Activity: Update Publications and their Purpose

Overview

The objective of this activity is to look at some publications that are "updates" to the original resource to understand how communication with the community works in biomedical databases.

Instructions

Consider this publication on NCBI databases from 2000:

Wheeler, D. L., Chappey, C., Lash, A. E., Leipe, D. D., Madden, T. L., Schuler, G. D., ... & Rapp, B. A. (2000). Database resources of the national center for biotechnology information. Nucleic acids research, 28(1), 10-14.

Now, search for the title of the publication, "Database resources of the national center for biotechnology information" on Pubmed or Google Scholar. How many of these publicatons do you find from 2000 to now?

Check out the Authors

You should have found multiple publications with this same title. Is this an example of self-plagiarism? Absolutely not. This is an example of the authors using consistent naming in a singular journal to make updates to the original publication easier to find. Chicago style citation allows us to view all the author names in full (this is not a comprehensive list):

Wheeler, David L., Colombe Chappey, Alex E. Lash, Detlef D. Leipe, Thomas L. Madden, Gregory D. Schuler, Tatiana A. Tatusova, and Barbara A. Rapp. "Database resources of the national center for biotechnology information." Nucleic acids research 28, no. 1 (2000): 10-14.
Coordinators, N. R. (2012). Database resources of the national center for biotechnology information. Nucleic acids research, 41(Database issue), D8.
Coordinators, NCBI Resource. "Database resources of the national center for biotechnology information." Nucleic acids research 45, no. Database issue (2016): D12.
Sayers, Eric W., Richa Agarwala, Evan E. Bolton, J. Rodney Brister, Kathi Canese, Karen Clark, Ryan Connor et al. "Database resources of the national center for biotechnology information." Nucleic acids research 47, no. D1 (2019): D23-D28.
Sayers, Eric W., Jeffrey Beck, Evan E. Bolton, Devon Bourexis, James R. Brister, Kathi Canese, Donald C. Comeau et al. "Database resources of the national center for biotechnology information." Nucleic acids research 49, no. D1 (2021): D10-D17.
Sayers, Eric W., Jeff Beck, Evan E. Bolton, J. Rodney Brister, Jessica Chan, Donald C. Comeau, Ryan Connor et al. "Database resources of the national center for biotechnology information." Nucleic acids research 52, no. D1 (2024): D33-D43.

Do you notice some repeat authors over time? What is different about the author list in 2012 and 2016? Did you know if you visit the publication page you can track down who is included in the "NCBI Resource Coordinators" are*?

*Note: Listing authors as a group instead of individually is sometimes called consortium-style or group authorship. There are studies on when this style of publication is recommended or appropriate, of course! See more here: FORRT.org and the Journal of Academic Ethics

Check out the Content

From the list above, open a few of the papers and take a few minutes to skim the content. What types of updates are they providing? Do the papers offer information on:

The size of the resources?
Number of users or clicks?
Physical infrastructure?
Computational architecture needed?
Updates to annotation or curation methods?
Updates to accessibility or user design?
What else is discussed?

To summarize: These "meta" resources about NCBI resources exist and recognizing the need to know and understand these resources if you use them is extremely important in bioinformatics.