Skip Navigation



Bioinformatics Advance Access published online on September 18, 2006
Bioinformatics, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btl480
This Article
Right arrow Advance Access manuscript (PDF) Freely available
Right arrowOA All Versions of this Article:
22/22/2813    most recent
btl480v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Zhou, W.
Right arrow Articles by Smalheiser, N. R.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Zhou, W.
Right arrow Articles by Smalheiser, N. R.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© 2006 The Author(s)
Received June 14, 2006
Revised September 7, 2006
Accepted September 8, 2006

Article

ADAM: another database of abbreviations in MEDLINE

Wei Zhou 1, Vetle I. Torvik 1, and Neil R. Smalheiser 1 *

1 Department of Psychiatry and Psychiatric Institute, MC912, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60612, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Neil R. Smalheiser, E-mail: neils{at}uic.edu


  Abstract

Motivation: Abbreviations are an important type of terminology in the biomedical domain. Although several groups have already created databases of biomedical abbreviations, these are either not public, or are not comprehensive, or focus exclusively on acronym-type abbreviations. We have created another abbreviation database, ADAM, which covers commonly used abbreviations and their definitions (or long-forms) within MEDLINE titles and abstracts, including both acronym and non-acronym abbreviations.

Results: A model of recognizing abbreviations and their long forms from titles and abstracts of MEDLINE (2006 baseline) was employed. After grouping morphological variants, 59,405 abbreviation/long-form pairs were identified. ADAM shows high precision (97.4%) and includes most of the frequently used abbreviations contained in the UMLS Lexicon and the Stanford Abbreviation Database. Conversely, one third of abbreviations in ADAM are novel insofar as they are not included in either database. About 19% of the novel abbreviations are non-acronym type and these cover at least 7 different types of short-form/long-form pairs.

Availability: A free, public query interface to ADAM is available at http://arrowsmith.psych.uic.edu, and the entire database can be downloaded as a text file.

Associate Editor: Dmitrij Frishman
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 BioinformaticsHome page
V. I. Torvik and N. R. Smalheiser
A quantitative model for linking two disparate sets of articles in MEDLINE
Bioinformatics, July 1, 2007; 23(13): 1658 - 1665.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.