Information science for biology

A thousand ways to say 'biomedical sciences'

What do I mean by ‘biomedical sciences’? It will be important to define this term early on in my studies.

One way in which I can do this is to look at the organisational structure of Universities in the United Kingdom to see where departments researching biology, medicine and biomedicine-like topics, are situated.

The Research Assessment Exercise for 2001 lists around one hundred departments which were examined under the research title ‘Biological Sciences’. This title includes the following:

“Molecular, cellular, organismal and population biology of micro-organisms, plants and animals, including biochemistry and biotechnology.”

(Taken from here)

On closer inspection of institutional websites, there rarely seems to be a single department exclusively researching biological sciences.

Research and teaching at UK universities is organised at the highest level into Schools, Faculties or Divisions – the terminology is variable and probably historical in derivation. It is common for example to have a School of Life Sciences within which biomedical science-related subjects will lie.

An attempt to distinguish the biomedical science Schools though is hampered by universities which spread research and teaching between life/physical science areas and medicine/health-related subjects. At universities, the biomedical sciences are taught and researched between the two.

The next organisational separation is usually, although not always, Departments. From browsing UK university websites, there is high variability in naming for departments, and in the subject-specialty for that department. For example, there may be a Department of Biochemistry at one institution, and a Department for Molecular and Cellular Medicine at another.

The final organisational division is normally the research groups, which fall within a department and conduct work on highly specialized topics. Again, there is no hard and fast rule for nomenclature and research specialization, as far as I can see, in UK research groups.

I think it will be useful to perform a comprehensive survey of organisational structures and naming conventions for biomedical science research in the UK, based on information gleaned from university websites. The objectives of such a survey would be several-fold:

1. To define the term ‘biomedical sciences’ according to research organisation at Higher education institutions in the UK
2. To create a browsable resource for the major research Schools, Departments and groups for biomedical science in the UK, including links to individual web pages
3. To investigate naming conventions for biomedical science departments in the UK, and to propose means for name authority control

Name authority control for research groups is as important as author name control. Science is a collaborative effort and the research group is a unit of collaboration for the scientific community.