New feature for BioStor: extracting literature cited from OCR text

At present BioStor provides a simple display of an article extracted from BHL. You get the page images, and sometimes a map and an altmetric "donut". But we can do better than this. For example, I'm starting to experiment with displaying a list of literature cited by the article. Below is a screenshot of the article A remarkable new species of Homalomena (Araceae) from Peninsular Malaysia showing the two references this article cites:

These references have been extracted using some simple regular expressions written in Javascript and wrapped up in a CouchDB view. They are extracted as simple text strings, I've not made any further attempt to parse the string into authors, title, journal, etc.

We don't need no stinkin' parser- a guide to resolving free-form citations with #CrossRef Metadata Search -> goo.gl/f9a4e

— Geoffrey Bilder (@gbilder) October 18, 2012

Of course, what we really want is to be able to convert these strings into clickable links to the actual reference. In the spirit of "We don't need no stinkin' parser" (see also Resolving free-form citations) I've added a little search icon that when you click on it attempts to find the reference in BioStor. In the screenshot above we've found both references in BioStor.

Obvious next steps are to add other resolvers (such as CrossRef for DOIs), do the resolution before the references are displayed (rather than wait for the user to click on the search icon), and even more usefully, display a list of articles that cite each article in BioStor (in the example above, both cited articles should "know" that they have been cited).

Whether an article in BioStor has a list of citations depends on the success of the regular expressions in extracting them, and whether the database has the OCR text. The current version of BioStor didn't originally store the OCR text, so I'm slowly adding that to the references. Other examples of articles with citations include Northeast African racers of the Platyceps rhodorachis complex (Reptilia: Squamata: Colubrinae) and Synopsis of the Neotropical mantid genus Pseudacanthops Saussure, 1870, with the description of three new species (Mantodea: Acanthopidae).

Long term adding linked citations to BioStor means we get a step closer to being able to offer readers an experience like PubMed Central (PMC), where articles in PMC are linked to articles in PMC that either cite, or a cited by that article. I think there's a case for a PubMed Central-like service for biodiversity literature (see Possible project: A PubMed Central for taxonomy) that rescues that literature from the ghetto much of it currently resides in, and instead makes it a first class citizen of the wider digital biodiversity landscape.

BHL and GBIF as biomedical databases

When I think of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) or GBIF I tend to think of taxonomy and biodiversity. Folk wisdom has it that BHL is full of old books, mostly pre-1923. Great for finding old taxonomic names, or nice artwork, but not exactly "modern" biology. GBIF is mainly about displaying organism distributions based on museum specimens, the primary data of taxonomic research. Again, great stuff, but aren't museums simply full of dead stuff that people have collected and forgotten about?

But BHL has a lot more post-1923 content than I suspect most people realise (several museum or society journals have 21st century issues in BHL's archives, for example). Continuing the theme of linking BHL and GBIF content, as part of a forthcoming project on taxonomic names (to be made available "real soon now") I stumbled across this 1976 paper in BHL (now in BioStor):

Monograph on "Lithoglyphopsis" aperta, the snail host of Mekong River Schistosomiasis by Davis et al..



This paper has been indexed in PubMed (PMID:948206, but as far as I'm aware, BHL (and BioStor) has the only digital copy of this paper. (As a side note, wouldn't it be great if PubMed could link to BHL content?).

The article page in BioStor shows a map derived from the OCR text, showing a two localities:



Below the map are the specimen codes I've automatically extracted from the OCR text, linked to the corresponding records in GBIF, which are georeferenced (e.g., ANSP Malacology 330925).

If we joined these things up just a little more, we could do some useful things. For example, what if a researcher searching in PubMed for schistosomiasis in South East Asia could find the Davis et al. paper, and then go to BHL or BioStor to read it? What if a researcher looking at gastropod distributions in the Mekong River in the GBIF portal could see that BHL had publications on diseases associated with these organisms (as well as their taxonomy and biology). We could also traverse the link from GBIF to BHL to PubMed and provide a direct route from distribution maps to biomedical literature.

It seems there's scope for trying to connect BHL, GBIF, and PubMed, and that BHL and GBIF may have important roles to play in providing access to basic information about organisms that have a serious impact on human populations.