SciLite: a platform for displaying text-mined annotations as a means to link research articles with biological data

Abstract

Biological databases are fundamental to biological research and discovery. Database curation adds highly precise and useful information, usually extracted from the literature through experts reading research articles. The significant amount of time and effort put in by curators, against the backdrop of tremendous data growth, makes manual curation a high value task. Therefore, there is an urgent need to find ways to scale curation efforts by improving data integration, linking literature to the underlying data. As part of the development of Europe PMC, we have developed a new platform, SciLite, that overlays text-mined annotations on research articles. The aim is to aid Europe PMC users in finding key concepts more easily and provide links to related resources or tools, bridging the gap between literature and biological data.