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

The effects of flaxseed, soy and corn flours on the textural and sensory properties of a bakery product

The objective of this study was to assess the effects of some healthy ingredients on the properties of a ring-shaped bagel/pretzel-type bakery product to offer an alternative product satisfying consumer demand. For this purpose, ground flaxseed, defatted soy flour and corn flour were blended at a weight basis with wheat flour at 5, 10 and 15%. The taste score decreased upon increasing the level of substitution of flaxseed, soy and corn flours. Samples containing 15% of flaxseed were rated poorest in taste. No significant difference was observed in crust color except 15% level of flaxseed. The control sample had highest crust color value. The crispness scores of control and other samples containing 5% corn flour were higher than that of other samples. The samples with 5% flaxseed flour had lower crust L values. Flaxseed, soy and corn flour showed significant effects on the hardness, cohesiveness, springiness, gumminess, fracture force and stiffness values (P < 0.05). Samples with 15% corn flour had the highest hardness value. The results of the present study suggest that flaxseed, soy and corn flours could be added to a typical snack formulation up to levels of 10% with a reasonable acceptance offering promising nutritious and healthy alternative to consumers