6,447 research outputs found
An Algorithm to Determine Peer-Reviewers
The peer-review process is the most widely accepted certification mechanism
for officially accepting the written results of researchers within the
scientific community. An essential component of peer-review is the
identification of competent referees to review a submitted manuscript. This
article presents an algorithm to automatically determine the most appropriate
reviewers for a manuscript by way of a co-authorship network data structure and
a relative-rank particle-swarm algorithm. This approach is novel in that it is
not limited to a pre-selected set of referees, is computationally efficient,
requires no human-intervention, and, in some instances, can automatically
identify conflict of interest situations. A useful application of this
algorithm would be to open commentary peer-review systems because it provides a
weighting for each referee with respects to their expertise in the domain of a
manuscript. The algorithm is validated using referee bid data from the 2005
Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.Comment: Rodriguez, M.A., Bollen, J., "An Algorithm to Determine
Peer-Reviewers", Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, in
press, ACM, LA-UR-06-2261, October 2008; ISBN:978-1-59593-991-
Mapping the Bid Behavior of Conference Referees
The peer-review process, in its present form, has been repeatedly criticized.
Of the many critiques ranging from publication delays to referee bias, this
paper will focus specifically on the issue of how submitted manuscripts are
distributed to qualified referees. Unqualified referees, without the proper
knowledge of a manuscript's domain, may reject a perfectly valid study or
potentially more damaging, unknowingly accept a faulty or fraudulent result. In
this paper, referee competence is analyzed with respect to referee bid data
collected from the 2005 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). The
analysis of the referee bid behavior provides a validation of the intuition
that referees are bidding on conference submissions with regards to the subject
domain of the submission. Unfortunately, this relationship is not strong and
therefore suggests that there exists other factors beyond subject domain that
may be influencing referees to bid for particular submissions
Using RDF to Model the Structure and Process of Systems
Many systems can be described in terms of networks of discrete elements and
their various relationships to one another. A semantic network, or
multi-relational network, is a directed labeled graph consisting of a
heterogeneous set of entities connected by a heterogeneous set of
relationships. Semantic networks serve as a promising general-purpose modeling
substrate for complex systems. Various standardized formats and tools are now
available to support practical, large-scale semantic network models. First, the
Resource Description Framework (RDF) offers a standardized semantic network
data model that can be further formalized by ontology modeling languages such
as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Second, the recent
introduction of highly performant triple-stores (i.e. semantic network
databases) allows semantic network models on the order of edges to be
efficiently stored and manipulated. RDF and its related technologies are
currently used extensively in the domains of computer science, digital library
science, and the biological sciences. This article will provide an introduction
to RDF/RDFS/OWL and an examination of its suitability to model discrete element
complex systems.Comment: International Conference on Complex Systems, Boston MA, October 200
Magnetic field stabilization for high-accuracy mass measurements on exotic nuclides
The magnetic-field stability of a mass spectrometer plays a crucial role in
precision mass measurements. In the case of mass determination of short-lived
nuclides with a Penning trap, major causes of instabilities are temperature
fluctuations in the vicinity of the trap and pressure fluctuations in the
liquid helium cryostat of the superconducting magnet. Thus systems for the
temperature and pressure stabilization of the Penning trap mass spectrometer
ISOLTRAP at the ISOLDE facility at CERN have been installed. A reduction of the
fluctuations by at least one order of magnitude downto dT=+/-5mK and
dp=+/-50mtorr has been achieved, which corresponds to a relative frequency
change of 2.7x10^{-9} and 1.5x10^{-10}, respectively. With this stabilization
the frequency determination with the Penning trap only shows a linear temporal
drift over several hours on the 10 ppb level due to the finite resistance of
the superconducting magnet coils.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figure
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