BRret: Retrieval of Brain Research Related Literature

Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), which is a recently introduced framework for mental illness, utilizes various units of analysis from genetics, neural circuits, etc., for accurate multi-dimensional classification of mental illnesses. Due to the large amount of relevant biomedical research available, automating the process of extracting evidence from the literature to assist with the curation of the RDoC matrix is essential for processing the full breadth of data in an accurate and cost-effective manner. In this work, we formulate the task of information retrieval of brain research literature from general PubMed abstracts. We develop BRret (Brain Research retriever), a novel algorithm for brain research related article retrieval. We use a large dataset of PubMed abstracts annotated with RDoC concepts to demonstrate the effectiveness of BRret. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study aimed at automated retrieval of brain research related literature.