Empirical Legal Studies Before 1940: A Bibliographic Essay

The modern empirical legal studies movement has well-known antecedents in the law and society and law and economics traditions of the latter half of the 20th century. Less well known is the body of empirical research on legal phenomena from the period prior to World War II. This paper is an extensive bibliographic essay that surveys the English language empirical legal research from approximately 1940 and earlier. The essay is arranged around the themes in the research: criminal justice, civil justice (general studies of civil litigation, auto accident litigation and compensation, divorce, small claims, jurisdiction and procedure, civil juries), debt and bankruptcy, banking, appellate courts, legal needs, legal profession (including legal education), and judicial staffing and selection. Accompanying the essay is an extensive bibliography of research articles, books, and reports

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

High burden and seasonal variation of paediatric scabies and pyoderma prevalence in The Gambia: A cross-sectional study. Main study dataset.

Scabies is a WHO neglected tropical disease common in children in low- and middle-income countries. Excoriation of scabies lesions can lead to secondary pyoderma infection, most commonly by Staphyloccocus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes (group A streptococcus, GAS), with the latter linked to acute post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis (APSGN) and potentially rheumatic heart disease (RHD). There is a paucity of data on the prevalence of these skin infections and their bacterial aetiology from Africa

Streptococcus pyogenes carriage and infection within households in The Gambia: a longitudinal cohort study

Background: Streptococcus pyogenes causes more than 500 000 deaths per year globally, which occur disproportionately in low-income and middle-income countries. The roles of S pyogenes skin and pharyngeal carriage in transmission are unclear. We aimed to investigate the clinical epidemiology and household transmission dynamics of both S pyogenes asymptomatic carriage and infection in a high-burden setting. Methods: We did a 1-year prospective, longitudinal, household cohort study, recruiting healthy participants from households in Sukuta, The Gambia. Households were eligible if they comprised at least three members, including one child younger than 18 years, and were excluded if more than half of household members declined to participate. Households were identified by random GPS coordinates derived from census data. At monthly visits, pharyngeal and normal skin swabs were collected for S pyogenes culture, and sociodemographic data were recorded by interview. Incident pharyngitis and pyoderma infections were captured. Cultured isolates underwent emm genotyping. The primary outcome measures were incidence of S pyogenes carriage and disease. Additional outcomes were prevalence of S pyogenes skin and pharyngeal carriage, S pyogenes skin and pharyngeal clearance time, S pyogenes emm type, risk factors for carriage and disease events, household secondary attack rate, and emm-linked household transmission events. The study is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT05117528. Findings: Between July 27, 2021, and Sept 28, 2022, 442 participants were enrolled from 44 households. The median age was 15 years (IQR 6–28) and 233 (53%) were female. We identified 17 pharyngitis and 99 pyoderma events and 49 pharyngeal and 39 skin S pyogenes carriage acquisition events. Mean monthly prevalence was 1·4% (95% CI 1·1–1·9) for S pyogenes pharyngeal carriage and 1·2% (0·9–1·6) for S pyogenes skin carriage. Incidence was 120 per 1000 person-years (95% CI 87–166) for S pyogenes pharyngeal carriage, 124 per 1000 person-years (90–170) for S pyogenes skin carriage, 51 per 1000 person-years (31–84) for S pyogenes pharyngitis, and 263 per 1000 person-years (212–327) for S pyogenes pyoderma. Pharyngeal carriage risk was higher during the rainy season (HR 5·67, 95% CI 2·19–14·69) and in larger households (per additional person: 1·03, 1·00–1·05), as was pharyngitis risk (rainy season: 3·00, 1·10–8·22; household size: 1·04, 1·02–1·07). Skin carriage risk was not affected by season or household size, but was lower in female than in male participants (0·45, 0·22–0·92) and highest in children younger than 5 years compared with adults (22·69, 3·08–167·21), with similar findings for pyoderma (female sex: 0·34, 0·19–0·61; age <5 years: 7·00, 2·78–17·64). Median clearance time after carriage acquisition was 4·0 days for both skin (IQR 3·5–7·0) and pharynx (3·5–7·3). The mean household secondary attack rate was 4·9 (95% CI 3·5–6·3) for epidemiologically linked S pyogenes events and 0·74 (0·3–1·2) for emm-linked S pyogenes events. Of the 204 carriage and disease events, emm types were available for 179 (88%). Only 18 emm-linked between-visit household transmission events were identified. Pyoderma was the most common source of S pyogenes household transmissions in 11 (61%) of 18 emm-linked transmissions. Both pharynx to skin and skin to pharynx transmission events were observed. Interpretation: S pyogenes carriage and infection are common in The Gambia, particularly in children. Most events are non-household acquisitions, but skin carriage and pyoderma have an important role in S pyogenes household transmission and bidirectional transmission between skin and pharynx occurs. Funding: Wellcome Trust, Chadwick Trust, Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium), European Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases, and Medical Research Council (UK).SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Scottish literature: second renaissance

No abstract available