Database, 2019, 1–66 doi: 10.1093/database/baz085 Original article Original article 2019 10 November on guest by https://academic.oup.com/database/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/database/baz085/5608006 from Downloaded Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search Peter Brown1,RELISHConsortium3 and Yaoqi Zhou1,2,* 1School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Gold Coast, QLD 4222, Australia, 2Institute for Glycomics, Griffith University, Gold Coast, QLD 4222, Australia and 3See collaborators section *Corresponding author: Tel.: +61 7 5552 8228; Fax: +61 7 5552 9040; Email: yaoqi.zhou@griffith.edu.au Citation details: Brown,P., RELISH Consortium, Zhou,Y. Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search. Database (2019) Vol. 2019: article ID baz085; doi:10.1093/database/baz085 Received 11 March 2019; Revised 15 May 2019; Accepted 31 May 2019 Abstract 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. ©TheAuthor(s)2019.PublishedbyOxfordUniversityPress. Page 1 of 66 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (page number not for citation purposes) Page 2 of 66 Database, Vol. 2019, Article ID baz085 When drafting a manuscript such as this article, a survey of assigned Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) descriptors relevant literature and related articles from the same sub- (52). Most importantly, all of these features are extracted field is required. Traditionally, such a survey is conducted and processed automatically without requiring any user by combining searches based on specific keywords and input or intervention. Thus, for an article-based search, the references found in bibliographies (i.e. references citing, search engine will accept as input either the selection of an or cited in, the selected articles). This process requires existing document from its database or a user uploaded doc- multiple attempts of different keyword combinations and ument in its entirety, in order to generate the list of results. 2019 10 November on guest by https://academic.oup.com/database/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/database/baz085/5608006 from Downloaded manual examination of numerous citations. A long list Article-based relevance searches, often referred to as of both relevant and irrelevant articles is often encoun- research paper recommender systems, is an active area tered requiring manual curation after further reading, yet of research with more than 100 different approaches not all of the important relevant articles are necessarily published since 1998 (7). Representative examples of included after this long and tedious process. The task of commonly used methods used for calculating the similarity finding truly relevant articles becomes increasingly time- between text documents are Okapi Best Matching 25 consuming and challenging as the number of scientific (BM25) (39, 40), Term Frequency–Inverse Document articles published every year expands at a rapid pace. Frequency (TF-IDF) (65) and PubMed-Related Articles For example, the PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ (PMRA) (49). These and other decade-old methods remain pubmed) database operated by the US National Center the backbone behind real-world recommender systems for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library such as PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed), of Medicine (NLM), has seen a sustained annual growth ResearchGate (http://www.researchgate.net) and CiteULike rate of nearly 5% for the past 4 years; from 25.2 million (http://www.citeulike.org). Numerous newly developed records in 2015 (57), 26.4 million records in 2016 (58), methods are not yet translated into practice because it 27.5 million records in 2017 (59) and is now approaching is unclear whether they have improved over existing 29 million records in 2018 as of the latest report (66). methods (7). The overall success of this classic approach depends on Improvements in paper recommender systems can be finding optimal keyword combinations as it is key for measured by ‘user studies’, ‘online evaluations’ or ‘offline ensuring the precision and completeness (i.e. sensitivity) evaluations’. User studies aim to quantify user experience by of the search results. interacting directly with explicit testers of the system; online The aforementioned scenario is an illustration of evaluations are a more passive approach wherein user an ‘informational’ search goal (8, 64), essentially an activity is silently monitored and recorded for assessment, exploratory request for discovering the most relevant and offline evaluations are akin to traditional benchmark- resources to ‘find out’ about a particular topic. For purely ing processes where algorithmic performance measures ‘navigational’ queries that seek out a single ‘correct’ result are evaluated on appropriate datasets. The problem with (8, 64), the classical keyword based approach is generally user studies and online evaluations is that considerable sufficient. However, for a more complete survey, the active participation is required to infer any meaningful keyword input given by the user is susceptible to a number conclusions (7). Accordingly, a large-scale user study would of rigidities including misspellings, ambiguity and desired require costly recruitment and management of a large scope. To address these challenges, traditional search engine number of participants, whereas for online evaluations operators implement various workarounds including query it is challenging to attract large numbers of active users spelling correction, query suggestions, query reformulation to a deployed system except for a few systems with and query expansion. A recent NLM study describing large established user bases. Moreover, the data used ‘under-the-hood’ improvements to PubMed demonstrate for evaluating such systems are often not made publicly the integration of such mitigation techniques (25). As this available. In addition, online evaluations collect implicit problem remains unsolved, alternative approaches may be measures of satisfaction such as click-through rates; employed. however, non-clicked items are not necessarily an indicator One way to avoid keywords in searches is to use a seed of negative samples. article. A seed article can provide the title, the abstract and Offline evaluations, on the other hand, require a gold- even its full text, containing significantly more information standard benchmark for comparing and contrasting the per- than a combination of a few pre-selected keywords. Aside formances of different systems. Previous work has focused from these content-based features, seed articles may also on building gold standards of query-to-document relevance provide additional metadata including the list of authors, in biomedical literature. Queries are generally defined as publication venue and date, citation information and poten- some topic comprised as a natural language statement, tially manually curated categorical information such as a question or a set of keywords conveying a specific Database, Vol. 2019, Article ID baz085 Page 3 of 66 information need. Representative examples of existing article’) given by, or assigned to, a user. The APSE allowed gold-standard query-to-document resources include the users to assess and annotate recommended candidate OSHUMED (32) collection, the first TREC Genomics articles regarding their degree of relevance to a respective track