The currently most common form of publication in scientific journals does not support the direct electronic access to the data. The use of natural language processing (NLP) tools is one approach to analyse and understand human language in published articles. 6 These computer science techniques can help to identify trends, but do not provide consistent data sets, as data in publications are not presented uniformly, for example often only in the form of graphical representations, and data as well as metadata are not necessarily provided completely.