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

Assimilation—On (Not) Turning White: Memory and the Narration of the Postwar History of Japanese Canadians in Southern Alberta

This essay explores understandings of “race” – specifically, what it means to be Japanese – of nisei (“second generation”) individuals who acknowledge their near complete assimilation structurally and normatively into the Canadian mainstream. In historically-contextualized analyses of memory fragments from oral-history interviews conducted between 2011-2017, it focusses on voices and experiences of southern Alberta, an area whose significance to local, national, continental, and trans-Pacific histories of people of Japanese descent is belied by a lack of dedicated scholarly attention. In this light, this essay reveals how the fact of being Japanese in the latter half of the twentieth century was strategically central to nisei lives as individuals and in their communities. In imagining a racial hierarchy whose apex they knew they could never share with the hakujin (whites), the racial heritage they nevertheless inherited and would bequeath could be so potent as to reverse the direction of the colonial gaze with empowering effects in individual engagements then and as remembered now. We see how the narration and validation of one’s life is the navigation of wider historical contexts, the shaping of the post-colonial legacy of Imperial cultures, as Britain and Japan withdrew from their erstwhile colonial projects in Canada

Partners No More: Relational Transformation and the Turn to Litigation in Two Conservationist Organizations

The rise in litigation against administrative bodies by environmental and other political interest groups worldwide has been explained predominantly through the liberalization of standing doctrines. Under this explanation, termed here the floodgate model, restrictive standing rules have dammed the flow of suits that groups were otherwise ready and eager to pursue. I examine this hypothesis by analyzing processes of institutional transformation in two conservationist organizations: the Sierra Club in the United States and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). Rather than an eagerness to embrace newly available litigation opportunities, as the floodgate model would predict, the groups\u27 history reveals a gradual process of transformation marked by internal, largely intergenerational divisions between those who abhorred conflict with state institutions and those who saw such conflict as not only appropriate but necessary to the mission of the group. Furthermore, in contrast to the pluralist interactions that the floodgate model imagines, both groups\u27 relations with pertinent agencies in earlier eras better accorded with the partnership-based corporatist paradigm. Sociolegal research has long indicated the importance of relational distance to the transformation of interpersonal disputes. I argue that, at the group level as well, the presence or absence of a (national) partnership-centered relationship determines propensities to bring political issues to court. As such, well beyond change in groups\u27 legal capacity and resources, current increases in levels of political litigation suggest more fundamental transformations in the structure and meaning of relations between citizen groups and the state

Legislating for Economic Sclerosis: Are Lawyers a Baleful Influence on Growth Rates?

William Easterly, an ex-World Bank economist and widely respected growth theorist, in recently noting that skilled individuals may elect to pursue occupations that redistribute income rather than enhance growth, referred to 'the somewhat whimsical piece of evidence … that economies with lots of lawyers grow more slowly than economies with lots of engineers'. The remark alluded to an assertion by the Bush-Quayle camp during the 1992 Presidential campaign that too many lawyers were prejudicial to US economic growth, and sparked a heated debate that was played out in the Wall Street Journal and a number of academic journals at the time. A decade later, Easterly's rejoinder has prompted us to examine the view that occupational capture (the capture of talent by particular occupations) can contribute to economic stagnation, by revisiting the notion of lawyers as negative externalities to the growth process. Copyright WWZ and Helbing & Lichtenhahn Verlag AG 2004.

Congresspeople in the Courtroom: Analysis of the use of Constitutional Complaints by Members of Congress in Colombia 1992-2015

The relationship between legislative and judicial branches in constitutional democracies has been the subject of several academic debates. Nevertheless, this literature has made little reference to congresspeople’s role as active subjects in judicial scenarios, especially when they present complaints against legislation enacted during their incumbency. This study seeks to address the question of why members of the Colombian Congress make use of constitutional review to overturn laws that they took part in debating. Through the use of quantitative and qualitative analysis, this paper explains how the use of constitutional complaints by members of congress is not limited to a political strategy of opposition by independents and opposition parties, but also serves members of the governing coalition for at least three different purposes: i) to deviate from the political approach of the Executive bill when they do not agree with the contents or when the reforms affect the interests of their constituency; ii) to “clean up” Executive bills of content introduced by the opposition during the law-making process; and iii) to advance certain points of their own political agenda, avoiding the political cost of opposing the reform as it passes through the legislative process