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

Back to the Future: "The New Nature Writing," Ecological Boredom, and the Recall of the Wild

The “new nature writing” has been seen as a response, especially in the United Kingdom, to the growing sense that earlier paradigms of nature and nature writing are no longer applicable to current geographical and environmental conditions. At the same time, some writers who have been associated with the “new nature writing” dislike the term, criticizing it for its residual parochialism, its continuing class and gender biases, and its paradoxical adherence to the very categories – particularly wildness – it wishes to confront. This article does not set out to dismiss the “new nature writing” or to assess which writers might be the best fit with it; instead, it looks at its indebtedness to the earlier literary and cultural traditions it claims to interrogate and deconstruct. This debt is often expressed in terms of belatedness, whether acknowledged or not, in relation to earlier notions of wilderness and wildness – inherently slippery categories that multiply and ramify in the “new nature writing,” which has neither managed to dissociate itself from wildness nor to redefine it for our ecologically troubled times

Early history of particle physics

The discovery of cosmic rays is a standard example of ‘one man’s noise is another man’s signal’. From the apparently minor leakages of electricity from well-insulated detectors came a subject of great importance for modern science: the detection of a so-called ‘radiation’ coming from not just beyond the Earth’s atmosphere but from deep cosmic space. Furthermore, a radiation of energy density rivalling that of starlight. Our goal is to examine the history of the subject from the period of ‘pre-discovery’ in the years from 1900 to 1912, through the discovery itself up to the 1940’s when particle physics was continued with accelerators. The crucial role of ‘new techniques’, principally the Wulf electrometer and the Wilson cloud chamber and their use in precission studies by Hess, Kolhörster, Anderson and Blackett are described. The arguments about the veracity of Hess’s claim for an extra-terrestrial origin are included, as well as the developments leading to the inspired discovery of the positron and the muon. The question of ‘origin’ is also examined, from the contention by Hess that the Sun was not responsible, to the idea – still held – that supernovae are involved