Recommending research articles to consumers of online vaccination information

Online health communications often provide biased interpretations of evidence and have unreliable links to the source research. We tested the feasibility of a tool for matching web pages to their source evidence. From 207,538 eligible vaccination-related PubMed articles, we evaluated several approaches using 3,573 unique links to web pages from Altmetric. We evaluated methods for ranking the source articles for vaccine-related research described on web pages, comparing simple baseline feature representation and dimensionality reduction approaches to those augmented with canonical correlation analysis (CCA). Performance measures included the median rank of the correct source article; the percentage of web pages for which the source article was correctly ranked first (recall@1); and the percentage ranked within the top 50 candidate articles (recall@50). While augmenting baseline methods using CCA generally improved results, no CCA-based approach outperformed a baseline method, which ranked the correct source article first for over one quarter of web pages and in the top 50 for more than half. Tools to help people identify evidence-based sources for the content they access on vaccination-related web pages are potentially feasible and may support the prevention of bias and misrepresentation of research in news and social media.

Evidence and stories about evidence: Stanford Prison Experiment under criticism

The Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip G. Zimbardo is probably the most recognizablestudy in the area of social psychology. The summer of 2018 proved to be exceptionally unfavourableto this scientific endeavour. The experiment was showered with strong criticisms to the extent thatsome voices were raised to withdraw the research from psychology textbooks; the study was no longerdescribed as ‘shocking’, but rather as a ‘sham’ or ‘lie’. At a closer look, it turns out that the wholecriticism can be traced back to one source article which contains unevenly distributed arguments.Some of them are relevant and new, but others can be described as hyperbolas, simplifications andrepetitions of frequent allegations. An attentive and critical look at Zimbardo’s Stanford PrisonExperiment and arguments against it helps to develop a more complex, but also more interestingperspective. It could serve as an example of a fierce, fascinating fight for a politically and sociallyimportant cause. In this fight, both sides remain faithful to their stance rather than to the facts. It isalso a story about the problem of reporting science in a sensational way.

Return to SOURCE: Contemporary Composers Discuss the Sociopolitical Implications of Their Work

During the heat of the fraught political climate of 1969, the editors of SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde invited 20 innovative composers and musicians to respond to a single question: “Have you, or has anyone, ever used your work for political or social ends?” Forty-five years later the author posed the same question to 20 unconventional composers working today, resulting in a provocative contemporary update to the original 1969 SOURCE article.

The Effects of Computerized Graphic Organizers on Students' Performance in English Reading and Writing Tasks

The study investigated the effects of the intervention of a computerized graphic organizer (CGO), Inspiration, on a group of EFL college students' performance of English reading-to-write tasks. Students were given two pretests to determine their entry levels of English proficiency of reading and writing. After the CGO treatment, they were given two posttests. Both pre- and post-intervention measurement involved writing a summary of, and then a response to a source article, both being rated based on a writing rubric. The summaries were further analyzed using idea units. An evaluation questionnaire was also given to understand the participants' perceptions of the CGO treatment. With the assistance of Inspiration plus the traditional instruction, the participants' reading and response writing performance was found to have improved, also confirmed by their perceptions. The benefits of the cognitive strategy inherent in graphic organizers plus computer facilities are argued to contribute to the gains.

Accuracy of Cited References: The Role of Citation Databases

The nature and extent of errors made by Science Citation Index ExpandedTM (SCIE) and SciFinder® ScholarTM (SFS) during data entry have been characterized by analysis of more than 5,400 cited articles from 204 randomly selected cited-article lists published in three core chemistry journals. Failure to map cited articles to target-source articles was due to transcription errors, target-source article errors, omitted cited articles, and reason unknown. Mapping error rates ranged from 1.2 to 6.9 percent. SCIE and SFS also were found to correct errors made by authors in cited-article lists roughly one-half and one-sixth of the time, respectively.

Summarizing Scientific Articles: Experiments with Relevance and Rhetorical Status

In this article we propose a strategy for the summarization of scientific articles that concentrates on the rhetorical status of statements in an article: Material for summaries is selected in such a way that summaries can highlight the new contribution of the source article and situate it with respect to earlier work. We provide a gold standard for summaries of this kind consisting of a substantial corpus of conference articles in computational linguistics annotated with human judgments of the rhetorical status and relevance of each sentence in the articles. We present several experiments measuring our judges' agreement on these annotations. We also present an algorithm that, on the basis of the annotated training material, selects content from unseen articles and classifies it into a fixed set of seven rhetorical categories. The output of this extraction and classification system can be viewed as a single-document summary in its own right; alternatively, it provides starting material for the generation of task-oriented and user-tailored summaries designed to give users an overview of a scientific field.