Table 1. Diversity of vocabularies: there is no established lexicon of neuroscience, even in hand-curated reference vocabularies, as visible across CognitiveAtlas (Poldrack and Yarkoni, 2016), MeSH (Lipscomb, 2000), NeuroNames (Bowden and Martin, 1995), NIF (Gardner et al., 2008), and NeuroSynth (Yarkoni et al., 2011).
Our dataset, NeuroQuery, contains all the terms from the other vocabularies that occur in more than 5 out of 10 000 articles. ‘MeSH’ corresponds to the branches of PubMed’s MEdical Subject Headings related to neurology, psychology, or neuroanatomy (see Section 'The choice of vocabulary'). Many MeSH terms are hardly or never used in practice – For example variants of multi-term expressions with permuted word order such as ‘Dementia, Frontotemporal’, and are therefore not included in NeuroQuery’s vocabulary. Numbers above 25% are shown in bold.
| % of ↓ contained in → | Cognitive Atlas (895) | MeSH (21287) | NeuroNames (7146) | NIF (6912) | NeuroSynth (1310) | NeuroQuery(7547) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cognitive Atlas | 100% | 14% | 0% | 3% | 14% | 68% |
| MeSH | 1% | 100% | 3% | 4% | 1% | 9% |
| NeuroNames | 0% | 9% | 100% | 29% | 1% | 10% |
| NIF | 0% | 12% | 30% | 100% | 1% | 10% |
| NeuroSynth | 9% | 14% | 5% | 5% | 100% | 98% |
| NeuroQuery | 8% | 25% | 9% | 9% | 17% | 100% |