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

Attribution of Blame in Father-Daughter Incest Cases: Perceptions of Social Workers and Case Aides

This exploratory study exarnined the attribution of blame in father-daughter incest cases by surveying the perceptions of 100 social workers and case aides. The random sample of 74 women and 26 men were mailed a self-repoft survey packet including two Likert-type, ordinal level scales: The Jackson Incest Blame Scale (JIBS) which measured offender, victim, societal and situational factors; and the JEL Blame Scale which measured mother blame. With a response rate of 30Vr, findings were reported in the median and mode. JIBS findings indicated most blame was aftributed to the offender, little to the victim, with varying amounts of blame to societal and situational factors. JEL Blame Scale findings indicated some blame was attributed to the mother. Findings also supported feminists\u27 perspectives encouraging social workers and researchers to redefine and reframe perceptions of rnother blame, and develop or refine measurement tools to empirically study mother blame