Figure 1

Gene-specific and baseline term occurrences in the literature. The literature-mining technique we describe compares term occurrence in a collection of abstracts relating to a specific gene to their occurrence in an unbiased set of abstracts (baseline occurrence in the literature). In the example illustrated here, the occurrence values for terms present in more than 25% of the abstracts relating to the gene RANTES are plotted on the y-axis. To determine baseline occurrence, occurrence values found in the literature concerning this gene are then averaged with values found for an increasing number of genes chosen randomly from all known human genes indexed in the LocusLink database (x-axis). Terms with high occurrence values in the collection of abstracts relating to RANTES and a low baseline occurrence in the literature are plotted in green.