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The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary work on extracting band gap information of materials from academic papers. With increasing demand for renewable energy, band gap information will help material scientists design and implement novel photovoltaic (PV) cells.

The authors collected 1.44 million titles and abstracts of scholarly articles related to materials science, and then filtered the collection to 11,939 articles that potentially contain relevant information about materials and their band gap values. ChemDataExtractor was extended to extract information about PV materials and their band gap information. Evaluation was performed on randomly sampled information records of 415 papers.

The findings of this study show that the current system is able to correctly extract information for 51.32% articles, with partially correct extraction for 36.62% articles and incorrect for 12.04%. The authors have also identified the errors belonging to three main categories pertaining to chemical entity identification, band gap information and interdependency resolution. Future work will focus on addressing these errors to improve the performance of the system.

The authors did not find any literature to date on band gap information extraction from academic text using automated methods. This work is unique and original. Band gap information is of importance to materials scientists in applications such as solar cells, light emitting diodes and laser diodes.

The output of academic literature has increased significantly due to digital technology, presenting researchers with a challenge across every discipline, including materials science, as it is impossible to manually read and extract knowledge from millions of published literature. The purpose of this study is to address this challenge by exploring knowledge extraction in materials science, as applied to digital scholarship. An overriding goal is to help inform readers about the status knowledge extraction in materials science.

The authors conducted a two-part analysis, comparing knowledge extraction methods applied materials science scholarship, across a sample of 22 articles; followed by a comparison of HIVE-4-MAT, an ontology-based knowledge extraction and MatScholar, a named entity recognition (NER) application. This paper covers contextual background, and a review of three tiers of knowledge extraction (ontology-based, NER and relation extraction), followed by the research goals and approach.

The results indicate three key needs for researchers to consider for advancing knowledge extraction: the need for materials science focused corpora; the need for researchers to define the scope of the research being pursued, and the need to understand the tradeoffs among different knowledge extraction methods. This paper also points to future material science research potential with relation extraction and increased availability of ontologies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are very few studies examining knowledge extraction in materials science. This work makes an important contribution to this underexplored research area.