100,000 Articles - And the Data Scientists Who Mine Them - Bio-IT World

"It’s January, the season for reviewing the milestones of the past year, and this Monday PLOS ONE announced that in 2013 the journal published an astonishing 31,500 scientific articles. You don’t have to bother consulting the record books to know that this is by far the largest volume of scientific discovery ever published in one venue in a single year. PLOS ONE has held that distinction every year since 2010, and 2013 saw another increase of roughly a third over the year before. December was also a particularly notable month for PLOS publications: on December 3, the Public Library of Science network of open access journals celebrated its 100,000th article, just over ten years after PLOS Biology first tried to spark a transformation in scientific publishing.  At the current rate of publication, we should see another 100,000 articles posted before the next U.S. presidential election. With this massive catalogue stored in its servers, the PLOS staff has to be very careful that it’s running a library and not a graveyard for scientific research. It would be easy for papers to be buried in the deluge, irretrievable to anyone who didn’t know the exact authors or titles they were interested in. To make sure researchers can find their way through the PLOS archives, a continuous project is maintained of tagging articles with searchable metadata, and refining the algorithms that match papers to their subject areas ..."