Engineering in genomics - Medline: the knowledge buried therein, its potential, and cost

A broader study of the knowledge contained in a Medline abstract requires the use of a different and more generalist approach that does not require very sophisticated language analysis approaches where the nature of relationships is not analyzed. The number of new co-occurrences would serve as a primitive measure of discovery, and since the first observation of new cooccurrence can be correlated with the publication date of the abstract in which it was noted, it is possible to estimate overall scientific productivity over time, and when the data are also correlated with research budgets, the cost of each new observation can be estimated.