Whether you are a materials scientist seeking to identify routes of synthesis for small molecules or a pharmacologist trying to understand a compound’s mechanism of action, it is vital to have a comprehensive and precise view of the relevant data.
Dimensions Life Sciences & Chemistry (Dimensions L&C) leverages an impressive dataset comprising over 25 million patents, more than 120 million scientific publications, and billions worth of grants, plus clinical trial documents and drug labels.
Coupled with built-in ontologies which offer comprehensive and precise results, Dimensions L&C’s access to extensive, contextualised data helps ensure that you never miss information critical to your strategic decisions.
In a study examining search results generated from different search engines, we observed that with its full-text indexing and semantic search capabilities, Dimensions L&C was able to find 10x more publications than PubMed on average.
To give a more concrete example, we can have a look at the drug inclisiran. Inclisiran, which is also known as Leqvio in Europe, is used in adults with primary hypercholesterolaemia or mixed dyslipidemia (conditions that cause high levels of fats, including cholesterol, in the blood).
It was recently approved by European Medicines Agency (EMA) for use in combination with a statin at the maximally tolerated dose or a statin at the maximally tolerated dose plus other lipid-lowering therapies for patients unable to achieve LDL-cholesterol goals outlined in the European guidelines. It is also approved as monotherapy, and in combination with other non-statin lipid-lowering drugs, in patients who are intolerant to statins.
Search for “inclisiran” retrieves:
- 146 publications in PubMed
- 161 publications Dimensions L&C title and abstract only
- 977 publications in Dimensions L&C full index
We can perform a more focused search, for example, identifying the literature related to adverse events of inclisiran. Searching for inclisiran and myalgia, which is one of the most common adverse events for this drug, retrieves:
- 1 publication in PubMed
- 3 publications Dimensions L&C title and abstract only
- 170 publications in Dimensions L&C full index
Tools within Dimensions L&C also allow you to increase the relevancy and precision of your search, ensuring you are seeing information most applicable to your research. For example, you can refine your search by defining the maximum distance between search terms; setting the maximum distance between “inclisiran” and “myalgia” to 70 characters surfaces 15 relevant publications that discuss myalgia in the context of inclisiran treatment.
The co-occurrence analysis tool enables you to move from the discovery of scientific publications to hypothesis generation. Using the “correlations” tab, you can correlate concepts of any nature from our ontological tree and discover where these two concepts are often mentioned in close textual proximity – an indicator of a relationship between these two concepts.
For example, when correlating “inclisiran” and “toxicities”, Dimensions L&C will bring to the surface the most common toxicities that co-occur in close textual proximity to inclisiran. These results are contextualised, showing you how closely the concepts appear within the document (which could be a publication, a grant, a patent or a clinical trial) enabling you to quickly identify those most relevant to your search, and begin gleaning insights and forming hypotheses about these relationships. Links to the original sources are provided, so you can easily find the documents you’ve identified as being of interest, to further investigate.
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