An ontology-based biomedical research paper authoring support tool

This work aims to develop a paper authoring support system that helps biomedical scientists to organize their ideas for a specific discourse purpose. As an initial step toward the goal, this study developed an abstract authoring support tool that provides candidate lexical bundles organized according to the introduction, methods, results, and discussion (IMRAD) structure. Lexical bundles were extracted from the sentences in 152,083 structured abstracts of the PubMed Central open access subset and their distribution was analyzed by IMRAD section. To organize lexical bundles according to IMRAD, the Lexical Bundle Ontology was built. A Journal Article Tag Suite compliant authoring support tool was implemented. This tool lists candidate lexical bundles corresponding to authors’ discourse purposes in a specific section and thereby helps to complete sentences. We expect this tool be useful, at least in biomedical abstract writing, to organize an author’s ideas to achieve a specific discourse purpose. This tool is targeted primarily at biomedical scientists whose mother tongue is not English; however, English native speakers may find it useful as well.