Full text clustering and relationship network analysis of biomedical publications

PLoS One. 2014 Sep 24;9(9):e108847. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0108847. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Rapid developments in the biomedical sciences have increased the demand for automatic clustering of biomedical publications. In contrast to current approaches to text clustering, which focus exclusively on the contents of abstracts, a novel method is proposed for clustering and analysis of complete biomedical article texts. To reduce dimensionality, Cosine Coefficient is used on a sub-space of only two vectors, instead of computing the Euclidean distance within the space of all vectors. Then a strategy and algorithm is introduced for Semi-supervised Affinity Propagation (SSAP) to improve analysis efficiency, using biomedical journal names as an evaluation background. Experimental results show that by avoiding high-dimensional sparse matrix computations, SSAP outperforms conventional k-means methods and improves upon the standard Affinity Propagation algorithm. In constructing a directed relationship network and distribution matrix for the clustering results, it can be noted that overlaps in scope and interests among BioMed publications can be easily identified, providing a valuable analytical tool for editors, authors and readers.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Cluster Analysis
  • Publishing*

Grants and funding

The research program is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61103092, 41101376, 61272207, 61373050)(http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2011M500613 and 2012T50298) (http://jj.chinapostdoctor.org.cn). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.