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Data and literature gathering in chemical cancer risk assessment
Author(s) -
Silins Ilona,
Korhonen Anna,
Högberg Johan,
Stenius Ulla
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
integrated environmental assessment and management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.665
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1551-3793
pISSN - 1551-3777
DOI - 10.1002/ieam.1278
Subject(s) - risk assessment , risk analysis (engineering) , identification (biology) , computer science , consistency (knowledge bases) , hazard , task (project management) , process (computing) , hazard analysis , scientific literature , data science , medicine , engineering , computer security , reliability engineering , systems engineering , artificial intelligence , paleontology , chemistry , botany , organic chemistry , biology , operating system
In recent years, chemical cancer risk assessment has faced major challenges: the demand for cancer risk assessment has grown considerably with strict legislation regarding chemical safety, whereas cancer hazard identification has turned increasingly complex due to the rapid development and high publication rate in biomedical sciences. Thus, much of the scientific evidence required for hazard identification is hidden in large collections of biomedical literature. Extensive guidelines have been produced to support cancer risk assessment under these circumstances. We evaluated whether these guidelines support the first, critical step of this task—data and literature gathering—and found that the guidance is vague. We propose ways to improve data and literature gathering for cancer risk assessment and suggest developing a computational literature search and analysis tool dedicated to the task. We describe the first prototype tool we have developed and discuss how it could help to improve the quality, consistency, and effectiveness of cancer risk assessment when developed further. Fully reliable automatic data and literature gathering may not be realistic; the retrieved articles will always need to be examined further by risk assessors. However, our proposal offers a starting point for improved data and literature gathering that can benefit the whole cancer risk assessment process. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2012; 8: 412–417. © 2012 SETAC