Do medicine and cell biology talk to each other? A study of vocabulary similarities between fields

A close interaction between basic science and applied medicine is to be expected. Therefore, it is important to measure how far apart the field of cell biology and medicine are. Our approach to estimating the distance between these fields was to compare their vocabularies and to quantify the difference in word repertoire. We compared the vocabulary of the title and abstract of articles available in PubMed in two selected high-impact journals in each field: cell biology, medicine, and translational science. Although each journal has its own editorial policy, we showed that within each field there is a small vocabulary difference between the two journals. We developed a word similarity index that can measure how much journals share a common vocabulary. We found a high similarity index between each cell biology (91%), medical (71-74%), and translational journal (65%). In contrast, the comparison between medicine and biology journals produced low correlation values (22-36%), suggesting that their vocabularies are quite dissimilar. Translational medicine journals had medium similarity values when compared to cell biology journals (52-70%) and medicine journals (27-59%). This approach was also performed in 10-year periods to evaluate the evolution of each field. Using the “onomics” strategy presented here, we observed that differences in vocabulary of basic science and medicine have been increasing over time. Since translational medicine has an intermediate vocabulary, we confirmed that translational medicine is an efficient approach to bridge this gap.基础科学与应用医学之间存在密切互动，实属意料之中。因此，量化细胞生物学与医学领域间的隔阂程度至关重要。我们估算这两大领域间隔阂的方法，是对比二者的词汇库，并量化其词汇储备的差异。我们从每个领域中选取两本高影响力期刊，对其刊载于PubMed的论文标题与摘要的词汇进行对比分析，涉及领域涵盖细胞生物学、医学与转化科学。尽管各期刊均拥有独立的编辑规范，但我们发现，同一领域内的两本期刊，其词汇差异微乎其微。我们开发了一款词汇相似度指数，可用于衡量不同期刊间的词汇共享程度。我们测得，细胞生物学期刊间的词汇相似度指数高达91%，医学期刊为71%至74%，转化科学期刊则为65%。与之形成鲜明对比的是，医学期刊与细胞生物学期刊的对比结果显示出较低的相关性（22%至36%），表明二者的词汇库差异显著。转化医学期刊与细胞生物学期刊对比时，相似度处于中等水平（52%至70%）；与医学期刊对比时则为27%至59%。我们还以10年为周期开展了此项分析，以评估各领域的发展演进。借助本文提出的「组学（onomics）」分析策略，我们观察到，基础科学与医学的词汇差异正随时间推移不断扩大。鉴于转化医学的词汇库处于中间状态，我们证实了转化医学是弥合这一鸿沟的有效路径。