“The National Library of Medicine is leveraging its database resources and artificial intelligence capabilities to rapidly provide COVID-19 literature and resources to researchers and scientists as the world races to understand and respond to the pandemic.”
“The White House in March tapped NLM, under the National Institutes of Health, to join a public-private partnership called the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) to develop data-mining techniques that could help the science community answer critical questions pertaining to COVID-19. Leveraging its existing infrastructure and establishing processes for content submission, NLM has quickly brought access to COVID-19 literature and clinical trial content on its PubMed Central (PMC) and ClinicalTrials.gov databases.”
“’As of May 1, about 46,000 articles had been deposited by publishers to PMC or updated in PMC to have a license that allows for text and data-mining, of which more than 5,600 articles specifically focus on the current novel coronavirus,’ said NLM National Center for Biotechnology Information Acting Director Stephen Sherry. ‘Some 49 publishers are now included in the PMC COVID-19 initiative.’”
“Within the first few weeks since launching the project, PMC saw significant COVID-19 download and data-sharing rates, said PMC Program Manager Kathryn Funk in an NIH webinar. As part of the project, Funk’s team worked to standardize submission data in a machine-readable format.”
“’The early results have been encouraging,’ Funk said. ‘Articles in the Public Health Emergency Collection and PMC were retrieved more than 2 million times in the first two to three weeks of the initiative, and the coordinating dataset has been downloaded more than 75,000 times at this time. It’s our hope that through expanded access and machine learning, NLM will be able to help accelerate scientific research on COVID-19.’”
“NLM has also leveraged ClinicalTrials.gov’s existing infrastructure to scale up and provide quick access to information about trials related to COVID-19…” Read the full article here.
Source: NLM Leverages Data Standardization, Text Mining to Sharpen COVID-19 Research Databases – By Melissa Harris, May 11, 2020. GovernmentCIO.
