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

Fertilizing pineapples on a soil high in potassium

Potassium was applied to Smooth Cayenne plants at rates of 5.7 kg and 11.3 kg/1000 plants as pre-plant base dressings, as side-dressings during the second summer, and as K2SO4 sprays from planting to ratoon crop flowering

Investigation of pineapple fertilizing methods and Sower induction

Greater yields were obtained from nitrogen supplied in urea sprays than in sidedressings. No differences in yield were obtained from the various rates and frequencies of urea spraying used. Solid urea side-dressings gave the same yield as ammonium sulphate side-dressings. Applying some nitrogen in the base-dressing gave no improvement in yield. A base-dressing of potash gave a higher plant crop yield but a lower ratoon crop yield than side-dressings of potash. Forcing produced a higher yield from all crops than did natural flowering. There were more fruit with forced flowering but their average weight was less

Copper deficiency in pineapples

The following symptoms were observed in Cu-deficient pineapple plants: young leaves narrow with curled edges; leaf tip initially drooping, then later necrotic; underside of leaves waxy and lacking bloom

Comparison of four fertilizer schedules for pineapples in Central Queensland

Four fertilizer schedules for pineapples were compared in the Yeppoon district on stony, sandy clay loam soil with a high available K content. The highest yields were obtained from a schedule which applied side-dressings ofa mixed NPK fertilizer five times a year throughout the trial

Amelioration of virulent Babesia bovis infection in calves by administration of the nitric oxide synthase inhibitor aminoguanidine

Calves undergoing initial infection with a virulent strain of the haemoprotozoan parasite Babesia bovis were treated with aminoguanidine (AG), an inhibitor of the inducible form of nitric oxide synthase (iNOS). The mean maximum parasitaemia of the AG treated calves was significantly lower than that of the control cattle. In addition, the febrile response and decrease in packed cell volume (PCV) observed during acute infection were significantly ameliorated in the AG treated cattle relative to the controls. However, AG had no effect on the multiplication of B. bovis in the microaerophilous stationary-phase (MASP) in-vitro culture system. These results provide evidence of a role for nitric oxide (NO) produced in response to acute infection in the pathology of bovine babesiosis