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

Discussions about Management of Scientific Research Projects in Agricultural Research Institutes: A Case Study of EPPI of CATAS

Taking Environment and Plant Protection Institute in Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences as an example, it summarized major experience and practice in management of scientific research projects from strengthening project database, enhancing project planning, reinforcing scientific research management team construction, bringing into play functions of academies and institutes, and improving management system. It analyzed existing problems and came up with recommendations from strengthening project process management, improving management team quality, and improving incentive mechanism, in the hope of providing reference for scientific research project management in agricultural scientific research institutes

Analysis on Influential Functions in the Weighted Software Network

Identifying influential nodes is important for software in terms of understanding the design patterns and controlling the development and the maintenance process. However, there are no efficient methods to discover them so far. Based on the invoking dependency relationships between the nodes, this paper proposes a novel approach to define the node importance for mining the influential software nodes. First, according to the multiple execution information, we construct a weighted software network (WSN) to denote the software execution dependency structure. Second, considering the invoking times and outdegree about software nodes, we improve the method PageRank and put forward the targeted algorithm FunctionRank to evaluate the node importance (NI) in weighted software network. It has higher influence when the node has lager value of NI. Finally, comparing the NI of nodes, we can obtain the most influential nodes in the software network. In addition, the experimental results show that the proposed approach has good performance in identifying the influential nodes

Non-stationary Parallel Multisplitting Two-Stage Iterative Methods with Self-AdaptiveWeighting Schemes

In this paper, we study the non-stationary parallel multisplitting two-stage iterative methods with selfadaptive weighting matrices for solving a linear system whose coefficient matrix is symmetric positive definite. Two choices of Self-adaptive weighting matrices are given, especially, the nonnegativity is eliminated. Moreover, we prove the convergence of the non-stationary parallel multisplitting two-stage iterative methods with self-adaptive weighting matrices. Finally, the numerical comparisons of several self-adaptive nonstationary parallel multisplitting two-stage iterative methods are shown

On Agricultural Scientific Research Institutions Supporting and Serving Technological Innovation Entities

This paper firstly analyzed current situation of agricultural technological innovation system in China and obstacles restricting agricultural enterprises to become technological innovation entities. It discussed exploration and practice of Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences in supporting and serving technological innovation entities. Finally, it came up with ideas and approaches for supporting and serving technological innovation entities

Influence of a Cr2O3 glass coating on enhancing the oxidation resistance of 20MnSiNb structural steel

In this paper, a glass protective coating containing chromium oxide deposited on a high-quality 20MnSiNb structural steel was prepared by a slurry-spraying technique at high temperature. Compared with a bare sample, the effect of the coating on the steel was investigated at a temperature range from 700 degrees C to 1150 degrees C in the air. The experimental results showed the coating had significant oxidation resistance and effective descaling ability for 20MnSiNb structure steel. The coating could enhance protective effect by 86% after heating for 60 min at 1050 degrees C compared with the bare sample. The formation of a dense chromium and silicon compound film on the 20MnSiNb structural steel prevented the diffusion of oxygen and iron ions. Due to the difference of the thermal expansion coefficient between the coating and the steel, the coating spalled during the cooling process, which enhanced the descaling ability significantly. The sample was characterized by XRD, SEM-EDS and TG-DTA/DSC to clarify the possible protective mechanism, which was the synergy between the glass coating and the protective film formed by the migration of chromium, preventing the diffusion of oxygen and iron ions. Because of the low cost and easy handling method, the coating has potentially applicable for reheating process of 20MnSiNb structural steel. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V

Evaluating the effect of body mass index and 25-hydroxy-vitamin D level on basal cell carcinoma using Mendelian randomization

Abstract Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common cancer with a rising incidence among white-skinned individuals. A number of epidemiological studies have suggested that obesity and serum 25-hydroxy-vitamin D (25(OH)D) levels may affect the arising of BCC. To address this, we selected 443 and 96 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with body mass index (BMI) and serum level of 25(OH)D from large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS), respectively. The univariable and multivariable two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses were conducted with a series of sensitivity analyses to ensure the results were reliable and reproducible. The results of univariable two-sample MR analysis showed that higher BMI was related to lower risk for BCC (Odds ratio(OR) = 0.90; 95% confidence interval (CI),[0.81,0.99]; p = 0.02). In addition, this causal effect of BMI on BCC still remained (OR = 0.88; 95%CI,[− 0.22, − 0.03], p-value = 0.008) after adjusting for 25(OH)D level in the multivariable MR analysis. However, the results suggested that 25(OH)D level was not associated with BCC(OR = 1.02; 95%CI, [0.94,1.09], p-value = 0.67). In conclusion, similar to the conclusions of retrospective observational studies, the MR results indicate that high BMI is an independent protective factor for BCC. Meanwhile, vitamin D levels may not be causally associated with the risk of basal cell carcinoma and increasing vitamin D supplementation is unlikely to reduce the risk