Evidence map›Paper›PMID 22962482›Full record

ArticleBioinformatics (Oxford, England)2012

An approach to describing and analysing bulk biological annotation quality: a case study using UniProtKB.

Michael J Bell, Colin S Gillespie, Daniel Swan, Phillip Lord

Abstract read
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Article in Bioinformatics (Oxford, England), 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
6citing papers in PubMed
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1 · What the graph read from it

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2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

6 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. On patterns and re-use in bioinformatics databases.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2017
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4 · The record

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PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

Michael J BellSchool of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK.
Colin S Gillespie
Daniel Swan
Phillip Lord

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

motivationAnnotations are a key feature of many biological databases, used to convey our knowledge of a sequence to the reader. Ideally, annotations are curated manually, however manual curation is costly, time consuming and requires expert knowledge and training. Given these issues and the exponential increase of data, many databases implement automated annotation pipelines in an attempt to avoid un-annotated entries. Both manual and automated annotations vary in quality between databases and annotators, making assessment of annotation reliability problematic for users. The community lacks a generic measure for determining annotation quality and correctness, which we look at addressing within this article. Specifically we investigate word reuse within bulk textual annotations and relate this to Zipf's Principle of Least Effort. We use the UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) as a case study to demonstrate this approach since it allows us to compare annotation change, both over time and between automated and manually curated annotations.

resultsBy applying power-law distributions to word reuse in annotation, we show clear trends in UniProtKB over time, which are consistent with existing studies of quality on free text English. Further, we show a clear distinction between manual and automated analysis and investigate cohorts of protein records as they mature. These results suggest that this approach holds distinct promise as a mechanism for judging annotation quality. AVAILABILITY: Source code is available at the authors website: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/m.j.bell1/annotation. CONTACT: phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk.

Indexed as

Databases, ProteinKnowledge BasesMolecular Sequence AnnotationProteinsProteins

Identifiers

PMID22962482
PMCPMC3436799

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.