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

Perspectives on ‘the lens of risk’ interview series: interviews with Tom Horlick-Jones, Paul Slovic and Andy Alaszewski

This article is the fourth and final of an interview series with a selection of significant contributors to the social science of risk. It provides quasi-verbatim interviews with Tom Horlick-Jones, Paul Slovic and Andy Alaszewski. Tom Horlick-Jones contributed to Chapter 6 of the Royal Society Risk monograph, on risk management. He offers further insights into the debates which underlay its production to those given by Nick Pidgeon in the first article of this series. Paul Slovic provides a North American perspective on risk social science. Andy Alaszewski, in the last of the eight interviews, discusses his views about risk in relation to the evolution of his journal, Health, Risk & Society

Assessing the Influence of an Educational Presentation on Climate Change Beliefs at an Evangelical Christian College

Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, a significant proportion of the American public continues to reject anthropogenic climate change. This disparity is particularly evident among evangelical Christians, for whom theological conservatism, general scientific skepticism, political affiliations, and sociocultural influences may impede their acceptance of human-caused climate change. Climate advocates have attempted to engage the evangelical community through various educational initiatives; lacking empirical measurement, however, it is difficult to draw conclusions regarding the efficacy of such programs. Here, we present the results of a study that addresses this lack by adapting questions from the Six Americas of Global Warming survey to measure the climate change beliefs of undergraduate students at an evangelical Christian college before and after attending a lecture by a Christian climate scientist. The 88 participants who successfully completed a pre- and posttreatment survey were divided into three groups: the first attended a live lecture, the second attended a recorded lecture, and the third attended a similar version of the same recorded lecture in which the presenter removed material addressing common misconceptions about climate change. The results demonstrate a significant increase in the proclimate beliefs for students in all three groups. There was no significant difference between the impacts of the live and recorded lectures or between the recorded lectures with and without misconceptions. These findings affirm the value of climate education among evangelicals; highlight the potential utility of such presentations, both recorded and live; and point to opportunities for research in the area of faith-based climate communication

Restorative Justice and College Student Misconduct

This article reports the findings of a restorative justice program to address student disciplinary problems at Skidmore College. Based on the model of “Community Reparative Boards” developed by the Vermont Department of Corrections for probation cases, the Skidmore Integrity Board is representative board of students, faculty, and staff. The article describes the nature and purpose of the board and reports findings from three recent years of board activity. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005organizational change, student misconduct, college judicial board, restorative justice,