Nucleic acids research
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Nucleic acids research · Jul 2005
PubFinder: a tool for improving retrieval rate of relevant PubMed abstracts.
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. ⋯ 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.