Keeping up with current scientific literature is a daunting
task, considering that hundreds to thousands of papers are published each day.
Now researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a computer
program to help them evaluate and rank scientific articles in their field.
The researchers use a text-mining algorithm to prioritize
research papers to read and include in their Comparative Toxicogenomics
Database (CTD), a public database that manually curates and codes data from the
scientific literature describing how environmental chemicals interact with
genes to affect human health.
“Over 33,000 scientific papers have been published on heavy
metal toxicity alone, going as far back as 1926,” explains Dr. Allan Peter
Davis, a biocuration project manager for CTD at NC State who worked on the
project and co-lead author of an article on the work. “We simply can’t read and
code them all. And, with the help of this new algorithm, we don’t have to.”