOTIVATION Biological knowledgebases, such as UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, constitute an essential component of daily scientific research by offering distilled, summarized, and computable knowledge extracted from the literature by expert curators. While knowledgebases play an increasingly important role in the scientific community, the question of their sustainability is raised due to the growth of biomedical literature.RESULTS By using UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot as a case study, we address this question by using different literature triage approaches. With the assistance of the PubTator text-mining tool, we tagged more than 10,000 articles to assess the ratio of papers relevant for curation. We first show that curators read and evaluate many more papers than they curate, and that measuring the number of curated publications is insufficient to provide a complete picture. We show that a large fraction of published papers found in PubMed is not relevant for curation in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot and demonstrate that, despite appearances, expert curation is sustainable.AVAILABILITY UniProt is freely available at http://www.uniprot.org/.CONTACT sylvain.poux{at}sib.swiss