FEBS Letters, a journal for short reports in molecular biosciences, has announced a new enhancement to the journal article: Structured Digital Abstracts (SDA).
SDA is an extension of the regular journal article abstract comprising a series of sentences, each of which contains a relationship between two biological entities, mentioning the method used to study the relationship. The sentence is preceded by one or more identifiers pointing to the corresponding database entries that contain the full details of the interaction.
A special issue of FEBS Letters, Volume 582/8 (April 9) marks the launch of SDA and explains the experiment and relevance in full detail. The aim of the experiment is threefold - to develop and fine tune simple tools to facilitate data entries and the authors selection of terms from controlled vocabularies; to propose a text layout for a structured abstract to be appended to the traditional abstract; and to investigate and estimate the authors' degree of interest (and competence) in a project implicating them as active players in this 'editorial revolution'.
The experiment is a joint project between the curators of the MINT Molecular Interactions database in Rome, the FEBS Letters editorial office in Heidelberg, and global experts in text- mining and bioinformatics.
In the FEBS Letters special issue Florian Leitner and Alfonso Valencia propose that a combination of human expertise and automatic text-mining systems can be used to create a first generation of electronically annotated information. This information can be added to journal abstracts - it would be directly related to the information in the corresponding text.
The Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) is a not-for-profit life sciences organisation.
