A set-covering approach to specific search for literature about human genes

With the advent of the cDNA microarray and oligonucleotide array technologies it has become possible to study a large number of genes in a single experiment. While experiments with thousands of genes are routinely performed, searching for literature about several genes by traditional methods is time consuming and error-prone. In addition to the inherent limitations of free text search, use of the conventional Boolean operators often result in either none (when AND'ing terms) or far too many (when OR'ing terms) hits. We have created a two-step procedure as an approach to meeting the challenge of multi-gene queries. Our results so far shows that the returned sets of articles scores high on relevance.