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 Spanish Tomato Export Sector of the Almeria Region: An Econometric Approach

Trade, Vegetables, Competitiveness, Cooperatives, L10, O50, Q00, R10,

Shaping performance: do international accreditations and quality management really help?

In recent years, international accreditations from private providers have gained importance among business schools all over the world. Higher education managers increasingly see these accreditations as a way of assuring and developing quality in order to comply with international standards, enhance performance, and increase reputation. However, given that an accreditation process requires a great deal of resources and that it might increase bureaucratization and control, international accreditations remain highly disputed in academia. This paper contributes to the discussion, providing quantitative empirical evidence regarding the effect of international accreditations on the research performance of business schools. On the basis of an international survey, we analyse how the acquisition of an AACSB and/or EQUIS accreditation affects the institutions’ position in the Top 1000 Business School Ranking of the Social Science Research Network, as compared to other quality management approaches. We find that international accreditations are positively related to research performance, while other forms of quality management do not exhibit any significant relationship to ranking positions. These results point to the importance of professional coaching in quality management. Because of AACSB and EQUIS’s high standards concerning a coherent strategy and the quality of faculty, applying for an international accreditation seems to be a useful way to improve a business school’s research performance