Introduction to Biomedical Literature Text Mining: Context and Objectives

Abstract

Information: If you are reading this, you know how important it is and almost certainly look to the biomedical literature for a large part of the information you need. We work hard to find more and more biomedical literature, seeking new content from multiple sources. But, can there be too much of a good thing?

Most science is reductionist by nature. It is difficult enough finding the relevant nuggets of information from 1,000 documents. It is at least ten times harder to do so from 10,000 documents. And, with 25 million biomedical journal articles and many times that of other textual information sources, we are faced with significant challenges.

In this introduction, we identify some of those challenges to prepare you for the remaining chapters.