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Author Spotlight: Emerging Technologies and Advanced Tools for Decoding Metabolomics Data Analysis
Published on: November 10, 2023
MBDBMetrics: an online metrics tool to measure the impact of biological data resources
Giuseppe Insana1, Alex Ignatchenko1, Maria Martin1
1European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton CB10 1SD, United Kingdom.
Motivation:
There now exist thousands of molecular biology databases covering every aspect of biological data. This database infrastructure takes significant effort and funding to develop and maintain. The creators of these databases need to make strong justifications to funders to prove their impact or importance. There are many publication metrics and tools available such as Google Scholar to measure citation impact or AltMetrics covering multiple measures including social media coverage.
Results:
In this article, we describe a series of novel impact metrics that have been applied initially to the UniProt database, and now made available via a Google Colab to enable any molecular biology resource to gain several additional metrics. These metrics, powered by freely available APIs from Europe PubMedCentral and SureCHEMBL cover mentions of the resource in full text articles, including which section of the paper the mention occurs in, grant acknowledgements and mentions in patent applications. This tool, that we call MBDBMetrics, is a useful adjunct to existing tools.
Availability And Implementation:
The MBDBMetrics tool is available at the following locations: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1aEmSQR9DGQIZmHAIuQV9mLv7Mw9Ppkin and https://github.com/g-insana/MBDBMetrics.
