Pauesia silana Tremblay, 1969 a parasitoid of Cinara-aphids on Conifers in Malta (Hymenoptera: Braconidae: Aphidiinae)

Pauesia silana is recorded for the first time from Malta and the Lefkada and Meganissi islands in Greece. From Malta, the species was reared from Cinara palaestinensis on Pinus halepensis from material collected from Buskett. From the Greek islands, the species was collected on Cinara sp. on the same mentioned hostplant. The new record contributes to the information on its distribution, hosts and plant associations in the Mediterranean area.peer-reviewe

Ozognathus cornutus (LeConte) – new record for the Palaearctic Region (Coleoptera: Anobiidae)

The occurrence of Ozognathus cornutus (LeConte, 1859) in the Mediterranean Region (Madeira Is., Malta and Tunisia) is documented for the first time. The genus is new for the Palaearctic Region, where it was only previously recorded from the Nearctic and Neotropical Regions.peer-reviewe

Incidental or influential? – A decade of using text-mining for citation function classification.

This work looks in depth at several studies that have attempted to automate the process of citation importance classification based on the publications’ full text. We offer a comparison of their individual similarities, strengths and weaknesses. We analyse a range of features that have been previously used in this task. Our experimental results confirm that the number of in-text references are highly predictive of influence. Contrary to the work of Valenzuela et al. (2015), we find abstract similarity one of the most predictive features. Overall, we show that many of the features previously described in literature have been either reported as not particularly predictive, cannot be reproduced based on their existing descriptions or should not be used due to their reliance on external changing evidence. Additionally, we find significant variance in the results provided by the PDF extraction tools used in the pre-processing stages of citation extraction. This has a direct and significant impact on the classification features that rely on this extraction process. Consequently, we discuss challenges and potential improvements in the classification pipeline, provide a critical review of the performance of individual features and address the importance of constructing a large-scale gold-standard reference dataset

Aphid parasitoids from Malta (Hymenoptera, Braconidae, Aphidiinae)

Six aphid parasitoids are listed including three species which are recorded for the fi rst time from the Maltese islands, namely Aphidius funebris, Ephedrus persicae and Lysiphlebus confusus. Aphidius colemani, a species which was introduced for the control of greenhouse aphids, was also found for the fi rst time in the open.peer-reviewe

Lipolexis gracilis Förster, 1862 - new record of an aphid parasitoid from Malta (Hymenoptera, Braconidae, Aphidiinae)

Lipolexis gracilis, an aphid parasitoid reared from a species of Aphis associated with Papaver is newly recorded from Malta. A check-list of the Aphidiinae known from Malta is given.peer-reviewe