Online tools to support literature-based discovery in the life sciences

In biomedical research, the amount of experimental data and published scientific information is overwhelming and ever increasing, which may inhibit rather than stimulate scientific progress. Not only are text-mining and information extraction tools needed to render the biomedical literature accessible but the results of these tools can also assist researchers in the formulation and evaluation of novel hypotheses. This requires an additional set of technological approaches that are defined here as literature-based discovery (LBD) tools. Recently, several LBD tools have been developed for this purpose and a few well-motivated, specific and directly testable hypotheses have been published, some of which have even been validated experimentally. This paper presents an overview of recent LBD research and discusses methodology, results and online tools that are available to the scientific community.