Scientific Literature Mining for Drug Discovery: A Case Study on Obesity

Obesity is currently an epidemic that affects almost 15% of the global adult population. The complex metabolic processes involved in energy homeostasis, which are regulated by signals from multiple sources, present a challenging problem for drug discovery. In the current analysis, we present bibliometric and data-mining approaches based on categorizing literature according to medical subject headings (MeSH) to examine "hot" and "cold" trends, which indicate emerging areas of scientific research within obesity. This trend analysis corrects for increase in the overall size of obesity publications. A "hot" trend within obesity research is a concept on which publications are growing statistically faster than the background rise in obesity publications. In addition to growth in the number of publications associated with gastrointestinal weight-loss surgery and clinical studies in obesity, there is increasing research in the fields of adipose tissue, islet cell, and enteroendocrine biology as observed by a significant increase in the number of publications during the period 2005-2009, when compared to 2000-2004. However, the number of the publications in the area of hypothalamic and nervous system research in obesity appears to be cooling off. Extending the same concept of trend analysis to genes, we present a list of obesity-related genes that show "hot" trends suggesting emerging molecular mechanisms for obesity. Finally, we present a list of key scientific publications associated with obesity, one from each year over the last decade, which have the highest number of citations. Drug Dev Res 72: 201-208, 2011. (C) 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.