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The amount of knowledge accumulated in published scientific papers has increased due to the continuing progress being made in scientific research. Since numerous papers have only reported fragments of scientific facts, there are possibilities for discovering new knowledge by connecting these facts. We therefore developed a system called BioTermNet to draft a conceptual network with hybrid methods of information extraction and information retrieval. Two concepts are regarded as related in this system if (a) their relationship is clearly described in MEDLINE abstracts or (b) they have distinctively co-occurred in abstracts. PRIME data, including protein interactions and functions extracted by NLP techniques, are used in the former, and the Singhal-measure for information retrieval is used in the latter. Relationships that are not clearly or directly described in an abstract can be extracted by connecting multiple concepts. To evaluate how well this system performs, Swanson's association between Raynaud's disease and fish oil and that between migraine and magnesium were tested with abstracts that had been published before the discovery of these associations. The result was that when start and end concepts were given, plausible and understandable intermediate concepts connecting them could be detected. When only the start concept was given, not only the focused concept (magnesium and fish oil) but also other probable concepts could be detected as related concept candidates. Finally, this system was applied to find diseases related to the BRCA1 gene. Some other new potentially related diseases were detected along with diseases whose relations to BRCA1 were already known. The BioTermNet is available at http://btn.ontology.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To establish a journal club for librarians, which aimed to develop appraisal skills and assist in the application of research to practice. Methods: Fourteen health librarians were invited to attend a journal club. Each month a librarian was responsible for preparing a scenario, choosing a research paper, and selecting a checklist. The paper was appraised by the club, and a critically appraised topic (CAT) prepared. Six months later, a questionnaire was sent to all librarians. Results: Six out of 14 librarians attended the journal club and five out of six returned the questionnaire. All five agreed that attending the journal club helped them develop appraisal skills, write a CAT and be more critical of research. Four agreed they always identified a research paper first, then formulated a question. One librarian agreed that applying results to their own practice was difficult, one disagreed and three were neutral. Conclusion: Journal clubs can be effective at developing appraisal skills and writing a CAT, as well as increasing the reading of library research. Librarians still need assistance in identifying and using questions directly from their own practice. The journal club has helped some librarians to apply evidence to practice, but others find the research is not always directly relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many algorithms have been implemented for the problem of text classification. Most of the work in this area was carried out for English text. Very little research has been carried out on Arabic text. The nature of Arabic text is different than that of English text, and preprocessing of Arabic text is more challenging. This paper presents an implementation of three automatic text-classification techniques for Arabic text. A corpus of 1445 Arabic text documents belonging to nine categories has been automatically classified using the kNN, Rocchio, and naïve Bayes algorithms. The research results reveal that Naïve Bayes was the best performer, followed by kNN and Rocchio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recently developed h-index has been applied to the literature produced by senior British-based academics in librarianship and information science. The majority of those evaluated currently hold senior positions in UK information science and librarianship departments; however, a small number of staff in other departments and retired “founding fathers” were analyzed as well. The analysis was carried out using the Web of Science (Thomson Scientific, Philadelphia, PA) for the years from 1992 to October 2005, and included both second-authored papers and self-citations. The top-ranking British information scientist, Peter Willett, has an h-index of 31. However, it was found that Eugene Garfield, the founder of modern citation studies, has an even higher h-index of 36. These results support other studies suggesting that the h-index is a useful tool in the armory of bibliometrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim and objectives. The aim of this paper is to present a study describing nurses’ adherence to the VIPS model by evaluating the quality of nursing assessment, and the quantity of completed nursing care plans. Background. Numerous efforts have been made over the years to improve nursing documentation in Denmark. Hospitals have traditionally based nurses’ charting on a rudimentary version of the nursing process and on Virginia Henderson's theory of human needs. In 2002–2004 the Copenhagen University Hospital, Rigshospitalet, introduced the Swedish VIPS model for nursing documentation. VIPS is an acronym for well being, integrity, prevention and safety, all of which are seen as major goals for nursing care. The model organizes nursing data according to a system of keywords, which facilitates storage and retrieval of data. Design and methods. The design in this part of the study was retrospective, wherein 50 journals from each of the departments of cardiology, neurology, oncology and urology were audited annually for three years using the Cat-ch-Ing instrument ( n = 600). All nursing journals were randomly selected by including the first 50 journals at each site given a specific date. Results. The nursing documentation significantly improved during the course of the study. After the second year the participants used the keywords appropriately and correctly according to the VIPS model. Application of primary nursing increased during the study. Initial, ongoing and discharge patient status improved. The nurses’ familiarity with nursing diagnoses, goals and interventions increased. Conclusions. The structured implementation programme significantly improved nursing documentation, and the simultaneous training of the entire nursing staff shows promise. The VIPS model has prepared the nurses for more complex computerized taxonomies and classification systems in the future by improving the nurses’ analytical skills. Relevance to clinical practice. New strategies for improving nursing documentation have been demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new document representation model is presented in this paper. This model is based on the idea of representing a document by two or more pictures of the document taken from different perspectives. It is shown that by applying the stereo representation model, enhanced textual retrieval performance is achieved because the new model improves the capability of capturing individual features of the document. Experiments have been conducted on two standard corpora, TIME and ADI, using the standard term vector method and the latent semantic indexing (LSI) method based upon both the stereo representation model and the traditional representation model. Statistical t-tests on the experimental results have convincingly illustrated that these methods achieve significant improvements in retrieval performances with the stereo representation model over those with the traditional representation model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on information science, bibliographic citations, and peer review. It states that information science has evolved since the 1950s and includes such concepts as knowledge representation, information retrieval, user needs and behavior, information theory, bibliometrics, and scholarly communication. It comments on article submissions and on the metrics concerning the quality of an article. It mentions that while the number of citations a paper receives after its publication can be a useful metric of the value of a paper, quality is not synonymous with a high number of citations. It comments on various forms of peer review, including web-based open peer review and single-blind peer review.