News

An analytical tool that serves as a one search platform for a variety of biopharmaceutical news coming from various syndicated and company news sources.  Its interactive and intuitive interface assists users in viewing a summarized view of the search results to find news articles of interest.

SEARCH

• All Fields: The 'All Fields' search queries title only, lead paragraph or all sections of the news article, depending on the selected radio button.  This search behavior is designed for a broad coverage without sacrificing the relevance of results. 

• Condition: This entity specific search queries the 'Title' section of the news article to extract the relevant condition.  Condition refers to a disease, disorder, syndrome, health risk, life span, quality of life, illness, or injury. The search on a broader term includes narrower and related terms including synonyms based on MeSH hierarchy.  As an example, search on Prostatic Neoplasm will include  Prostate Cancer.

• Intervention: This entity specific search queries the 'Title' section of the news article to extract the relevant intervention. Interventions refer to drugs, biologics, surgical procedures, radiologic procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, preventive care, etc that is the focus of a news article.

• Organization: This entity specific search queries the 'Title' section of the news article to extract the relevant organization.  Organization refers to a company, government agency, institution or other type of organization.

• Include Synonyms: A synonym term could be a word/phrase that means similar to its preferred term. When 'Include Synonyms' (the default) is selected the synonym expansion behavior from thesaurus gets activated. The system will process the search term against all its synonyms and display the preferred term in the application. De-selection of the 'Include Synonyms' option will query only the search term and display its preferred term in the application.

• Entire News Article: If selected, this will look for the user’s query term in the entire news article.  This option allows users to conduct broad searches as news articles may contain general information about organizations or conditions or interventions.

• Title Only: This is the default search behavior of the application.  This option allows users to conduct more focused searches as titles normally contain focused information related to an organization or a condition or an intervention.

• Lead Paragraph: This option allows users to conduct searches from the lead paragraph of the news articles. This broadens the search compared to titles only option, but reduces noise that may result from searching the entire article.

Entity specific searches for Condition, Intervention and Organization fields include auto-suggest options via a drop-down list to assist users in term selection. Please note that the drop-down list includes only those terms that are present in the current data sources. A synonym term will include its preferred term in parenthesis in the drop-down list. As an example, Velcade will appear as Velcade (Bortemozib) in the drop-down list.

RESULTS

Results of the search are presented in two tabs: overview (chart/facet panel view) and articles view.

The overview is a summary view of the search results and contains a selection of interactive charts and facet panels.

• Conditions: The 'Conditions' panel lists the preferred condition terminology based on the title of the relevant news articles retrieved by the search query.  Due to the exploding capability, the retrieved results contain the MeSH heading as well as all narrower, more specific terms.  Corresponding to each condition, a count of trials retrieved is displayed.  Next to the trial count is provided a link to the condition profile page.  The MeSH thesaurus (latest version, from the National Library of Medicine) is being used for normalization, synonym expansion and hierarchical structure of condition names. The application uses the following MeSH descriptors: Diseases [C], Mental Disorders [F03] and Supplemental Concept Records [T047: Disease & Syndrome].

  • Interventions: The 'Interventions' panel lists all the drugs names based on the title of the relevant news articles retrieved by the search query. Corresponding to each intervention name, a count of the news articles discussing about that intervention is displayed.  Interventions extraction is primarily limited to drugs of both chemical and biological type.  Next to the trial count is provided a link to the intervention profile page.  The CRN intervention vocabulary and ChemIDPlus vocabulary (from the National Library of Medicine) are being used for normalization and synonym expansion of drugs names.

• Organizations: The 'Organizations' panel lists all organization names extracted from the title of the relevant news articles retrieved by the search query. Corresponding to each organization, a count of the news articles with references to that organization is displayed. Next to the news article count is provided a link to the organization profile page.  The CRN organization vocabulary is being used for normalization and synonym expansion.

• Bionews Trends: The 'Bionews Trends' panel provides a graphical representation of all query relevant articles on a time-scale. The graph captures the news articles which were released within the last six months from the date of the search query. Rolling the mouse over the graphical time points will display the date and the count of the news articles.  Please note that the article count display on the timeline chart (y axis) may include duplicate entries when the count of retrieved news articles is small.

• Country: The 'Country' panel displays a world map based on the number of news articles from which the countries are extracted. The extraction of countries is from the entire news articles. Rolling the mouse over these data points will display the number of articles from that country.

All the above described panels have interactive filtering capability.  Thus, overview panels allow users to further explore and refine the query by inclusion and/or exclusion* of meta data from these panels.  Clicking left mouse button on one of the data value in a facet panel returns a subset of the results that match your query and contains the selected data value.  The included data value in a facet panel gets highlighted in Green. Clicking right  mouse button on one of the  in a facet panel returns a subset of the results that match your query excluding the selected data value.  The excluded data value in a facet panel gets highlighted in red. Multiple values can be selected by holding down the Control key while clicking on the data values within the facet.  Boolean logic can be added to the interactive filtering capability by selecting AND or OR from the top right of the respective panel.  Selected data values for inclusion/exclusion appears as breadcrumbs and can be individually removed from the breadcrumb panel. Multiple selections within a facet panel can be removed by clicking the filter icon which appears in the panel title bar.

*The capability of excluding facets is currently available for Organizations, Conditions and Interventions panels only

The articles view is a detailed view of the search results and contains the news articles and the relevant entity information in a tabular format displayed in a chronological order of news release date.

• Articles:  This panel displays the first 1000 articles retrieved by the query. Multiple news articles with similar titles can be grouped and un-grouped using the collapse (-) and expand (+) option provided at the top right corner of the trials panel. 

  • RSS Feed Date: The date column displays the release date when the article was captured.

  • Title: The title column displays the article title with a link to the original news article.

  • Source: The source column displays the name of the news source with a link to the original news article.

  • Clinical Trials Link: The clinical trials link column provides an icon to show that there is a relevant trial(s) associated with this news article.  Clicking on this icon redirects user to the Clinical Trials application.  The Clinical Trials application will display an overview and detailed trial information for the relevant trial(s).

  • Organizations: The organizations column lists the name(s) of organization(s) mentioned in the title of the news article.  Extraction of associated organization(s) is an ongoing process and therefore may not populate all organizations.  The organization names in this column are links that redirect user to the organization profile page.

  • Conditions: The conditions column lists the conditions extracted from the title of the news article.

  • Interventions: The interventions column lists drugs names extracted from the title of the news article.

It is possible to select, remove and reorder columns by selecting the Columns menu at the top right of the title bar. Once the selection of the columns is done, click Accept to refresh the view. Columns can be sorted in ascending or descending order by clicking on the column titles.

Exporting Data

Users have the ability to export results to an excel spreadsheet for further analysis. An Excel export provides information at the document level as previewed in the news articles panel. The first worksheet contains the search criteria used to generate the result set as well as the date and time the search was performed. The second worksheet contains all relevant articles retrieved by the query. The third worksheet contains deduplicated news articles of the result set. The following columns are included in the exported file (these columns can be reordered, added or removed by using the Columns menu):

• RSS Feed Date: This field represents the date the article was captured in the system.

• Title: This field displays the title of the article.   The title is again hyper-linked to the site that originally published the article.

• Source: This column provides the name of the source from where the article was obtained.  The source is also hyper-linked to the published news article.

• Clinical Trials Link: This column provides the clinical trial ID hyperlinked to the ClinicalTrials Navigator, displaying the summary and detail view of the associated trial(s).

• Organizations: This field shows all the organizations extracted from the news article.

• Conditions: This field shows the conditions extracted from the title of the news article.

• Interventions: This field shows the drugs extracted from the title of the news article.