Do medicine and cell biology talk to each other? A study of vocabulary similarities between fields

Abstract

A close interaction between basic science and applied medicine is to be expected. Therefore, it is important to measure how far apart the field of cell biology and medicine are. Our approach to estimating the distance between these fields was to compare their vocabularies and to quantify the difference in word repertoire. We compared the vocabulary of the title and abstract of articles available in PubMed in two selected high-impact journals in each field: cell biology, medicine, and translational science.Although each journal has its own editorial policy, we showed that within each field there is a small vocabulary difference between the two journals. We developed a word similarity index that can measure how much journals share a common vocabulary. We found a high similarity index between each cell biology (91%), medical (71-74%), and translational journal (65%). In contrast, the comparison between medicine and biology journals produced low correlation values (22-36%), suggesting that their vocabularies are quite dissimilar. Translational medicine journals had medium similarity values when compared to cell biology journals (52-70%) and medicine journals (27-59%). This approach was also performed in 10-year periods to evaluate the evolution of each field. Using the ''onomics'' strategy presented here, we observed that differences in vocabulary of basic science and medicine have been increasing over time. Since translational medicine has an intermediate vocabulary, we confirmed that translational medicine is an efficient approach to bridge this gap.

What does desmin do: A bibliometric assessment of the functions of the muscle intermediate filament

“…This difference could be justified because the scientific community has been emphasizing research focused on mechanisms of action rather than description of cases or observations. 13 We then used the spreadsheet to further analyze the articles that contained "function" or "role" in their abstract and that were not Reviews. We extracted the papers listed on Table 1 among those 164 articles.…”

“…This difference could be justified because the scientific community has been emphasizing research focused on mechanisms of action rather than description of cases or observations. 13…”

“…Desminopathy has been characterized as a disease caused by alterations in the desmin gene or alterations that lead to the abnormal distribution and/or accumulation of desmin inside the cells. 12 As it happens to many other diseases, there is a gap between medical and basic cell biology knowledge, 13 and the desmin-related physiopathological mechanisms are not clearly characterized: it is still not clear whether the disease is caused by the lack of function of altered desmin or to the accumulation of unprocessed molecular aggregates.…”

Physiological Properties of Platelets in Dutch Calves during the Dairy Phase

“…It is now recognized that blood is an important integrative medium of the whole organism (Abreu et al, 2016;Oshurkova & Medvedev, 2018a). The degree of functional perfection of its various regulatory systems largely ensures the success of maintaining mammalian homeostasis (Zavalishina, 2018b;Azevedo et al, 2021). Among them, a very important place is occupied by the homeostasis system.…”

Epithelial‐to‐mesenchymal transition as a learning paradigm of cell biology

“…Although a close interaction between cell biology and medicine would be beneficial for both fields, we have shown that the two areas have different vocabularies and translation of basic concepts into medical applications need to be improved (Azevedo et al, 2021). Curiously, in spite of Flexner's recommendation in his report of 1910 to include basic science in medical education (Flexner, 1910), to this day there is still a tension between the time dedicated to teaching basic science (such as cell biology) versus clinical subjects.…”