RAMESES publication standards: realist syntheses

PMCID: PMC3558331This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

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

Reasons for the Discontinuation of Betterment-Levy Charging in Poland (A Case Study of Gorlicki County)

Local government units carry costs related to the shaping and spatial development of communes, and are consequently interested in sharing the benefits that land property owners gain on this account. This is possible through, inter alia, the betterment levy. The aim of this study was to determine the reasons for the discontinuation of betterment levy charging in Poland, illustrated with the example of Gorlicki County. A further aim was to classify the reasons for the discontinuation of betterment levy charging in Poland, and to suggest directions for changes in the way in which this levy is charged. A questionnaire survey was conducted of the communes of Gorlicki County (Małopolskie Voivodeship), and was completed by those responsible for charging betterment levies in the communes. According to the survey results, no decision on charging of the betterment levy was issued in Gorlicki County between 2012 and 2019. The reasons for the discontinuation of charging of this levy, as indicated by the respondents, included the lack of analyses (estimation) of the increase in the property value following the execution of specific investment activities, high administrative costs related to the charging of this levy, and the stimulation of socio-economic development. However, the statistical analysis showed that the discontinuation of charging of the betterment levy in Gorlicki County had failed to contribute to socio-economic growth

Reasons for the Discontinuation of Betterment-Levy Charging in Poland (A Case Study of Gorlicki County)

Local government units carry costs related to the shaping and spatial development of communes, and are consequently interested in sharing the benefits that land property owners gain on this account. This is possible through, inter alia, the betterment levy. The aim of this study was to determine the reasons for the discontinuation of betterment levy charging in Poland, illustrated with the example of Gorlicki County. A further aim was to classify the reasons for the discontinuation of betterment levy charging in Poland, and to suggest directions for changes in the way in which this levy is charged. A questionnaire survey was conducted of the communes of Gorlicki County (Małopolskie Voivodeship), and was completed by those responsible for charging betterment levies in the communes. According to the survey results, no decision on charging of the betterment levy was issued in Gorlicki County between 2012 and 2019. The reasons for the discontinuation of charging of this levy, as indicated by the respondents, included the lack of analyses (estimation) of the increase in the property value following the execution of specific investment activities, high administrative costs related to the charging of this levy, and the stimulation of socio-economic development. However, the statistical analysis showed that the discontinuation of charging of the betterment levy in Gorlicki County had failed to contribute to socio-economic growth