Using the PubMatrix Literature-Mining Resource to Accelerate Student-Centered Learning in a Veterinary Problem-Based Learning Curriculum

Problem-based learning (PBL) creates an atmosphere in which veterinary students must take responsibility for their own education. Unlike a traditional curriculum where students receive discipline-specific information by attending formal lectures, PBL is designed to elicit self-directed, student-centered learning such that each student determines (1) what he/she does not know (learning issues), (2) what he/she needs to learn, (3) how he/she will learn it, and (4) what resources he/she will use. One of the biggest challenges facing students in a PBL curriculum is efficient time management while pursuing learning issues. Bioinformatics resources, such as the PubMatrix literature-mining tool, allow access to tremendous amounts of information almost instantaneously. To accelerate student-centered learning it is necessary to include resources that enhance the rate at which students can process biomedical information. Unlike using the PubMed interface directly, the PubMatrix tool enables users to automate queries, allowing up to 1,000 distinct PubMed queries to be executed per single PubMatrix submission. Users may submit multiple PubMatrix queries per session, resulting in the ability to execute tens of thousands of PubMed queries in a single day. The intuitively organized results, which remain accessible from PubMatrix user accounts, enable students to rapidly assimilate and process hundreds of thousands of individual publication records as they relate to the student's specific learning issues and query terms. Subsequently, students can explore substantially more of the biomedical publication landscape per learning issue and spend a greater fraction of their time actively engaged in resolving their learning issues.