How biological source capabilities may affect the data collection process

Scientific discovery relies partially on the collection of information related to multiple scientific objects (e.g., "retrieve all genes involved in brain cancer", "retrieve all citations related to diabetes"). Scientists are interested in exploring multiple data sources in order to explore relationships between scientific objects. Each data source provides specific capabilities that allow scientists to access, navigate, and analyze the data. This work addresses the impact of resource selection (data source and capability) in the data collection process as it may affect significantly the quality and completeness of the data. We present preliminary research that demonstrates that the data collection process depends on two orthogonal variables: the data sources involved in the process, and the selection of capabilities available at these resources. We report the results for four commonly used biological resources: the NCBl Nucleotide, Protein, PubMed and OMIM databases.