Vilip - A Visual Literature Research Platform For Biomedical Publications

A thorough literature research is usually the first step when dealing with a novel topic in science. Regarding the medical domain, a popular starting point for this task is the web based search engine PubMed, which has an index of over 27 million medical publications from the MEDLINE database and other sources. Given certain search terms of interest, e.g. neurodegeneration or the drug FTY 720, results are presented by PubMed in form of textual lists which can span over several hundred pages. Thus, getting a reasonable overview over published literature for a given topic can be a very time consuming and challenging task. To facilitate a more intuitive approach to medical literature research, interactive visual interfaces can be helpful. The novel web platform ViLiP (Visual Literature Platform) is built around this idea. It provides an easy to operate interactive interface to PubMed and presents the result of a user's query in form of in-situ heat map or word cloud visualizations. The ViLiP tool is currently actively used in the neuroanatomy domain, namely in multiple-sclerosis research.