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NeuroBoun: An inquiry-based approach for exploring scientific literature -- a use case in neuroscience

Online scientific publications provide vast opportunities for researchers. Alas, the quantity and the rate of increase in the articles make the utilization of these resources very challenging. This work presents as inquiry-based approach to support the articulation of complex inter-related queries to gain insights regarding how these subjects have been studied in conjunction with one another as reported in the scientific literature. For this purpose we introduce inquiries that represent inter-related subqueries that are of interest to a researcher. The inquiries are expanded to better capture the intent of the inquirer, from which several queries are generated that represent various juxtapositions of the subjects in consideration. The sets of queries are used to search repositories to yield results that reveal quantitative and temporal relations among the subjects of the inquiry. A web-based tool, NeuroBoun, is developed as a proof of concept for medical publications found in PubMed. A use case related to the asymmetry of amygdala is presented to illustrate the potentials of the proposed approach.