While the numbers of publications indexed in PubMed that mention mice continues to grow (∼72 000 papers added in 2017), the subset of papers relevant to MGD (i.e. those focused on genetics and genomics of the laboratory mouse) has remained relatively stable. We curate ∼12 000 of these papers each year, primarily from a core set of 160 journals. A major challenge for MGD curators is how to identify the relevant subset of papers from a large corpus of biomedical literature. Manuscripts, while peer-reviewed, are often published without annotations using relevant bio-ontologies; authors often do not adhere to existing gene, allele or mouse strain nomenclature standards for example. As a consequence, the identification of publications that are actually relevant to MGD’s mission requires a substantial investment of time for manual review.
