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Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine (IBME)

Making sense in the flood. How to cope with the massive flow of digital information in medical ethics

Giovanni Spitale published a new paper on the (over)proliferation of academic publications and the impossibility of keeping the pace with new literature. The article discusses the issue and presents a set of easily usable methodological strategies to cope with the flood. 

Abstract
Scientific publications have become the currency of Academia, hence the concept of ‘publish or perish’. But there are consequences: the amount of existing literature and its proliferation rate have reached the point where keeping pace is just impossible. If this is true in general, it becomes a huge issue in interdisciplinary fields such as bioethics where knowing the state of the art in more than one single discipline is a concrete necessity. If we accept the idea of building new science on an exhaustive comprehension of existing knowledge, a radical change is needed. Smart iterative search strategies, frequency analysis and text mining, techniques described in this paper, can't be a long run solution. But they might serve as a useful coping strategy.

Keywords
Publications' proliferation, Text mining, Search strategies, Information extraction, Topic tracking, Information science, Information systems management, Information technology, Content analysis, Data mining, Knowledge representation, Information management

Full text

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04426