eGenPub, a text mining system for extending computationally mapped bibliography for UniProt Knowledgebase by capturing centrality

UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) is a publicly available database with access to a vast amount of protein sequence and functional information. To widen the scope of the publications associated with a protein entry, UniProt has introduced the computationally mapped additional bibliography section, which includes literature collected from external sources. In this article, we describe a text mining system, eGenPub, which selects articles that are ‘about’ specific proteins and allows automatic identification of additional bibliography for given UniProt protein entries. Focusing on plant proteins initially, eGenPub utilizes a gene normalization tool called pGenN, and a trained support vector machine model, which achieves a precision of 95.3%, to predict whether an article, based on its abstract, should be linked to a given UniProt entry. We have conducted a full-scale PubMed processing using eGenPub for eight common plant species. Altogether, 9025 articles are identified as relevant bibliography for 4752 UniProt entries, among which 5252 are additional papers not in the existing publication section. These newly computationally mapped additional bibliography via eGenPub is being integrated in the UniProt production pipeline, and can be accessed via the UniProtKB protein entry publication view.