Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Agrowaste with antioxidant properties as intercalating agents for LDH

The exploitation of biowastes for the production of bio-based chemicals, materials or fuels has been recently fostered to the purpose of converting an environmental and economical concern into an industrial opportunity. Biowastes in fact, in most cases are rich in organic molecules as for example the olive mill wastewater (OMW), an aqueous waste released from the production of virgin olive oil. OMW typically contains a wide range of polyphenols, which are natural antioxidants and may be present up to 10 g L-1. After recovering, such antioxidant molecules can be exploited for cosmetic and food applications [1]. However, the recovery implies the use of biotechnological processes and the operating costs must be taken into consideration. Anionic clays or layered double hydroxides (LDHs) are versatile and multifunctional materials, thanks to their easiness of scaling-up preparation and functionalization through one pot synthesis, tunable composition and biocompatibility. LDHs indeed, are advantageous in many field of application as catalysts, catalyst precursors, anion exchangers, additives and/or stabilizers in polymer formulations, sorbents and scavengers for pollutants, thus revealing an essential role also in environmental remediation [2-3]. In the present work, the idea is to intercalate an agrowaste into an LDH with the aim of decreasing the environmental impact of such biowaste and to exploit the antioxidant properties of the polyphenols present, such as p-coumaric acid, syringic acid, ferulic acid, vanillic acid, 3,4-dihydroxybenzoic acid, etc. and then to further exploit such organo-modified LDH in a polymer composite. Hence, the final material would be of great interest thanks to its multifunctionality. It is well-known in fact that the organic functionalization of LDH induces a strong interaction at the interface filler/polymer through its tethered molecules, with consequent notable boosting in mechanical performances. Moreover, being the modifier antioxidant, such property is potentially preserved into the composite. In view of these considerations, olive mill wastewater has been used as intercalating agent in Zn2Al-LDH and, for comparison, some model systems have been also prepared through the intercalation of some antioxidant molecules, chosen among those potentially present in OMW. The organo-modified LDHs have been employed for the preparation of poly(butylene succinate) (PBS) composites trough in situ polymerization. Both clays and composites have been studied in terms of molecular, morphological and chemical characteristics by GPC, XRD and FT-IR. Thermal properties have been investigated by TGA and DSC. Viscoelastic and antioxidant properties have been also assessed