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

A ética do silêncio racial no contexto urbano: políticas públicas e desigualdade social no Recife, 1900-1940

Mais de meio século após o preconceito racial ter se tornado o principal alvo dos movimentos urbanos pelos direitos civis nos Estados Unidos e na África do Sul, e décadas depois do surgimento dos movimentos negros contemporâneos no Brasil, o conjunto de ferramentas legislativas criado no Brasil para promover o direito à cidade ainda adere à longa tradição brasileira de silêncio acerca da questão racial. Este artigo propõe iniciar uma exploração das raízes históricas desse fenômeno, remontando ao surgimento do silêncio sobre a questão racial na política urbana do Recife, Brasil, durante a primeira metade do século XX. O Recife foi eé um exemplo paradigmático do processo pelo qual uma cidade amplamente marcada por traços negros e africanos chegou a ser definida política e legalmente como um espaço pobre, subdesenvolvido e racialmente neutro, onde as desigualdades sociais originaram na exclusão capitalista, e não na escravidão e nas ideologias do racismo científico. Neste sentido, Recife lança luzes sobre a política urbana que se gerou sob a sombra do silêncio racial.More than half a century after racial prejudice became central to urban civil rights movements in the United States and South Africa, and decades after the emergence of Brazil’s contemporary Black movements, Brazil's internationally recognized body of rights-to-the-city legislation still adheres to the country's long historical tradition of racial silence. This article explores the historical roots of this phenomenon by focusing on the emergence of racial silence in Recife, Brazil during the first half of the 20th Century. Recife was and remains a paradigmatic example of the process through which a city marked by its Black and African roots came to be legally and politically defined as a poor, underdeveloped and racially neutral space, where social inequalities derived from capitalist exclusion rather than from slavery and scientific racism. As such, Recife'sexperience sheds light on the urban policies that were generated in the shadow of racial silence

A medicina de Nina Rodrigues: análise de uma trajetória científica Brazilian physician Nina Rodrigues: analysis of a scientific career

Uma das maneiras mais profícuas de se pesquisar a história da medicina brasileira na passagem do século XIX para o XX é a investigação da trajetória profissional de determinados médicos que tiveram posições de relevo no processo de mudanças que atingiu o campo médico à época. Neste sentido, este artigo tem por objetivo analisar a carreira acadêmico-profissional de Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, a partir da noção de campo científico de Pierre Bourdieu. Partindo do princípio de que o campo médico é um espaço de confrontos estruturalmente determinado pelos embates passados, onde os médicos buscam monopolizar a autoridade/competência científica, considero que o perfil médico de Nina Rodrigues é um indicador preciso do processo de especialização e concorrência que se desenvolveu naquele momento.One of the most productive ways of investigating the history of Brazilian medical practice at the turn of this century is to focus on the fruitful and ambiguous careers of those physicians that played an important role in the changes affecting the medical field at that time. This paper aims at analyzing the scientific career of physician-anthropologist Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, taking as its conceptual basis Pierrre Bourdieu's notion of "scientific field ". The paper's point of departure is the notion that the medical field is a space of confrontation that is structurally determined by previous conflicts in which physicians try to monopolize claims to scientific authority and competence. Nina Rodrigues' medical profile appears in this context as a precise indicator of the process of specialization and competition that took place during that period