Journal of Biomedical Informatics-Special Issue on Mining the Pharmacovigilance Literature

[Isabel Segura]

First call for Papers: Journal of Biomedical Informatics Special Issue on Mining the Pharmacovigilance Literature
Guest Editors: Isabel Segura-Bedmar, Paloma Martínez


Dear DDIExtraction Participant, 

We are pleased to announce a Special Issue of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics on Mining the Pharmacovigilance Literature. For detailed information on the special issue, please see http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-biomedical-informatics/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-mining-the-pharmacovigilance-literature/.

Pharmacovigilance is formally defined by WHO as ‘‘the science and activities related to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects or any other drug-related problems’’. Text Mining applied to the pharmacovigilance literature can be of great benefit in the pharmaceutical industry, allowing identification and extraction of relevant information, and providing an interesting way to reduce the time spent by healthcare professionals and researchers who are trying to stay current by reviewing the literature.

We encourage you to submit your articles for this special issue on automatic extraction of relationships between biomedical entities relevant to the Pharmacovigilance field. More specifically, we are interested in papers that present new and novel approaches for the extraction of drug–drug interactions (DDI) and drug side-effects relationships from biomedical texts.

We particularly welcome submissions that use the DDI corpus because their results can be compared with those reported in DDIExtraction 2013. In order to advance in the extraction of drug–side effects relationships, we also welcome contributions on the creation of gold standard corpora annotated with drug–side effects.

Topics of interest for submission to this special issue include (but are not limited to):
•    Corpus development for pharmacovigilance text mining.
•    Named entity recognition for pharmacological substances and side effects.
•    Relation extraction between drugs, particularly DDIs.
•    Relation extraction between drugs and side effects.
•    The creation and use of ontologies to represent knowledge relevant to drug interactions and adverse drug effects.
•    The use of biomedical ontologies in combination with text mining to facilitate the detection of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) and DDIs.
•    Review of the state of the art in text mining for pharmacovigilance.


Submission deadline: September 30, 2014

All submitted papers must be original and will undergo a rigorous peer-review process with at least two reviewers. All submissions should follow the guidelines for authors, available at the Journal of Biomedical Informatics web site (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-biomedical-informatics).

Authors must submit their paper by September 30, 2014 via the online Elsevier Editorial System (EES) at http://ees.elsevier.com/jbi.

Please feel free to contact us if you need any further information.

With our best regards,

Isabel Segura-Bedmar and Paloma Martínez
Computer Science Department
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain