{{short description|Free text-similarity service search engine}} {{Lowercase title}} {{COI|date=August 2011}} '''eTBLAST''' was a free text-similarity service now defunct. It was initially developed by Alexander Pertsemlidis and Harold “Skip” Garner in 2005 at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. It offered access to the following databases:
* MEDLINE * National Institutes of Health (NIH) * CRISP * Institute of Physics (IOP) * Wikipedia * arXiv * NASA technical reports * Virginia Tech class descriptions * others of clinical interest
eTBLAST searched citation databases<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Lewis|first1=J|last2=Ossowski|first2=S|last3=Hicks|first3=J|last4=Errami|first4=M|last5=Garner|first5=HR|year=2006|title=Text similarity: An alternative way to search MEDLINE|journal=Bioinformatics|volume=22|issue=18|pages=2298–304|doi=10.1093/bioinformatics/btl388|pmid=16926219|doi-access=free}}</ref> and databases containing full-text such as PUBMED. It compared a user’s natural-text query with target databases utilizing a hybrid-search algorithm. The algorithm consisted of a low-sensitivity, weighted, keyword-based first pass followed by a novel second pass based on sentence alignment. eTBLAST later became a web-based service of The Innovation Laboratory at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute.
The text-similarity engine studied duplicate publications and potential plagiarism in biomedical literature. eTBLAST received thousands of random samples of Medline abstracts for a large-scale study. Those with the highest similarity were assessed then entered into an on-line database. The work revealed several trends including an increasing rate of duplication in the biomedical literature, according to prominent scientific journals ''Bioinformatics'',<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Errami|first1=M|last2=Hicks|first2=JM|last3=Fisher|first3=W|last4=Trusty|first4=D|last5=Wren|first5=JD|last6=Long|first6=TC|last7=Garner|first7=HR|year=2007|title=Deja vu a study of duplicate citations in Medline|journal=Bioinformatics|volume=24|issue=2|pages=243–9|doi=10.1093/bioinformatics/btm574|pmid=18056062|doi-access=free}}</ref>''Anaesthesia and Intensive Care'',<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Loadsman|first1=JA|last2=Garner|first2=HR|last3=Drummond|first3=GB|year=2008|title=Towards the elimination of duplication in ''Anaesthesia and Intensive Care''|url=http://www.aaic.net.au/document/?D=20080552|journal=Anaesthesia and Intensive Care|volume=36|issue=5|pages=643–5|doi=10.1177/0310057X0803600502|pmid=18853580|doi-access=free|url-access=subscription|archive-date=2015-02-16|access-date=2021-03-08|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150216175602/http://www.aaic.net.au/document/?D=20080552|url-status=dead}}</ref> ''Clinical Chemistry'',<ref>{{cite journal|last1=George|first1=AC|last2=Long|first2=TC|last3=Garner|first3=HR|year=2010|title=Quaere Verum|journal=Clinical Chemistry|volume=56|issue=4|pages=673–4|doi=10.1373/clinchem.2009.130468|pmid=20093558|doi-access=free}}</ref> ''Urologic oncology'',<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Garner|first1=HR|year=2011|title=Combating unethical publications with plagiarism detection services|journal=Urologic Oncology|volume=29|issue=1|pages=95–9|doi=10.1016/j.urolonc.2010.09.016|pmc=3035174|pmid=21194644}}</ref> ''Nature'',<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Errami|first1=M|last2=Garner|first2=H|year=2008|title=A tale of two citations|journal=Nature|volume=451|issue=7177|pages=397–9|bibcode=2008Natur.451..397E|doi=10.1038/451397a|pmid=18216832|s2cid=4358525|doi-access=free}}</ref> and ''Science''.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Long|first1=TC|last2=Errami|first2=M|last3=George|first3=AC|last4=Sun|first4=Z|last5=Garner|first5=HR|year=2009|title=Responding to Possible Plagiarism|journal=Science|volume=323|issue=5919|pages=1293–4|doi=10.1126/science.1167408|pmid=19265004|s2cid=28467385}}</ref>
==See also== *BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) *Natural language processing *Medical literature retrieval
== References == {{reflist|colwidth=30em}}
==External links== * {{official|url=https://helioblast.heliotext.com/}}
{{Virginia Tech}} {{DEFAULTSORT:Etblast}} Category:Virginia Tech Category:Bioinformatics software Category:Medical search engines Category:Natural language processing Category:Bibliographic databases and indexes Category:Plagiarism detectors