Data Curation Workflow

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ZFIN obtains research publications from PubMed using automated scripts. Student workers integrate the PDFs and images into the database. A curator indexes the newly added publications which involves associating genes, alleles, and reagents to the publication. If there are questions about reagents, allele or gene nomenclature, or sequences the curator contacts the authors to resolve questions. After the associations are completed the publication is triaged to determine in which curation bin it should reside. Publications with new human disease models, new mutants, or new genes are given the highest priority for manual curation and are triaged to the High Priority Bin. Publications with new expression, new phenotype and new orthology are triaged into Data Type Bins and are manually curated with varying priority dependent on curator workloads. Publications that are toxicology or fish orthology publications are not manually curated and are filed, and all other papers are closed and filed. Once curators complete manual curation, publications are closed and filed. Data are updated to the ZFIN website in real time as curation is completed and are added to download files daily.