Developing a biomedical expert finding system using medical subject headings

Area of Science:

• Bibliometrics
• Information Science
• Computer Science

Background:

• Organizational growth relies on identifying subject matter experts.
• Existing expert finding systems often use biased self-nomination and lack ranking capabilities.
• There is a need for robust, unbiased systems to quantitatively measure expertise.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a quantitative, unbiased expert finding system.
• To enable the ranking of subject matter experts.
• To overcome the limitations of traditional expert identification methods.

Main Methods:

• Utilized Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) from peer-reviewed articles indexed in PubMed.
• Developed a web-based program to identify experts and their associated subjects.
• Focused on articles published from India for initial testing.

Main Results:

• The system successfully identified subject experts in India.
• A ranked list of experts was generated, with known experts appearing at the top.
• The system demonstrated generalizability, applicable to any country using PubMed data.

Conclusions:

• The developed expert finding system effectively identifies and ranks subject experts.
• Quantification of expertise and use of standardized MeSH terms are key innovations.
• The system aligns with the requirements of an ideal expert finding solution based on peer-reviewed data.