Tracking biomedical articles along the translational continuum: a measure based on biomedical knowledge representation

Xin Li (), Xuli Tang () and Wei Lu ()
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Xin Li: Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Xuli Tang: Central China Normal University
Wei Lu: Wuhan University

Scientometrics, 2023, vol. 128, issue 2, No 18, 1295-1319

Abstract: Abstract Keeping track of translational research is essential to evaluating the performance of programs on translational medicine. Despite several indicators in previous studies, a consensus measure is still needed to represent the translational features of biomedical research at the article level. In this study, we first trained semantic representations of biomedical entities and documents (i.e., bio-entity2vec and bio-doc2vec) based on over 30 million PubMed articles. With these vectors, we then developed a new measure called Translational Progression (TP) for tracking biomedical articles along the translational continuum. We validated the effectiveness of TP from two perspectives (Clinical trial phase identification and ACH classification), which showed excellent consistency between TP and other indicators. Meanwhile, TP has several advantages. First, it can track the degree of translation of biomedical research dynamically and in real-time. Second, it is straightforward to interpret and operationalize. Third, it doesn’t require labor-intensive MeSH labeling and it is suitable for big scholarly data as well as papers that are not indexed in PubMed. In addition, we examined the translational progressions of biomedical research from three dimensions (including overall distribution, time, and research topic), which revealed three significant findings. The proposed measure in this study could be used by policymakers to monitor biomedical research with high translational potential in real-time and make better decisions. It can also be adopted and improved for other domains, such as physics or computer science, to assess the application value of scientific discoveries.

Keywords: Translational Progression; Biomedical knowledge representation; Indicator; Bibliometrics; Research evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-022-04607-z

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