Why is Biomedical FigureSearch limited to 200,000 articles?

Our FigureSearch indexes the captions from the open access articles. Due to copyright restrictions and the non-availability of many articles, we cannot display information from a lot of articles. PubMed Central, a free library of biomedical articles, makes available a set of open access articles. Currently, the size of this set is about 200,000 articles. Of these, about 120,000 articles have their full text available and have figures in them. As more articles are published in the open access domain, we will be able to index them and improve the quality of our results.

How is the summary generated?

Here at UWM, we have developed a technology to automatically detect sentences from full-text of the article that are most relevant to the figure. We present 3 such sentences, one Background sentence, one Results sentence and one Conclusion sentence. We believe that these sentences together provide a brief overview of the figure. These sentences are selected on the basis of words that are present in the caption and the sentence.

How do I use this site?

Simply start at the Home Page. Enter your search query and hit "Search". You'll get a set of results displayed, with the article title, abstract and figure caption. You can also view the automatically generated summary of any figure below its caption.

The summary is made up of 3 sentences. All sentences of the article are classified as either background, method result or conclusion. The summary displays one background sentence, one results sentence and one conclusion sentence.

You can also click on the article's title to view other figures in the article.

A video demo of FigureSearch is also available.