Bad omics word of the day: Bibliome

(Note – this was supposed to be published tomorrow but clicked the wrong button – so we will have two today – yay)

And here is a doozy.  The bad omics word of the day is … Bibliome. See for example, the source of all knowledge (Wikipedia): Bibliome – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Which also refers to some other related omics words the literaturome and the textome.  Now, every one at once, 1,2, 3, groan.

Back to the bibliome which is described in Wikipedia as follows:

“The bibliome is the totality of biological text corpus. This term was coined around 2000 in EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute) to denote the importance of biological text information. 

The first uses seem to be in and around 2001. See this article from Nature Reviews Genetics in 2001 Mining the bibliome.  And another one with a very similar title in EMBO in 2002: Mining the Bibliome (with some other words in the title).  And another one in Pharmacogenomics entitled Mining the bibliome. 

And though I would have thought and hoped that it would not get used much it has shown up here and there for a while (see for example Ten thousand views of bioinformatics: a bibliome perspective.). 

So here is a question – what exactly is “the totality of biological text corpus”?  And does this thing, whatever it is, need an omics word?

Hat tip to @rdmpage and others for pointing this one out.

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen