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Insights from biomedical citation networks can be used to identify promising avenues for accelerating research and its downstream bench-to-bedside translation. Citation analysis generally assumes that each citation documents substantive knowledge transfer that informed the conception, design, or execution of the main experiments. Citations may exist for other reasons. In this paper, we take advantage of late-stage citations added during peer review because these are less likely to represent substantive knowledge flow. Using a large, comprehensive feature set of open access data, we train a predictive model to identify late-stage citations. The model relies only on the title, abstract, and citations to previous articles but not the full-text or future citations patterns, making it suitable for publications as soon as they are released, or those behind a paywall (the vast majority). We find that high prediction scores identify late-stage citations that were likely added during the peer review process as well as those more likely to be rhetorical, such as journal self-citations added during review. Our model conversely gives low prediction scores to early-stage citations and citation classes that are known to represent substantive knowledge transfer. Using this model, we find that US federally funded biomedical research publications represent 30% of the predicted early-stage (and more likely to be substantive) knowledge transfer from basic studies to clinical research, even though these comprise only 10% of the literature. This is a threefold overrepresentation in this important type of knowledge flow.

Citation data have remained hidden behind proprietary, restrictive licensing agreements, which raises barriers to entry for analysts wishing to use the data, increases the expense of performing large-scale analyses, and reduces the robustness and reproducibility of the conclusions. For the past several years, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Portfolio Analysis (OPA) has been aggregating and enhancing citation data that can be shared publicly. Here, we describe the NIH Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC), a public access database for biomedical research that is made freely available to the community. This dataset, which has been carefully generated from unrestricted data sources such as MedLine, PubMed Central (PMC), and CrossRef, now underlies the citation statistics delivered in the NIH iCite analytic platform. We have also included data from a machine learning pipeline that identifies, extracts, resolves, and disambiguates references from full-text articles available on the internet. Open citation links are available to the public in a major update of iCite (https://icite.od.nih.gov)., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Despite efforts to promote diversity in the biomedical workforce, there remains a lower rate of funding of National Institutes of Health R01 applications submitted by African-American/black (AA/B) scientists relative to white scientists. To identify underlying causes of this funding gap, we analyzed six stages of the application process from 2011 to 2015 and found that disparate outcomes arise at three of the six: decision to discuss, impact score assignment, and a previously unstudied stage, topic choice. Notably, AA/B applicants tend to propose research on topics with lower award rates. These topics include research at the community and population level, as opposed to more fundamental and mechanistic investigations; the latter tend to have higher award rates. Topic choice alone accounts for over 20% of the funding gap after controlling for multiple variables, including the applicant's prior achievements. Our findings can be used to inform interventions designed to close the funding gap., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).)

A 2014 U.S. Department of Justice Best Practices Report advocates that states eliminate HIV-specific criminal penalties except under 2 conditions: when a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive person intentionally commits a sex crime or transmits the virus by engaging in behavior that poses a significant risk of transmission, regardless of actual transmission. We assess the premise of these exceptions to understand whether these best practices are based on scientific evidence about the population at risk of infection and the risk of sexual violence by HIV-positive individuals. We employ nationally representative, cross-sectional survey data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Survey of Inmates in State, Federal, and Local Jails (SISFLJ), and the National Health and Nutrition Survey (NHANES). Data from the CPS, SISFLJ, and NHANES are weighted and combined to analyze bias in the population at risk of HIV. Linear probability models are employed to estimate the likelihood that HIV-positive inmates are incarcerated for violent or sexual offenses, net of socioeconomic factors. We find significant measurement bias in HIV prevalence rates. The selection of national surveys for population denominators distorts contemporary estimates of HIV prevalence by 7% to 20%. Our findings also illustrate that HIV-positive inmates are 10 percentage-points less likely to be incarcerated for violent offenses than HIV-negative inmates. National best practice guidelines may undermine effective social policy that aims to curtail stigma within HIV-positive communities because scientific evidence neither include inmates into prevalence denominators (as a measure of the population at risk) nor assess the likelihood that HIV-positive inmates commit violent or sexual crimes.

Social scientists have much to contribute to the analysis of the real and potential contribution of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to HIV prevention around the world. Beyond just a matter of clinical efficacy and getting pills into people's mouths, PrEP raises a number of important social-psychological questions that must be attended to in order to translate biomedical and clinical findings into uptake of PrEP among enough people at risk of HIV infection to produce population-level effectiveness. PrEP is a dynamic phenomenon with "dialectical" attributes that invite both optimism and cynicism as a desirable and effective HIV prevention strategy. PrEP disrupts traditional notions of "safe" and "unsafe" sex; it confers on its users a level of agency and control not generally achieved with condoms; and it affects sexual practices and sexual cultures in meaningful ways. As these dynamics play out in different contexts, and as new modes of PrEP administration emerge, it will be important for social scientists to be engaged in assessing their impact on PrEP implementation and effectiveness.

In prepulse inhibition (PPI), startle responses to sudden, unexpected stimuli are markedly attenuated if immediately preceded by a weak stimulus of almost any modality. This experimental paradigm exposes a potent inhibitory process, present in nervous systems from invertebrates to humans, that is widely considered to play an important role in reducing distraction during the processing of sensory input. The neural mechanisms mediating PPI are of considerable interest given evidence linking PPI deficits with some of the cognitive disorders of schizophrenia. Here, in the marine mollusk Tritonia diomedea, we describe a detailed cellular mechanism for PPI--a combination of presynaptic inhibition of startle afferent neurons together with distributed postsynaptic inhibition of several downstream interneuronal sites in the startle circuit.

Presenting a weak stimulus just before a strong, startle stimulus reduces the amplitude of the ensuing startle response in humans and other vertebrates. This phenomenon, termed "prepulse inhibition" (PPI), appears to function to reduce distraction while processing sensory input. To date, no detailed neural mechanism has been described for PPI. Here we demonstrate PPI in the marine mollusk Tritonia diomedea, which has a nervous system highly suitable for cellular analyses. We found that a 100 msec vibrotactile prepulse prevented the animal's escape swim response to a closely following 1 sec tail shock. This inhibition was highly transient, with a significant effect lasting just 2.5 sec. These findings indicate that the Tritonia escape swim response undergoes a form of PPI phenomenologically similar to that observed in vertebrates. Further tests showed that the vibrotactile stimulus had no inhibitory effect if applied after tail shock, while the animal was preparing to swim, but it acted to terminate swims once they were actively under way. As a first step toward a cellular analysis of PPI, we recorded from neurons of the swim circuit in a semi-intact preparation and found that the vibrotactile stimulus used in the behavioral experiments also prevented the tail shock-elicited swim motor program. These results represent the first explicit demonstration of PPI in an invertebrate and establish Tritonia as a model system for analyzing its physiological basis.