KoExPubMed: A tool for effective and customized knowledge extraction from PubMed

Abstract

An exponential growth in the literature in general and the medical literature in particular raises a need for effective intelligent analysis strategies and tools to provide valuable insights to researchers about the current evolving literature. While existing applications provide more specific approaches to the problem, such as focusing on particular genome or protein information, in this paper, the proposed application provides effective and detailed analysis of PubMed. The developed tool, named KoExPubMed, follows a more generalized and holistic way by taking into consideration different types of information such as authors, countries, genes, and the interactions between them. The developed application consists of four main components; (1) keyword search and ID extraction, (2) PubMed article information and abstract retrieval, (3) country and address extraction, and (4) gene information extraction. In addition to the fundamental components, the tool provides a variety of visualization options for showing the extracted information and the related associations, including line charts for densities and countries, chord charts for collaborations of authors, network graphs for the genes mentioned together, bubble charts for gene frequencies, etc. By addressing the need for a generalized data mining tool, we propose a comprehensive application which is capable of employing data mining and machine learning techniques to extract from PubMed knowledge valuable to researchers and practitioners who are interested in closely investigating the achievements of others.