Neurological Disorders and Publication Abstracts Follow Social Network-Type Node Patterns When Indexed Using Ontology Tree- Based Key Term Search

Disorders of the Central Nervous System (CNS) are worldwide causes of morbidity and mortality. In order to further investigate the nature of the CNS research, we generate from an initial reference a controlled vocabulary and ontological tree structure for this vocabulary, and then apply the vocabulary in an analysis of the past ten years of abstracts (n = 10,468) from a major neuroscience journal. Using naïve search methodology with our terminology tree, we find over 4,500 relationships between abstracts and clinical diagnostic topics. After generating a network graph of these document-topic relationships, we find that this network graph contains characteristics of document-author and other human social networks, including evidence of scalefree and power law-like node distributions. Lastly, we discuss potential health consumer-centered uses for our ontology and search methodology.