Abstract
A close interaction between basic science and applied medicine is to be expected. Therefore, it is important to measure how far apart the field of cell biology and medicine are. Our approach to estimating the distance between these fields was to compare their vocabularies and to quantify the difference in word repertoire. We compared the vocabulary of the title and abstract of articles available in PubMed in two selected high-impact journals in each field: cell biology, medicine, and translational science. Although each journal has its own editorial policy, we showed that within each field there is a small vocabulary difference between the two journals. We developed a word similarity index that can measure how much journals share a common vocabulary. We found a high similarity index between each cell biology (91%), medical (71-74%), and translational journal (65%). In contrast, the comparison between medicine and biology journals produced low correlation values (22-36%), suggesting that their vocabularies are quite dissimilar. Translational medicine journals had medium similarity values when compared to cell biology journals (52-70%) and medicine journals (27-59%). This approach was also performed in 10-year periods to evaluate the evolution of each field. Using the “onomics” strategy presented here, we observed that differences in vocabulary of basic science and medicine have been increasing over time. Since translational medicine has an intermediate vocabulary, we confirmed that translational medicine is an efficient approach to bridge this gap.
Highlights
Cell biology is one of the major fields of basic science and has been experiencing extremely rapid growth over the past 50 years [1]
Selection of journals and inclusion criteria In this study, we compared the vocabulary used in the fields of cell biology, medicine, and translational medicine by analyzing the titles and abstracts of articles published in the Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), Journal of Cell Science (JCS), Lancet (Lan), New England Journal of Medicine (NEJ), Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), and Science Translational Medicine (STM)
There was a remarkable coincidence in the sequence of the most frequent words between the cell biology journals JCB and JCS (Table 1 and Supplementary Table S1). ‘‘Cell’’ was the most frequent word and ‘‘protein’’ was the second most frequent, probably reflecting the influence of biochemistry in the cell biology field (Table 1)
Summary
Cell biology is one of the major fields of basic science and has been experiencing extremely rapid growth over the past 50 years [1]. Previous attempts have used text mining [8] Such a strategy is widely used to analyze textual data from scientific literature, especially using article abstracts [9]. We analyzed the frequency of words in the title and abstract of articles published in leading scientific journals of cell biology and medicine over the past 50 years. While we observed and quantified a small vocabulary difference between articles published in traditional journals in the same field, our findings revealed an ever-widening vocabulary gap between cell biology and medicine This observation raises important concerns about whether the communication between specialists in different fields hinders the translation of recent advances into clinics, which may be
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