Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider (MS ’08) has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop a series of automated informatics tools for reviewing medical literature more quickly and easily. The project, “Text Mining Pipeline to Accelerate Systematic Reviews in Evidence-Based Medicine,” was funded through a subaward from the University of Illinois at Chicago that will cover $228,006 in direct costs. Schneider is co-principal investigator with Neil Smalheiser, associate professor of psychiatry at UIC, and Aaron Cohen, a professor in the Oregon Health & Science University’s Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology.
The team is currently testing three informatics tools: a meta-search engine for finding articles in medical literatures across different databases; an automated randomized control trial (RCT) tagger for identifying human randomized controlled clinical trial articles; and an aggregator tool that clusters together RCT articles predicted to arise from the same underlying clinical trial.
"Our evaluation work will help improve tool development and find new directions for it," said Schneider. "In the long-run, this work could help automate the process of conducting systematic reviews, perhaps not only maintaining but also even improving their quality."
Schneider studies scholarly communication and social media through the lens of arguments, evidence, and persuasion. She is developing linked data (ontologies, metadata, Semantic Web) approaches to manage scientific evidence. She holds a PhD in informatics from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Prior to joining the iSchool in 2016, Schneider served as a postdoctoral scholar at the National Library of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, and INRIA, the national French Computer Science Research Institute. She recently received an XSEDE start-up award for her research in biomedical informatics.