bims: Biomed news

Enable reports on new biomedical research papers

In a nutshell

Among the many things researchers have to do are (1) stay up-to-date in their field (2) develop name recognition as an expert. We aim to help with both at the same time.

Bims is organized as a series of topic-specific reports. Each report is curated by a selector. Each week we make new PubMed papers available to selectors. By default, it's 7% of the new papers added to PubMed, something between 1000 and 2000 papers. Each selector decides what papers go into the report. We sound like a masochist's idea of fun. And probably the first time it is. But after that the system uses machine learning. Each week, it gets better at knowing what the selector wants.

When you become a selector, you will quickly realize that our machine-learning based relevance order is more flexible and more precise than PubMed searches. Reports issues can be freely circulated to user communities. When we get our own server we will start building email distribution lists.

Goals and intentions

We aim to disseminate biomedical information through regularly scheduled subject specific reports. We want a system for fast dissemination of research results. We want to promote high quality research by having expert reviewers. At this time, Biomed news is based on PubMed.

At this time, our reports are mainly geared to the academic and research communities. This does not have to be the case. PubMed has a lot of papers of more general interest. We can for example think of reports aimed at medical doctors, that filter for papers that have clinical relevance. Such reports may be run by MDs who normally don't do any research. We can think of reports aimed at patients that filter for advice on how to cope with a disease. Such reports may be run by patients, who have no prior biomedical training.

Project status

Active

Types of outputs

Journal accepted manuscripts

Review process

Review requested by

Non-authors
Reviewer selected by

Self-nominated
Public interaction

No
Author response

No
Decision

None

Review policy

Review coverage

Complete paper
Reviewer identity known to

Public
Competing interests

Not included

Social Networks

Review features

Manuscript hosting

No
Notes

Selectors initially choose abstracts relevant to the topic report, these inform the learning for the subsequent issues of the report. Selectors can also customize the abstracts sent to e-mail subscribers by removing abstracts and also by providing a ranking order.
Review of code or data

No
Eligible reviewers/editors

Topic experts are selected based on topic interest.
Tags or badges

No
Criteria for inclusion

At this time, we consider all new items that have been made available during the last week. We remove items that we can not date to the current or the past year.

Transparency

Results

Number of scholarly outputs commented on

1,000-10,000
Metrics

The amount of time a selector spends on each issue can be tracked.
Results summary

Since our founder fixed a major bug on 2018-11-14, no selector has lost interest in maintaining their report. Some selectors maintain several reports, this allows reports of different scopes to be compared by the same selector.
Results URL

http://biomed.news/reports

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