Information-Wise

At Maastricht University (UM), the importance of information literacy (IL) is widely recognised – students require structured support in dealing independently with (academic) information, and encouragement to develop creative and critical approaches when faced with complex questions and sources. IL is especially significant in a problem-based learning (PBL) environment such as that offered by UM, which advocates a constructive, contextual, collaborative, and self-directed approach toward learning and knowledge creation. The project Information-Wise launched in February 2019 and resulted in an evidence-informed IL programme for bachelor students. The ADDIE model (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation) was adopted to organise the development process of the programme. The analysis phase was conducted by gathering qualitative and quantitative evidence. Two literature reviews and a university-wide survey with responses from over 600 bachelor students and about 100 staff teachers resulted in recommendations for an IL programme at UM. The design phase consisted of the development of an IL framework that embraces the PBL vision of UM. The framework consists of four dimensions: 1) Resource Discovery, 2) Critical Assessment, 3) Organising Information, 4) Creation & Communication. In order to translate the conceptual research outcomes and framework dimensions into educational practices, the project team created a developmental rubric with intended learning outcomes (ILOs). In the development phase, a five-step piloting approach was used to design teaching activities and assessments that support students in achieving these rubric ILOs. The constructive alignment approach helped to align these activities with the content of the subject courses in which these pilots took place. Part of the IL programme is an online curriculum consisting of generic and discipline-specific online modules. For the implementation phase, this report presents Do’s, Don’ts, and Don’t knows, which outline the future integration of the IL programme into faculty curricula. The evaluation phase still has to be done

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

Evaluating neurocognitive tests for screening of drug induced driving impairment

Before a drug appears on the market, research must show whether or not it affects the user’s ability to drive. At an early stage in the registration process, researchers should use tests that are sensitive enough to detect any potential negative effects and, ideally, to predict these effects in everyday traffic situations. This research shows that tests of alertness and divided attention are the most suitable for illustrating the effects of alcohol, sedatives or one night’s sleep deprivation (and can predict the ability to drive to a certain extent). These tests are much better than a very short test of processing speed, which is currently often used to measure the influence of medication on driving ability