Allie is a search service for abbreviations and long forms used in life sciences. It provides a solution to the issue that many abbreviations are used in the literature, and polysemous or synonymous abbreviations appear frequently, making it difficult to read and understand scientific papers that are not relevant to the reader's expertise. Allie searches for abbreviations and their corresponding long forms from titles and abstracts in the entire PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. PubMed stores over 30 million bibliographic information in life science and is suitable for extracting domain specific abbreviations and their long forms appearing in actual literature.

• Users can search for the long forms of abbreviations or the abbreviations of long forms.

• Bibliographic data which includes the inquired abbreviation or long form in titles or abstracts can be obtained.

• Users can also obtain co-occurring abbreviations in titles and abstracts.

• SPARQL/REST/SOAP interfaces are available which allow the users to call upon Allie from their scripts, programs, etc.

You can learn Allie here (video tutorial).

Please refer the following publication:
Y. Yamamoto, A. Yamaguchi, H. Bono and T. Takagi, "Allie: a database and a search service of abbreviations and long forms.", Database, 2011:bar03.
PubMed Entry | Full text paper available

Allie uses ALICE to extract abbreviation and long form pairs along with PubMed ID from PubMed data. The details of this tool is described in the following publication:
H. Ao and T. Takagi, "ALICE: an algorithm to extract abbreviations from MEDLINE.", J Am Med Inform Assoc., 2005 Sep-Oct;12(5):576-86.
PubMed Entry | Full text paper available

Last Index Update: May 1, 2024 (Monthly update)

You can download and use the database used for Allie (Weekly update) under the terms and conditions of use. [download site]