A Negative Results Search Tool

Researchers unveil BioNOT, a new app that scours PubMed for studies that report negative findings.

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Negative findings can be hard to come by in the biomedical literature. And papers reporting such findings can be darn near impossible to turn up in searches of the go-to database, PubMed. Enter University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, biomedical informatician Hong Yu. In collaboration with her grad student Shashank Agarwal, Yu developed a search engine, called BioNOT, that can find the rare papers reporting negative findings—such as a particular gene not being associated with a particular disease—that actually get published.

BioNOT uses artificial intelligence and data mining to comb PubMed abstracts as well as open access full-text articles and papers published by Elsevier. For example, typing in "alcohol" and "heart disease" brings up a slew of excerpts from studies, highlighting results that failed to draw a ...

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Meet the Author

  • Bob Grant

    From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer.
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