Updating a bibliography using the related articles function within PubMed

Comprehensive bibliographies are useful for conducting reviews of the literature, and for assessing the progress within a field. These bibliographies may be broad and inclusive, or focused and precise in their inclusion criteria. In either case, the task of maintaining a complete bibliography within a particular area of research is made difficult by the diversity, complexity and huge volume of newly published literature. In an effort to effectively and automatically retrieve relevant literature, different search strategies and indexing tools have been developed, including the RELATED ARTICLES function provided with the PubMed system. In this paper, we report a program for incremental updates of a bibliography using the PubMed RELATED ARTICLES function. Given a highly specialized starting bibliography of experimental measurements of the structure of the 30S bacterial ribosomal subunit, the system was applied to find additional relevant references. For this particular task, the system has a recall of 75%, a strict precision of 32% and a partial precision of 42%. Our results are notable because although the RELATED ARTICLES function is purely statistical, it is nonetheless able to select a very narrowly defined set of articles from the literature. We discuss the tradeoffs between having a user to evaluate many articles of possible interest in a single session, versus asking a user to evaluate a small set of articles on a periodic basis.

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