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

Theories of behaviour and behaviour change across the social and behavioural sciences: a scoping review.

Interventions to change health-related behaviours typically have modest effects and may be more effective if grounded in appropriate theory. Most theories applied to public health interventions tend to emphasise individual capabilities and motivation, with limited reference to context and social factors. Intervention effectiveness may be increased by drawing on a wider range of theories incorporating social, cultural and economic factors that influence behaviour. The primary aim of this paper is to identify theories of behaviour and behaviour change of potential relevance to public health interventions across four scientific disciplines: psychology, sociology, anthropology and economics. We report in detail the methodology of our scoping review used to identify these theories including which involved a systematic search of electronic databases, consultation with a multidisciplinary advisory group, web searching, searching of reference lists and hand searching of key behavioural science journals. Of secondary interest we developed a list of agreed criteria for judging the quality of the theories. We identified 82 theories and 9 criteria for assessing theory quality. The potential relevance of this wide-ranging number of theories to public health interventions and the ease and usefulness of evaluating the theories in terms of the quality criteria are however yet to be determined

The COVID-19 pandemic – A focus on nurse managers’ mental health, coping behaviours and organisational commitment

Background: The emergence of COVID-19 has substantially impacted frontline health care workers, including nurse managers. To date, no studies have been conducted to examine the impact COVID-19 has had on Nurse Managers’ mental health, coping strategies and organisational commitment. Aim: To investigate the mental health, coping behaviours, and organisational commitment among Nurse Managers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Cross-sectional study involving 59 Nursing Managers from one Local Health District in Sydney Australia during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected relating to demographics, anxiety, coping strategies and organisational commitment. Results: Overall, approximately three quarters of the Nurse Managers had high anxiety scores. Managers who had worked longer as a nurse had higher scores for adaptive coping strategies and 41% of Nurse Managers considered leaving their jobs. Conclusions: Strategies to minimise anxiety and enable coping as part of organisational disaster, emergency or crisis planning for Nurse Managers may result in decreased anxiety and stress levels, increased use of adaptive coping strategies and lower intent to leave the organisation and the nursing profession

Help-seeking for sexual difficulties and the potential role of interactive digital interventions: findings from the third British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles

Sexual difficulties are common and can negatively impact health and wellbeing. A wide range of support is available, but there are multiple barriers to accessing help. Interactive Digital Interventions (IDIs) for sexual difficulties have the potential to provide a convenient, wide-reaching and cost-effective source of support but little is known about who might use them. We explored their potential reach by assessing the prevalence of help-seeking among people with distressing sexual difficulties, including who seeks which sources of help. Data came from sexually active men and women aged 16-74 participating in Britain’s third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (N = 11,637). Help/advice was sought by less than half of those with distressing sexual difficulties and help-seeking was associated with younger age in women but not men. The most popular sources of support were family doctor (47.5-54.8%), Internet (22.0-25.6%), and family/friend (20.7-41.8%), with older participants (≥35), particularly men, preferring to seek help from a family doctor, and younger (<35) from the Internet or family/friend. Despite a paucity of good digital-support sites for sexual function, the Internet is a common source of help. As Internet access continues to increase, so too does the potential for well-designed IDIs to support those with sexual difficulties

Comparing Scores From Full Length, Short Form, and Adaptive Tests of the Social Interaction Anxiety and Social Phobia Scales

The current study developed and examined the performance of a computerized adaptive version of the Social Interaction Anxiety and Social Phobia Scales (SIAS/SPS) and compared results with a previously developed static short form (SIAS-6/SPS-6) in terms of measurement precision, concordance with the full forms, and sensitivity to treatment. Among an online sample of Australian adults, there were relatively minor differences in the performance of the adaptive tests and static short forms when compared with the full scales. Moreover, both adaptive and static short forms generated similar effect sizes across treatment in a clinical sample. This provides further evidence for the use of static or adaptive short forms of the SIAS/SPS rather than the lengthier 20-item versions. However, at the individual level, the adaptive tests were able to maintain an acceptable level of precision, using few items as possible, across the severity continua in contrast to the static short forms