Vast amount of literatures for biomedical research is available online, in MEDLINE database. This helps the biomedical scientists to have instant access to literatures and references they need. But finding a manageable subset of literatures that are relevant to their current research is hard because: (1) the number of these articles are growing very fast , and (2) each disease (and gene) has di...

Given the occurrence frequency of any term within any set of articles within MEDLINE, we define ―characteristic‖ terms as words and phrases that occur in that literature more frequently than expected by chance (at p < 0.001 or better). In this report, we studied how the cut-off criterion varied as a function of literature size and term frequency in MEDLINE as a whole, and have compared the dist...