Thursday, May 01, 2008

Using names of methods and techniques as a way to make your work 'fit in'

Consider these two recently published article titles.

"GAPscreener: An Automatic Tool for Screening Human Genetic Association Literature in PubMed Using the Support Vector Machine Technique"

"Extraction of semantic biomedical relations from text using conditional random fields"


I have no problem with the work, or the conclusions they draw or the methods they use.
But I do have a problem with the way that this title.

"Extraction of semantic biomedical relations from text, using a method which we chose because it was the most appropriate for task, but it doesn't really have a name that you will know"

Sounds rubbish, even after ignoring its extreme verbosity.

How can you present work that uses methods or techniques that are novel and well chosen and yet could be previously unpublished, don't have a specific name, and are not well known in the field?

Also it does make you wonder if people use 'known' methods for tasks, even if they are not the most appropriate choice, just to ease the process of peer review and publication.

Personally i'm not keen on fitting in, just for the sake of simplicity.