PubPharm - Specialised Information Services for Pharmacy

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Wolf-Tilo Balke; Robert Strötgen, since 10/2022
• Subject Area: Pharmacy
• Term: since 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 267140244

The drug-centred search engine of the Specialised Information Service (SIS) for Pharmacy and its innovative services will be continued as the central infrastructure PubPharm. Furthermore, all services will be integrated into a Single Point of Entry, the new comprehensive platform www.pubpharm.de. The cooperation between the University Library and the Institute for Information Systems of the TU Braunschweig resulted in productive services with innovative character confirmed by the scientific community. These services, e.g. the entity-based contextualization and semantic faceting as well as the visualised entity networks (Drug-Target-Disease Networks), are frequently utilised in pharmaceutical research workflows. Information technology research and the close cooperation between information infrastructure and computer science have proven to be cutting-edge and model-building. New challenges in the research of innovative services will be addressed during the third funding period. Examples are the prediction of interactions between drugs and other bioactive compounds based on knowledge embedded in publications and specialist databases, the plausibility check of newly published scientific results and the improvement of user experience by better explaining the output of AI-based tools. Furthermore, narrative information access offers a precise search utilizing variables for argumentation structures in scientific literature. Based on this research, intelligent tools are developed, evaluated by the scientific community, and integrated into PubPharm. A major enhancement affects the overall architecture of PubPharm: all SIS services, such as the new subject-specific repository pharmRxiv, workflows for innovative services and social media channels, will be embedded in PubPharm. Furthermore, scalable digital processes will be established for indexing, validating and semantically enriching metadata of heterogeneous scientific sources, such as clinical studies, specialised databases and research data. Intensive and systematic feedback from the scientific community guarantees the requirements-based as well as the user-centric orientation of PubPharm. In addition to the drug-centred search engine, an important component of the SIS services is providing specialised digital journals to university-based pharmaceutical scientists. Open access activities, retro-digitization and long-term preservation as well as research data management consulting supplement the SIS portfolio.

• DFG Programme: Acquisition and Provision (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Katrin Stump, until 10/2022