Groundbreaking text mining project highlights 'gender gap' in scientific research
Thursday, March 3, 2016 - 10:40
in Mathematics & Economics
A project at The University of Manchester to analyse 15,000 mouse studies - the largest of its kind ever undertaken - has revealed that about half of these studies failed to report the sex and age of the mice involved, despite these being recognised as key variables that can affect the outcome of scientific studies. The project utilised text mining software developed at the University, which can analyse large collections of documents to unearth information which would otherwise have been virtually impossible to discover. The software relies on a number of rules, which automatically scan the method section of papers to identify mentions of gender and age.