LitSense 2.0: AI-powered biomedical information retrieval with sentence and passage level knowledge discovery.

Journal: Nucleic acids research
Published Date: Jul 7, 2025

Abstract

LitSense 2.0 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/litsense2/) is an advanced biomedical search system enhanced with dense vector semantic retrieval, designed for accessing literature on sentence and paragraph levels. It provides unified access to 38 million PubMed abstracts and 6.6 million full-length articles in the PubMed Central (PMC) Open Access subset, encompassing 1.4 billion sentences and ∼300 million paragraphs, and is updated weekly. Compared to PubMed and PMC, the primary platforms for biomedical information search, LitSense offers cross-platform functionality by searching seamlessly across both PubMed and PMC and returning relevant results at a more granular level. Building on the success of the original LitSense launched in 2018, LitSense 2.0 introduces two major enhancements. The first is the addition of paragraph-level search: users can now choose to search either against sentences or against paragraphs. The second is improved retrieval accuracy via a state-of-the-art biomedical text encoder, ensuring more reliable identification of relevant results across the entire biomedical literature.

Authors

  • Lana Yeganova
    National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), Bethesda, MD, USA. Electronic address: lana.yeganova@nih.gov.
  • Won Kim
    Department of Neurosurgery, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
  • Shubo Tian
    Department of Statistics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.
  • Donald C Comeau
    Division of Intramural Research (DIR), National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH), MD 20894 Bethesda, United States.
  • W John Wilbur
    National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, 20894, MD, USA. wilbur@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
  • Zhiyong Lu
    National Center for Biotechnology Information, Bethesda, MD 20894 USA.

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