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

The Emerging Drugs Network of Australia: a toxicosurveillance system of illicit and emerging drugs in the emergency department

Objective: The unprecedented rise in synthetic drugs, many containing unknown toxic agents, has made timely analytical diagnosis more difficult, and has reduced the confidence of clinicians providing ED management to this population of patients. This has also impacted the quality of evidence informing harm reduction responses. The Emerging Drugs Network of Australia (EDNA) brings together emergency physicians, toxicologists and forensic laboratories to establish a standardised ED toxicosurveillance system in Australia. Methods: Blood analysis of intoxicated patients will be conducted by forensic laboratories to enable precise identification of the substances causing acute toxicity. This will be linked with clinical data collected at the time of ED presentation to enable analysis of the clinical effects and outcomes associated with different illicit and emerging drugs. Toxicological and clinical data collected across sentinel sites will align with a nationally endorsed minimum dataset. Results: EDNA's collaborative network will establish a national system of surveillance and reporting of illicit and emerging drugs causing acute toxicity. Standardisation of data collection recorded in a national clinical registry will provide more robust data on epidemiology and associated harms. This will facilitate the translation of clinical and toxicological evidence into timely, appropriate harm reduction and policy. Conclusion: Our work represents a collaborative response to calls for more sophisticated data on emerging drug trends in Australia. EDNA will improve coordination between clinicians and analytical services by way of its standardised approach to surveillance and reporting.Jennifer L Smith, Jessamine Soderstrom, Andrew Dawson, Sam Alfred, Shaun Greene, Katherine Isoasrdi, David McCutcheon, Francois Oosthuizen, Nadine Ezard, Jonathon Burcham, and Daniel M Fatovich, on behalf of the EDNA Investigator

Achieving Responsiveness in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises through Assemble To Order Strategy

Part 1: Knowledge-Based Performance ImprovementInternational audienceWith an aggressive economic competition on a global scale, more educated and demanding customers, and a rapid pace of change in process technology, responsiveness in manufacturing is becoming a key competitive advantage. The present paper examines how responsiveness can be achieved in SMEs operating according to an Assemble to Order strategy. The framework – proposed starting from literature analysis and tested through a first case study – will be used in future works to drive a systematic analysis of responsiveness in SMEs