Digital Science launches Dimensions Life Sciences & Chemistry

Digital Science, a technology company with a vision of a trusted and collaborative research ecosystem driving progress for all, is pleased to announce the launch of a new version of its popular Dimensions platform – Dimensions Life Sciences & Chemistry (Dimensions L&C) – focused on life sciences and chemistry research activities. 

Dimensions L&C analyzes more than 120 million scientific publications, millions of patents, grants and clinical trial documents. It is both larger than other databases, and unlike traditional manually curated tools, applies up-to-the-minute semantic text analysis tools and ontologies, providing powerful up-to-date discovery functionality previously unavailable at such scale. 

In the past, literature search tools required the user to know exactly what they wanted to find, narrowing down the relevant results and confirming or invalidating pre-defined hypotheses. Thanks to insights systematically captured in ontologies and computational power, researchers can get answers to complex and diverse queries directly from the source content. 

Users can search for small molecules, chemical reactions and gene sequences, validate biomarkers, understand disease mechanisms and identify drug targets. They can also quickly discover relevant chemical information in broader life sciences and chemistry research areas working with a chemistry structure editor and a biosequence search for nucleotides and proteins. Different from other products, data is identified in full-text documents on a daily basis, creating a highly comprehensive and up-to-date resource.

Digital Science recently announced a collaboration with OntoChem (www.ontochem.com). Dimensions L&C uses the ontologies from OntoChem, which include around 40 million concepts and 100 million synonyms from more than 35 knowledge domains such as compounds, proteins, diseases, drugs, materials, methods, devices or species, enabling a high quality, context sensitive knowledge discovery tool.

Christian Herzog, CEO Dimensions, said: “There is an ever growing publication haystack and researchers need to find the needles of information quickly and efficiently. In the past you needed to know what to ask the search engine in order to find it, but with Dimensions L&C, we are now providing next generation discoverability for life sciences and chemistry researchers: an ontology driven retrieval engine which identifies relationships and links in more than 120m publications – allowing the researcher to move on from search to AI-supported discovery.”

Dimensions is used by scientists, academic institutions, funders and industry. Its database offers the most comprehensive collection of linked data in a single platform; from grants, publications, datasets and clinical trials to patents and policy documents. Because Dimensions maps the entire research lifecycle, research can be followed from funding through output to impact. It has transformed the way research is discovered, accessed and evaluated.