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

Book Review of “At Risk: Social Justice in Child Welfare and Other Human Services” by Karen J. Swift and Marilyn Callahan, 2009, Toronto: University of Toronto Press

The newest book by Canadian social work scholars Karen Swift and Marilyn Callahan is exemplary of how other disciplines can invigorate social work theory. “At Risk” uses child welfare practice as an entry point for exploring the continuing movement away from addressing needs and towards the management of risk in the human services

On the Intersection of Somatechnics and Transgender Studies

The relationship between transgender studies and somatechnics has been generative. In this reflection on the intersection between somatechnics and transgender studies, the editorial collective of the Somatechnics journal provides a brief outline of what has been accomplished in the latter through an engagement with the former. This reflection is not intended to be an exhaustive review of trans*-somatechnics relations. Instead, here we highlight topics and modes of study that are indicative of critical interest in trans* matters at this time and how these matters intersect with our related areas of research. We outline how the somatechnical understanding of transgender as relational and constitutively realized through particular kinds of sociopolitical contexts explains the critical purchase of somatechnical investigations to trans* matters. We also cover somatechnics and transgender studies' engagements with technologies of mobility, race, and coloniality as well as media. We suggest that work in the journal on somatechnics and transgender studies constitutes a trans-substantial dialogue that trans*-identified scholars make specific via their contributions to social sciences and the humanities

On the Intersection of Somatechnics and Transgender Studies

The relationship between transgender studies and somatechnics has been generative. In this reflection on the intersection between somatechnics and transgender studies, the editorial collective of the Somatechnics journal provides a brief outline of what has been accomplished in the latter through an engagement with the former. This reflection is not intended to be an exhaustive review of trans*-somatechnics relations. Instead, here we highlight topics and modes of study that are indicative of critical interest in trans* matters at this time and how these matters intersect with our related areas of research. We outline how the somatechnical understanding of transgender as relational and constitutively realized through particular kinds of sociopolitical contexts explains the critical purchase of somatechnical investigations to trans* matters. We also cover somatechnics and transgender studies' engagements with technologies of mobility, race, and coloniality as well as media. We suggest that work in the journal on somatechnics and transgender studies constitutes a trans-substantial dialogue that trans*-identified scholars make specific via their contributions to social sciences and the humanities