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. 2023 Dec 18;3(1):vbad180.
doi: 10.1093/bioadv/vbad180. eCollection 2023.

MBDBMetrics: an online metrics tool to measure the impact of biological data resources

Giuseppe Insana  1 , Alex Ignatchenko  1 , Maria Martin  1 , Alex Bateman  1 ; UniProt Consortium
Collaborators, Affiliations

MBDBMetrics: an online metrics tool to measure the impact of biological data resources

Giuseppe Insana et al. Bioinform Adv. .

Abstract

Motivation: There now exist thousands of molecular biology databases covering every aspect of biological data. This database infrastructure takes significant effort and funding to develop and maintain. The creators of these databases need to make strong justifications to funders to prove their impact or importance. There are many publication metrics and tools available such as Google Scholar to measure citation impact or AltMetrics covering multiple measures including social media coverage.

Results: In this article, we describe a series of novel impact metrics that have been applied initially to the UniProt database, and now made available via a Google Colab to enable any molecular biology resource to gain several additional metrics. These metrics, powered by freely available APIs from Europe PubMedCentral and SureCHEMBL cover mentions of the resource in full text articles, including which section of the paper the mention occurs in, grant acknowledgements and mentions in patent applications. This tool, that we call MBDBMetrics, is a useful adjunct to existing tools.

Availability and implementation: The MBDBMetrics tool is available at the following locations: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1aEmSQR9DGQIZmHAIuQV9mLv7Mw9Ppkin and https://github.com/g-insana/MBDBMetrics.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

A.B. is Editor-in-Chief of Bioinformatics Advances but was not involved in the editorial process of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Example of the plot ‘Publication mentions by year’ for the date range 2018–23 and the resource UniProt (and its related keywords). Top panel: total number of papers for each year; bottom panel: restricted to those acknowledging ‘US funders’. More plot examples are available on the GitHub repository page.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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