News from FEBS Letters

Structured Digital Abstracts

FEBS Letters is pleased to announce an exciting new enhancement to the journal article: Structured Digital Abstracts (SDA).

A Structured Digital Abstract in FEBS Letters is an extension of the regular journal article abstract comprising of a series of sentences each of which contains a relationship between two biological entities, mentioning the method used to study the relationship. Each sentence is preceded by one or more identifiers pointing to the corresponding database entries that contain the full details of the interaction. To provide a simplified example of a potential relationship: protein A interacts with protein B, by method X. 

 A Special Issue of FEBS Letters, Volume 582/8 (9 April) marks the launch of Structured Digital Abstracts and explains the experiment and relevance in full detail.

The aim of this 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.
• To investigate and estimate the authors’ degree of interest (and competence) in a project implicating them as active players in this “editorial revolution”.

This innovative experiment is a joint project between the curators of the MINT Molecular Interactions database in Rome, the FEBS Letters Editorial Office in Heidelberg, and leading global experts in text- mining and bioinformatics.

As Gianni Cesareni, Editor of FEBS Letters and in charge of the Molecular INTeraction database (MINT) database explains: “Many articles in biological journals describe relationships between entities (genes, proteins, etc.) yet this information cannot be efficiently used because of difficulties in retrieving from text. Databases capture this valuable information and organize it in a structured format ready for automatic analysis. The experiment aims at adding to each manuscript a structured summary precisely reporting the protein interactions discussed in the manuscript. This will facilitate database entry and improve disclosure, to the benefit of authors and readers.”

In the FEBS Letters special issue that is being launched to mark this occasion, 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 that can be added to journal abstracts and that is directly related to the information in the corresponding text.