Structured digital abstract

[1][2] In a six-month pilot project that started in January 2008, FEBS Letters began publishing manuscripts with “structured digital abstracts” (SDAs).

The SDAs were added to the end of abstracts in a structured, but human-readable, format and digitally linked to interaction databases.

Each sentence in an SDA is followed by one or more identifiers pointing to the corresponding database entries that contain all the details of the structured information.

Although most of the sentences currently point to the MINT Molecular INTeraction Database, the proposed structure can easily be extended to contain identifiers from other databases storing protein interactions or different types of relationships between biological entities.

e.g. UniProtKB for proteins and the European Bioinformatics Institute ontology look up service for other entities.