SIB Literature Services: RESTful customizable search engines in biomedical literature, enriched with automatically mapped biomedical concepts

Gender and geographical bias in the editorial decision-making process of biomedical journals: a case-control study

OBJECTIVES

To assess whether the gender (primary) and geographical affiliation (post-hoc) of the first and/or last authors are associated with publication decisions after peer review.

DESIGN

Case-control study.

SETTING

Biomedical journals.

PARTICIPANTS

Original peer-reviewed manuscripts submitted between 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2019.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE

Manuscripts accepted (cases) and rejected for publication (controls).

RESULTS

Of 6213 included manuscripts, 5294 (85.2%) first and 5479 (88.1%) last authors' gender were identified; 2511 (47.4%) and 1793 (32.7%) were women, respectively. The proportion of women first and last authors was 48.4% (n=1314) and 32.2% (n=885) among cases and 46.4% (n=1197) and 33.2% (n=908) among controls. After adjustment, the association between the first author's gender and acceptance for publication remained non-significant 1.04 (0.92 to 1.17). Acceptance for publication was lower for first authors affiliated to Asia 0.58 (0.46 to 0.73), Africa 0.75 (0.41 to 1.36) and South America 0.68 (0.40 to 1.16) compared with Europe, and for first author affiliated to upper-middle country-income 0.66 (0.47 to 0.95) and lower-middle/low 0.69 (0.46 to 1.03) compared with high country-income group. It was significantly higher when both first and last authors were affiliated to different countries from same geographical and income groups 1.35 (1.03 to 1.77), different countries and geographical but same income groups 1.50 (1.14 to 1.96) or different countries, geographical and income groups 1.78 (1.27 to 2.50) compared with authors from similar countries. The study funding was independently associated with the acceptance for publication (when compared with no funding, 1.40; 1.04 to 1.89 for funding by association & foundations, 2.76; 1.87 to 4.10 for international organisations, 1.30; 1.04 to 1.62 for non-profit & associations & foundations). The reviewers' recommendations of the original submitted version were significantly associated with the outcome (unadjusted 5.36; 4.98 to 5.78 for acceptance compared with rejection). Gender of the first author was not associated with reviewers' recommendations (adjusted 0.96, 0.87 to 1.06).

CONCLUSIONS

We did not identify evidence of gender bias during the editorial decision-making process for papers sent out to peer review. However, the under-representation in manuscripts accepted for publication of first authors affiliated to Asia, Africa or South America and those affiliated to upper/lower-middle and low country-income group, indicates poor representation of global scientists' opinion and supports growing demands for improving equity, diversity and inclusion in biomedical research. The more diverse the countries and incomes of the first and last authors, the greater the chances of the publication being accepted.

Ensemble of deep learning language models to support the creation of living systematic reviews for the COVID-19 literature

BACKGROUND

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented amount of scientific publications, growing at a pace never seen before. Multiple living systematic reviews have been developed to assist professionals with up-to-date and trustworthy health information, but it is increasingly challenging for systematic reviewers to keep up with the evidence in electronic databases. We aimed to investigate deep learning-based machine learning algorithms to classify COVID-19-related publications to help scale up the epidemiological curation process.

METHODS

In this retrospective study, five different pre-trained deep learning-based language models were fine-tuned on a dataset of 6365 publications manually classified into two classes, three subclasses, and 22 sub-subclasses relevant for epidemiological triage purposes. In a k-fold cross-validation setting, each standalone model was assessed on a classification task and compared against an ensemble, which takes the standalone model predictions as input and uses different strategies to infer the optimal article class. A ranking task was also considered, in which the model outputs a ranked list of sub-subclasses associated with the article.

RESULTS

The ensemble model significantly outperformed the standalone classifiers, achieving a F1-score of 89.2 at the class level of the classification task. The difference between the standalone and ensemble models increases at the sub-subclass level, where the ensemble reaches a micro F1-score of 70% against 67% for the best-performing standalone model. For the ranking task, the ensemble obtained the highest recall@3, with a performance of 89%. Using an unanimity voting rule, the ensemble can provide predictions with higher confidence on a subset of the data, achieving detection of original papers with a F1-score up to 97% on a subset of 80% of the collection instead of 93% on the whole dataset.

CONCLUSION

This study shows the potential of using deep learning language models to perform triage of COVID-19 references efficiently and support epidemiological curation and review. The ensemble consistently and significantly outperforms any standalone model. Fine-tuning the voting strategy thresholds is an interesting alternative to annotate a subset with higher predictive confidence.

COVoc and COVTriage: novel resources to support literature triage

MOTIVATION

Since early 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has confronted the biomedical community with an unprecedented challenge. The rapid spread of COVID-19 and ease of transmission seen worldwide is due to increased population flow and international trade. Front-line medical care, treatment research and vaccine development also require rapid and informative interpretation of the literature and COVID-19 data produced around the world, with 177 500 papers published between January 2020 and November 2021, i.e. almost 8500 papers per month. To extract knowledge and enable interoperability across resources, we developed the COVID-19 Vocabulary (COVoc), an application ontology related to the research on this pandemic. The main objective of COVoc development was to enable seamless navigation from biomedical literature to core databases and tools of ELIXIR, a European-wide intergovernmental organization for life sciences.

RESULTS

This collaborative work provided data integration into SIB Literature services, an application ontology (COVoc) and a triage service named COVTriage and based on annotation processing to search for COVID-related information across pre-defined aspects with daily updates. Thanks to its interoperability potential, COVoc lends itself to wider applications, hopefully through further connections with other novel COVID-19 ontologies as has been established with Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

The data at https://github.com/EBISPOT/covoc and the service at https://candy.hesge.ch/COVTriage.

Variomes: a high recall search engine to support the curation of genomic variants

Motivation

Identification and interpretation of clinically actionable variants is a critical bottleneck. Searching for evidence in the literature is mandatory according to ASCO/AMP/CAP practice guidelines; however, it is both labor-intensive and error-prone. We developed a system to perform triage of publications relevant to support an evidence-based decision. The system is also able to prioritize variants. Our system searches within pre-annotated collections such as MEDLINE and PubMed Central.

Results

We assess the search effectiveness of the system using three different experimental settings: literature triage; variant prioritization and comparison of Variomes with LitVar. Almost two-thirds of the publications returned in the top-5 are relevant for clinical decision-support. Our approach enabled identifying 81.8% of clinically actionable variants in the top-3. Variomes retrieves on average +21.3% more articles than LitVar and returns the same number of results or more results than LitVar for 90% of the queries when tested on a set of 803 queries; thus, establishing a new baseline for searching the literature about variants.

Availability and implementation

Variomes is publicly available at https://candy.hesge.ch/Variomes. Source code is freely available at https://github.com/variomes/sibtm-variomes. SynVar is publicly available at https://goldorak.hesge.ch/synvar.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

LitSuggest: a web-based system for literature recommendation and curation using machine learning

Searching and reading relevant literature is a routine practice in biomedical research. However, it is challenging for a user to design optimal search queries using all the keywords related to a given topic. As such, existing search systems such as PubMed often return suboptimal results. Several computational methods have been proposed as an effective alternative to keyword-based query methods for literature recommendation. However, those methods require specialized knowledge in machine learning and natural language processing, which can make them difficult for biologists to utilize. In this paper, we propose LitSuggest, a web server that provides an all-in-one literature recommendation and curation service to help biomedical researchers stay up to date with scientific literature. LitSuggest combines advanced machine learning techniques for suggesting relevant PubMed articles with high accuracy. In addition to innovative text-processing methods, LitSuggest offers multiple advantages over existing tools. First, LitSuggest allows users to curate, organize, and download classification results in a single interface. Second, users can easily fine-tune LitSuggest results by updating the training corpus. Third, results can be readily shared, enabling collaborative analysis and curation of scientific literature. Finally, LitSuggest provides an automated personalized weekly digest of newly published articles for each user's project. LitSuggest is publicly available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/litsuggest.