PubTator: a web-based text mining tool for assisting biocuration

Abstract

Manually curating knowledge from biomedical literature into structured databases is highly expen-sive and time-consuming, making it difficult to keep pace with the rapid growth of the literature. There is therefore a pressing need to assist biocuration with automated text mining tools. Here, we describe PubTator, a web-based system for assist-ing biocuration. PubTator is different from the few existing tools by featuring a PubMed-like interface, which many biocurators find familiar, and being equipped with multiple challenge-winning text mining algorithms to ensure the quality of its auto-matic results. Through a formal evaluation with two external user groups, PubTator was shown to be capable of improving both the efficiency and accuracy of manual curation. PubTator is publicly available a