PubFinder: a tool for improving retrieval rate of relevant PubMed abstracts

Nucleic Acids Res. 2005 Jul 1;33(Web Server issue):W774-8. doi: 10.1093/nar/gki429.

Abstract

Since it is becoming increasingly laborious to manually extract useful information embedded in the ever-growing volumes of literature, automated intelligent text analysis tools are becoming more and more essential to assist in this task. PubFinder (www.glycosciences.de/tools/PubFinder) is a publicly available web tool designed to improve the retrieval rate of scientific abstracts relevant for a specific scientific topic. Only the selection of a representative set of abstracts is required, which are central for a scientific topic. No special knowledge concerning the query-syntax is necessary. Based on the selected abstracts, a list of discriminating words is automatically calculated, which is subsequently used for scoring all defined PubMed abstracts for their probability of belonging to the defined scientific topic. This results in a hit-list of references in the descending order of their likelihood score. The algorithms and procedures implemented in PubFinder facilitate the perpetual task for every scientist of staying up-to-date with current publications dealing with a specific subject in biomedicine.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Abstracting and Indexing
  • Algorithms
  • Internet
  • PubMed*
  • Software*
  • User-Computer Interface