Methodology capture: discriminating between the "best" and the rest of community practice

Background: The methodologies we use both enable and help define our research. However, as experimental complexity has increased the choice of appropriate methodologies has become an increasingly difficult task. This makes it difficult to keep track of available bioinformatics software, let alone the most suitable protocols in a specific research area. To remedy this we present an approach for capturing methodology from literature in order to identify and, thus, define best practice within a field. Results: Our approach is to implement data extraction techniques on the full-text of scientific articles to obtain the set of experimental protocols used by an entire scientific discipline, molecular phylogenetics. Our methodology for identifying methodologies could in principle be applied to any scientific discipline, whether or not computer-based. We find a number of issues related to the nature of best practice, as opposed to community practice. We find that there is much heterogeneity i...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: James M. Eales, John W. Pinney, Robert D. Stevens, David L. Robertson
• Keywords: BMCBI 2008, Molecular Phylogenetic, Phylogenetic, Scientific Discipline