We’ve updated the Literature section of SGD gene pages. You can now see how much has been published on a gene over time and which papers are the newest, without leaving the gene page.
What’s new
The Literature section of each gene page now has two additions:
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A bar graph of publications by year. It shows the distribution of all manually curated literature for the gene, as a count of references by year of publication. Hover over any bar to see the count for that year. You can see when interest in a gene took off, whether research is still active, and how deep the literature is.
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A list of the most recent papers. Below the graph are the newest papers curated for the gene, so you can catch up on recent work.
The literature in SGD is manually curated. SGD gathers references through a PubMed search for papers whose titles or abstracts contain “yeast” or “cerevisiae.” Curators review these papers and link them to the relevant genes and literature topics.
An example: ATG8
ATG8 encodes a ubiquitin-like protein with a role in autophagosome formation. It currently has 889 curated papers, though this number will grow with continued curation. The graph shows that publications peaked in 2012, with 66 papers that year. Hovering over the bars lets you see how the literature built up to that peak and how it has continued since.
Explore all the literature
Click Literature Details or See all to open the gene’s full Literature page. It has all the literature information for the gene, organized into topics by relevance:
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Primary Literature: papers that focus on the gene or contain information about its function, biological role, cellular location, phenotype, regulation, structure, or disease homologs in other species.
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Additional Literature: papers that show experimental evidence for the gene or describe homologs in other species, but for which the gene is not the paper’s principal focus.
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Reviews: review articles.
Why it matters
Some genes have decades of literature and others have only a few papers. The graph shows that at a glance, and the recent-papers list gives you a quick way into current work. The Literature page then sorts the papers by relevance, so you can start with the papers most focused on your gene and move on to the rest.
Try it out
Go to any gene page, such as ATG8, and scroll to Literature. Hover over the bars to see yearly counts and look at the recent papers. Then click Literature Details or See all to browse by topic. For help with the Literature page, see the Literature Help page.
Questions or suggestions? Contact us!