For any organization working in life sciences and chemistry, it’s important to be able to stay ahead of the competition by expanding and prioritizing your portfolio, continuously analyzing ever-changing demand patterns and identifying new application areas for your products.
To help accelerate research discovery, Dimensions has launched a new version of its linked-research-knowledge system: Dimensions Life Sciences & Chemistry (also known as Dimensions L&C).
Building on the enriched data set and search capabilities offered in existing versions of Dimensions, Dimensions L&C uses ontology-based indexing and semantic search functionality to usher in a new generation of knowledge discovery platform aimed at life sciences and chemistry researchers.
Dimensions L&C analyzes over 120 million scientific publications, millions of patents, grants and clinical trial documents. It is both larger than other databases, and unlike traditional manually curated tools, leverages the latest semantic text analysis tools and ontologies to provide powerful up-to-date discovery functionality previously unavailable at such scale.
Built-in ontologies of over 40 million concepts and 100 million synonyms related to life sciences and chemistry allow Dimensions L&C to deliver comprehensive and precise results. For example, if you want to discover documents that mention the disease “cancer”, Dimensions L&C will search for all cancer types and their synonyms. This intelligent system can differentiate between homonyms so you won’t see results for the branch of animals “cancer”. See a snapshot of the ontological tree below.
This powerful semantic capability also allows users to immediately generate insights and move from the discovery of scientific documents to hypothesis generation. For example, you may have a hypothesis about the relationship between Alzheimer’s and any of the following genes: APOE, APP, BACE, PSEN1 so would search for documents containing those specific terms. However, you may be overlooking important genes and proteins because you do not know what you do not know!
With Dimensions L&C’s “Co-occurrence analysis”, you do not need to have a specific protein in mind; you can search for any proteins mentioned in close textual proximity to Alzheimer’s disease with the knowledge that close textual proximity typically indicates a close relationship. From this you will be able to see all relevant proteins, fetch a list of the documents where the disease and proteins are mentioned, and begin to form hypotheses about these relationships.
Search functions within Dimensions L&C such as semantic search, co-occurrence analysis, chemistry search and sequence search allow for a large variety of applications across life sciences and chemistry. These include but are not limited to biomarker validation, understanding disease mechanisms and the identification of drug targets. Users can also use a chemistry structure editor and biosequence search for nucleotides and proteins to quickly discover relevant chemical information in broader life sciences and chemistry research areas.
We will be sharing blogs which focus on specific functions and use cases in the coming weeks, so make sure you are following us on Twitter or LinkedIn .
Subscribe to our mailing list below to receive the latest updates