open access: BioMed Central Blog : Connecting the evidence: an “ontology” (vocabulary) for Threaded Publications (unpublished research)

Thursday Feb 02, 2012

Connecting the evidence: an “ontology” for Threaded Publications

"Unpublished research is a serious problem for evidence-based decision making in healthcare, and this was recently highlighted on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and in an entire issue of the BMJ. Systematic reviews aim to present the totality of the evidence, and a problem for those preparing and maintaining these reviews is how to find unpublished studies and data. But, even when clinical trials are reported in journals and their supplements the formats and descriptions are widely heterogeneous and studies can remain difficult to discover and challenging to compare with similar trials.
Clearly connecting trial-related publications is a way to help with this problem and is a major goal of BioMed Central’s Threaded Publications initiative. To achieve its fundamental aims of connecting all digital published content relating to the evidence about a particular trial, however, Threaded Publications must go beyond a single journal or publisher.
Through our partnership with CrossRef – an organisation founded by publishers, for publishers – and engagement with editors and publishers we hope to achieve interoperability across different publishing platforms.
The desired outcome is that articles reporting the protocol or the findings of a trial published in different journals or by different publishers will be linked in a thread, which should also include the trial’s entry in a research register......."