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

Paspalum schesslii (Poaceae, Paspaleae), a new species from Mato Grosso (Brazil) with an unusual base chromosome number.

Paspalum schesslii, a new species from the state of Mato Grosso in central-western Brazil, is described and illustrated. The new species is related to P. malmeanum, from central-western Brazil and eastern Bolivia, and Paspalum eucomum, from central Brazil. It comprises shorter plants with leaf blades and racemes shorter than those of the related species, and spikelets having obovate, deciduous upper florets. An unexpected chromosome number 2n = 12 was found in specimens of P. schesslii; thus it differs from both P. malmeanum, which has 2n = 20, and P. eucomum, for which 2n = 30 and 2n = 32 chromosome counts are here reported for the first time. The discovery of a new species having 2n = 12, which often cohabits with diploid populations of the widespread related species, P. stellatum, is consistent with an hypothesis about the hybrid origin of the polyploid cytotypes of P. stellatum having 2n = 32 and 2n = 52 chromosomes. Moreover, such an hybrid origin involving parental species with different base chromosome numbers (x = 6 and x = 10) could also explain the occurrence of 32 chromosomes in P. eucomum, potentially documenting a speciation mechanism that is otherwise unknown in the genus.Fil: Bonasora, Marisa Graciela. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Agronomía; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Pozzobon, Marisa T.. Ministerio da Agricultura Pecuaria e Abastecimento de Brasil. Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaria; BrasilFil: Honfi, Ana Isabel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Nordeste. Instituto de Biología Subtropical. Instituto de Biología Subtropical - Nodo Posadas | Universidad Nacional de Misiones. Instituto de Biología Subtropical. Instituto de Biología Subtropical - Nodo Posadas; ArgentinaFil: Rua, Gabriel Hugo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Agronomía; Argentin