Searching for duplicate resource names in PMC article titles

I enjoyed this article by Keith Bradnam, and the associated tweets, on the problem of duplicated names for bioinformatics software.

I figured that to some degree at least, we should be able to search for such instances, since the titles of published articles that describe software often follow a particular pattern. There may even be a grammatical term for it, but I’ll call it the announcement colon:

eDuS: Segmental Duplication Simulator
Reveel: large-scale population genotyping using low-coverage sequencing data
RNF: a general framework to evaluate NGS read mappers
Hammock: A Hidden Markov model-based peptide clustering algorithm to identify protein-interaction consensus motifs in large datasets

You get the idea. “XXX COLON a [METHOD] to [DO SOMETHING] using [SOME DATA].”

Let’s go in search of announcement colons, using titles from the PubMed Central dataset. You can find this mini-project at Github.