Research

An analytical tool that helps mine millions of published documents from various data sources in the area of life sciences.  Its interactive and intuitive interface helps identify the query relevant documents from the published literature to finding the documents of interest.   

SEARCH

• • All Fields: The free text search is conducted against Title, Abstract, Keywords, Journal Type, Document ID, Author, Affiliation, Author Country, Condition and Interventions fields of the relevant document type.  This search behavior is designed for broad coverage without sacrificing the relevance of results.

  • Condition: This entity specific search field queries the MEDLINE (Title, Abstract and MeSH headings, Keywords, Chemical list fields), Research Projects (Title and Abstract fields), selected Conferences (Title and Abstract fields), US Patents (Title and Abstract fields) and Clinical Trials (Condition and Title fields).  Condition refers to a disease, disorder, syndrome, health risk, life span, quality of life, illness, or injury.

  • Intervention: This entity specific search field queries the MEDLINE (Title, Abstract and Chemical list fields), Research Projects (Title and Abstract fields), selected Conferences (Title and Abstract fields), US Patents (Title and Abstract fields) and Clinical Trials (Condition and Title fields). Intervention refers to drugs, biologics, surgical procedures, radiologic procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, preventive care, etc. that is the focus of a clinical study.

  • Name: This entity specific search field queries the Author field of  MEDLINE and Conferences; Principal Investigator field of Research Projects and Clinical Trials; and Inventor field of US Patents data.

  • 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 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/s and displays its preferred term in the application.

Entity specific searches for Condition, Intervention and Name fields include auto-suggest option via a drop-down list to assist users in making 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 (Bortezomib) in the drop-down list.

RESULTS

Results for search query are summarized in two tabs: Overview and Documents 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 relevant research records retrieved by the search query.  Due to the exploding capability, the retrieved results contain the MeSH heading as well as all of its narrower and more specific terms.  Corresponding to each condition, a count of Research documents retrieved is displayed.  Next to the count is a link to the condition profile page.  The MeSH thesaurus (from the National Library of Medicine) is being used for normalization, synonym expansion and hierarchical structure of condition names. The application uses only the following MeSH descriptors: Diseases [C], Mental Disorders [F03] and Supplemental Concept Records [SCRClass = "3"].

• Document Affiliations: The 'Document Affiliations' chart displays organizations which the experts in the document are affiliated with and the total number of documents for that organization.  This panel flips to Top Journals chart.

  • Top Journals: User can flip the 'Document Affiliations' panel to view the "Top Journals" panel.The 'Top Journals' chart displays journals with the most query-relevant documents published in MEDLINE journals.

  • Country: The 'Country' chart displays a visual world heat map based on the most query-relevant documents published in MEDLINE journals specific to each country retrieved for the search query. The heat map display is based on logarithmic scale.  The user can select a country to find a list of documents published specific to the selected country.  The Documents panel will also be refreshed to display the published documents from the selected country.  To clear the country selected and show documents from all countries, remove the breadcrumb for that country.

• Interventions: The 'Interventions' panel lists all the drug names from Research documents retrieved by the search query.  Corresponding to each intervention, a count of documents retrieved is displayed.  Interventions extraction is primarily limited to drugs of both chemical and biological type.  Next to the count is 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.

  • Collaboration Network: The 'Collaboration Network' panel displays a network graph of the top ten organizations based on the search query along with collaborations between them. The thickness of of the line is proportional to the number of common documents between two organizations. The graph can be zoomedunzoomed using the + sign at the top right of the panel.  The user can adjust the sliding scale at bottom left to select minimum common documents to expand/shrink the network graph.  Clicking on a node displays the network of that node. The user can navigate back to prior clicked nodes or to the starting graph dispay using the drop down box at the top of the panel..

• Sources by Year: The 'Sources by Year' panel displays a bar chart of the documents per data source for the last ten years based on the search query. This chart flips to a chart displaying total number of documents by source.

The Documents view is a detailed view of the search results and contains the 'Documents' panel that displays a list of documents returned by the query in a tabular format.

• • Documents: This panel displays the first 500 of the most relevant recent articles per data source retrieved by the query.  Results are displayed under different tabs for each document source.  The default columns displayed are: Title, Authors, Document Affiliation, Citation, Date, Source, Link, Related Info, Relevant Documents, Conditions and Interventions.  Columns can be sorted by clicking on the column titles in an ascending or descending order.  The Title column displays the active link of the abstract snippets.  The Authors column displays the expert names that all have authored the document.  The expert name is an active link and re-directs user to the Expert Profile page of the Expert module.  The Citation column displays the name of citation in which the article was published.  The Date column provides the month & year in which the document was published.  The source column provides the name of the data source for the retrieved document.  The Link column provides an active link to the source document.  A graphical icon ($) indicates paid link to the full text article whereas absence of graphical icon ($) indicates full-text article is available from an open-source.

Exporting Data

Users have the ability to export results to conduct further analysis.

• Documents: The export includes information at the document level for each publication and/or other selected data sources.  Click on the export button at the top right of the page to export data to an Excel workbook.

        The first tab of the workbook, titled Research Search Criteria, contains the search criteria that were used to generate the result set as well as the date and time the search was performed.

        The second tab of the workbook, titled Research Search Results, contains the following fields:

• Title: This field displays the title of the abstract snippet.

• Authors: This field displays the expert names that all have authored the document.

• Document Affiliations: This field displays the organizations with which this document has been affiliated.

• Citation: This field displays the name of citation in which the article was published.

• Date: This field displays the month & year in which the document was published.

• Source: This field displays the name of the data source for the retrieved document.

• Link: This field provides an active link to the raw document.  PMC indicates that the full text article is available from an open-source whereas subscription indicates paid link to the full text article.

• Related Info: This field contains any information of related documents provided in the document.

• Conditions: This field displays conditions extracted from the document.

• Interventions: This field displays interventions extracted from the document.