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

Clusters of alcohol abstainers and drinkers incorporating motives against drinking: a random survey of 18 to 34 year olds in four cities in four different continents

Objective: The aim of this analysis was to identify alcohol consumption clusters for adolescents and early adults according to attitudes to drinking, motivations against drinking and perceptions associated with alcohol. Method: Interviews were undertaken with people aged 18–34 years old living in four cities in different regions of the world. Multistage random sampling was consistent across the four cities (Ilorin (Nigeria), Wuhan (China), Montevideo (Uruguay) and Moscow (Russia)). The questionnaire was forward and back translated into relevant languages and face-to-face interviewing undertaken. The data were weighted to the population of each city. In total 6235 structured interviews were undertaken (1391 in Ilorin, 1600 in Montevideo, 1604 in Moscow and 1640 in Wuhan). Questions regarding motivation against alcohol consumption (14 items), assessing perceptions (3 items) and attitudes to drinking in certain situations (8 items) were asked of all respondents including abstainers. Factor analysis was initially undertaken to identify highly related correlated variables. Results: Cluster analysis provided a variety of clusters (Ilorin (3 clusters), Montevideo (5), Moscow (4) and Wuhan (4)). At least one cluster in each city was dominated by abstainers and another by heavy episodic drinkers. Variations by city and alcohol consumption patterns existed in regards to variables included. Conclusion: This analysis detailed the city specific motivations against drinking alcohol, and the attitudes towards alcohol consumption. Differences highlight the influence of country/city specific culture, customs, laws, societal norms and traditions