Collaborative work by EACH students published in Analytical Chemistry

During our Winter School at Krusenberg Manor outside Uppsala held January 17-19 this year, visiting scholar prof. Magnus Palmblad did a workshop with the students related to cheminformatics, specifically on ontologies and semantic method annotations for published articles related to analytical chemistry. This is an emerging field, expected to be helpful for advanced literature search and data mining. The work done by students during the workshop was so serious that Prof. Palmblad saw the possibility of advancing it further and publishing. He offered this plan to students. Six of them accepted and worked together with prof. Palmblad (via online communication) in the following months, resulting in the largest set of manually curated, semantically annotated methods sections in any scientific journal – 100 papers in total. This work by the students was recently published in Analytical Chemistry, the most prestigious analytical chemistry journal! The corresponding resource and EACH100 dataset are available on GitHub. One of the figures of this work will be on the cover of the upcoming issue of Analytical Chemistry.

Prof. Palmblad says: “It was a pleasure to work with the students, who engaged in the tasks with exceptional enthusiasm and perseverance. I am particularly thankful for the students who continued to work on the annotations for months after the Winter School, jointly producing an impressive body of original work. This resource will be critical in evaluating natural language processing methods from artificial intelligence used in extracting important metadata information from analytical chemistry methods.”

Prof. Jonas Bergquist, the main organiser of the Winter School, concludes: “It is always very stimulating to be able to interact with these brilliant students, and this year’s Winter School was a great success!”