Abstract
BackgroundTo promote research activities in a particular research area, it is important to efficiently identify current research trends, advances, and issues in that area. Although review papers in the research area can suffice for this purpose in general, researchers are not necessarily able to obtain these papers from research aspects of their interests at the time they are required. Therefore, the utilization of the citation contexts of papers in a research area has been considered as another approach. However, there are few search services to retrieve citation contexts in the life sciences domain; furthermore, efficiently obtaining citation contexts is becoming difficult due to the large volume and rapid growth of life sciences papers.ResultsHere, we introduce the Colil (Comments on Literature in Literature) database to store citation contexts in the life sciences domain. By using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and a newly compiled vocabulary, we built the Colil database and made it available through the SPARQL endpoint. In addition, we developed a web-based search service called Colil that searches for a cited paper in the Colil database and then returns a list of citation contexts for it along with papers relevant to it based on co-citations. The citation contexts in the Colil database were extracted from full-text papers of the PubMed Central Open Access Subset (PMC-OAS), which includes 545,147 papers indexed in PubMed. These papers are distributed across 3,171 journals and cite 5,136,741 unique papers that correspond to approximately 25 % of total PubMed entries.ConclusionsBy utilizing Colil, researchers can easily refer to a set of citation contexts and relevant papers based on co-citations for a target paper. Colil helps researchers to comprehend life sciences papers in a research area more efficiently and makes their biological research more efficient.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13326-015-0037-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
To promote research activities in a particular research area, it is important to efficiently identify current research trends, advances, and issues in that area
Citations are widely used and typically consist of two parts: a) a list of references found at the end of the citing paper that provides full bibliographic information for each source; and b) reference markers located in the text that are linked to the references [3]
The Comments on Literature in Literature (Colil) database includes citations, citation contexts, and co-citations extracted from full-text papers of PMCOAS
Summary
To promote research activities in a particular research area, it is important to efficiently identify current research trends, advances, and issues in that area. Elkiss et al [8] and Divoli et al [9] examined the relationships between the abstract and the citation contexts of a given life sciences paper, and their experiments showed that citation contexts tend to have additional and focused information that is not present in the abstract. These results indicate that citation contexts play an important role in representing the semantic content of life sciences papers
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
