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 strategic management of technology: Integrating technology supply and demand perspectives

The rapid rate of technological change of recent years has played a major role in changing the structure of established industries as well as new industries. It has elevated the management of technology into the arena of strategic issues. This paper reviews the work of authors who argue that technology management must be given a strategic role in the firm. It does not take issue with the general tenor of their views. But, it counsels caution on the grounds that a focus on technology supply may lead to a product orientation which subverts the influence of customer considerations in strategy making. The writers argue for an approach to the strategic management of technology that integrates the technology supply and technology demand perspectives. Descriptive guidelines are developed for an integrative framework by means of which technology strategy can be formulated. Several factors are discussed which are considered to have an important role to play in formalising the role of technology strategy and ensuring a balanced view of market needs and desired technological capabilities.

Constructing cultures of caring consumption: an exploratory study of the lived experience of embodiment within the elderly care home

Examines the culture of caring consumption in the context of the everyday experiences of elderly consumers in residential care homes

Customer satisfaction with bank services: a multidimensional space analysis

The nature and direction of the satisfactions that are delivered to consumers of bank services are explored, and the criteria used to evaluate these services are highlighted. The non-metric multidimensional scaling technique enabled respondents' perceptions to be represented spatially. It is revealed that respondents had high levels of satisfaction with regard to the location and accessibility of branches and ATMs, and acceptance of the current levels of banking fees; but expressed some caution in their evaluation of new and improved services

Celebrity, convergence and transformation

It is almost 30 years since Tom Wolfe first ‘celebrated’ the sinful vanities of greed, class and racism lurking behind Wall Street successes of the 1980s. Since then the excess of city traders and bankers has hardly moderated; nor has the media lost its appetite for reproducing such excess as moralising narratives of avarice, corruption and claims of cynically manipulative practices informing neoliberal market capitalism. Beyond commentary on a culture of high-profile moral posturing set to sell anything and everything as media product, one detects two trenchant and defining insights born of nascent informational capitalism (Castells, 2001). The first relates to the immersion of identity in ‘vast incalculable circuits’ of connectivity; not merely of the conventional media of Wolfe’s era, but of the vast global enterprise of networked society and its computer-mediated worlds where, as predicted, selfdom is indeed experienced as being ‘multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction with machine connections; it is [indeed] made and transformed by language; sexual congress is [indeed] an exchange of signifiers; and understanding [indeed] follows from navigation and tinkering rather than analysis’ (Turkle, 1997, p. 15). The second relates to the ongoing explosion of new technologies of reproduction in that the identification of the commodity with its image as media content occurs under conditions governed by the ‘systematic production of messages, not from the world, but from the medium itself’ (Baudrillard, 1998, p. 125); and that the interplay of connectivity as mediatised sociality animates symbolic circulation to the point where everyday interactivity consists in a ‘mass medium at the level of the brand’ (Baudrillard, 1998, p. 125). These insights suggest Lury’s (2004, p. 51) exposition of the brand as an ‘interface: a frame that organises and connects as a site of interactivity with its own recursive logic independent of context’. Indeed, in writing that ‘the brand is an image instrument, a medium of translation, a new media object’, Lury (2004, p. 49) not only restates the view of Douglas and Isherwood (1980, p. 62) that ‘the essential function of consumption is its capacity to make sense’, to make meaning, to think with: she anticipates the underlying concern of this special issue that brands function as distributed cultural intermediaries; and that this is most apparent empirically at the level of the celebrity brand