Scientific methodology elements structure of  Health Science e-journal articles

Elements of the scientific methodology, as factual data, the problem statement, the methodology used, hypotheses, results and conclusions, are embedded, implicitly or explicitly, in the text of scientific articles. In a Web Publishing environment, if the scientific methodology elements structure of digital articles could be extracted or captured as a by-product of the Web publishing process, then formalized  and represented in a machine readable format, the processing of these structure through programs -  intelligent software agents - would enhance the scientific communication process. This would enable semantic retrieval, critical inquiring, semantic citation, comparison and coherence verification. The knowledge-base thus extracted and represented would also permit validating a scientific article against public Web ontologies, which express the assented knowledge of a scientific area like the UMLS - Unified Med ical Language System. A model of the scientific methodology elements structure, its & quot;deep structure & quot;, represented in XML, is proposed. This model points toward a Scientific Methodology Markup Language - Sm-ML, similar to the pioneering CML - Chemical Markup Language, SBML - System Biology Markup Language, MathML - Mathematical Markup Language and more general approaches such as STMML - Scientific Technical and Medical Markup Language. The research reported here exposes the model proposed, discusses its features and its potential as a cognitive tool in the context of the Semantic Web initiative. The text format of scientific articles in areas such as Health Science are highly structured. This research also examines scientific articles in an electronic Health Science journal in order to identify these elements, which comprise of scientific methodology elements of each article in order to validate the model proposed. The model is also conceived as the base for developing enhanced authoring and retrieval Web tools.