Methods for structuring scientific knowledge from many areas related to aging research

Abstract

Aging and age-related disease represents a substantial quantity of current natural, social and behavioral science research efforts. Presently, no centralized system exists for tracking aging research projects across numerous research disciplines. The multidisciplinary nature of this research complicates the understanding of underlying project categories, the establishment of project relations, and the development of a unified project classification scheme. We have developed a highly visual database, the International Aging Research Portfolio (IARP), available at AgingPortfolio.org to address this issue. The database integrates information on research grants, peer-reviewed publications, and issued patent applications from multiple sources. Additionally, the database uses flexible project classification mechanisms and tools for analyzing project associations and trends. This system enables scientists to search the centralized project database, to classify and categorize aging projects, and to analyze the funding aspects across multiple research disciplines. The IARP is designed to provide improved allocation and prioritization of scarce research funding, to reduce project overlap and improve scientific collaboration thereby accelerating scientific and medical progress in a rapidly growing area of research. Grant applications often precede publications and some grants do not result in publications, thus, this system provides utility to investigate an earlier and broader view on research activity in many research disciplines. This project is a first attempt to provide a centralized database system for research grants and to categorize aging research projects into multiple subcategories utilizing both advanced machine algorithms and a hierarchical environment for scientific collaboration.

Figure 1. General scheme of scientific research.

The scheme illustrates the general concept where research grants precede publications. It allows for the possibility for grant applications to be published earlier than research results and failed research projects receiving grant funding not to be published at all.

Figure 2. Project management scheme for category editors and SAB members.

The two main user classes are the scientific advisory board (SAB) members and category editors (CE). SAB members can assign category editors so specific categories. Both user classes can add, edit, classify the projects, add or edit subcategories and train the classification algorithms.

Figure 3. Workflow of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm implementation.

(A) Vectorization step for each project in the database. (B) Learning step using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm with the training sets. (C) Prediction of project classification.

Figure 4. Screenshot of the AgingPortfolio.org web-site home page interface.

Screenshot of the website taken on the date of manuscript submission illustrating the main features and the research project classification directory.

Figure 5. Screenshot of the Advanced project search page.

Screenshot of the website taken on the date of manuscript submission illustrating the advanced project search parameters and limits.