Bioinformatics Resource Discovery by Social Media Scanning

Wednesday, September 24, 2014 — Poster Session IV
10:00 a.m. –12:00 p.m.	FAES Academic Center	OD	COMPBIO-4

Authors

• T Chatterjee
• L Young
• M Bhagwat

Abstract

Bioinformatics scientists often use tools that are freely available online. However, finding such tools requires periodic manual checking of journals for bioinformatics software and database articles. Multiple repositories of these tools have been created, in particular the Online Bioinformatics Resources Collection (OBRC) of the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Library System, which is a curated collection. Here we show a semi-automated approach for the discovery of resources in social media. Information miners have been written to glean resources from four broad areas: forums, blogs, PubMed, and Twitter. While literature searches through PubMed or Medline have been done before, our miners were made to gauge not only which resources have been created, but also which are being used. The addition of forums, blogs and Twitter miners is based on the principle that such technologies rely on users to voluntarily post information about any resource they wish, which can lead the miners to the resources which have stimulated the most interest.

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