This is the sixth state of bims statement (sobs). Sobs comes out every 30 of January. It commemorates the first sober meeting between Gavin and Thomas on 30th January 2017. This statement contains a part by Gavin and a part by Thomas.

Gavin writes:

2023 has been another year of frustration for Biomed News. The number of active reports remains around 90. This is because the number of new selectors we recruit is approximately the same as the number of selectors who do not keep their reports active. I try to give lagging selectors a nudge to catch up, sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. Our recruitment strategy also needs to become more streamlined and effective. The main active recruitment methods are still through social media approaches to people who have interacted with Biomed News posts. I have presented about biomed news at some conferences this year. In April I presented at a Royal Society Tissue Resilience meeting in Manchester, where I was the only poster presenter! I presented at my home university’s Students at the Heart Conference in June and then at the ELRIG Drug Discovery meeting in October in Liverpool. There was a general interest in the idea and some new selectors emerged from these. A submission was made to assess the impact that Biomed News has on research charities to discover the latest relevant literature. This was not funded. So, we still endeavour to push through the 100 active report target. In addition to the challenges, I really enjoy the interactions and enthusiasm of our long term and committed selectors. I feel there is a nucleus of a strong community that would benefit a much wider population looking for new biomedical research literature. And this is why I continue, because I believe it provides a benefit to those who use it. We think that promotion of reports by selectors themselves would be an effective way to recruit more selectors. We are willing to help write any articles or publications that you think will promote your own report. Thanks for reading and if you have any ideas how to expand or support Biomed News, my ears are wide open.

Thomas writes:

Responding in some way to Gavin, let me go back to my education as a social scientist. I have some idea about the stagnation. I suspect that a lot of folks see our reports list, and note that there are clustered around a certain core area. Potential users outside these area are somehow deterred, they are like “it’s for mitochondrial cancer folks, not me.” So they don not feel they fit in. Thus they do not open a report. Thus we have reached a saturation point, even though we only cover a tiny part of PubMed at this time.

Fortunately stagnation of user numbers does not make for a stagnating Thomas! I have been making important progress.

This year saw the introduction of report home pages. This brings a fundamental change the word’s view of reports. All reports can now be accessed in isolation. Just use of the URL https://biomed.new/bims-foobar, say where foobar would be the report code. This URL will work even if the report is closed. In fact I vow to keep maintaining closed reports. Say if the formatting of the report page were to change significantly, these changes would also apply to closed reports. Thus while we work on news, I am still concerned with archiving the old news. This also affects the way the presentation of old report issues. Thus if you change your homepage, then I can change all historic report issues to point to your new homepage. Your institutional affiliation, however, stays the one it was at the time. I collect historical institutional affiliation data for each selector, for the period while they select at least one report.

The introduction of homepages should change the way you promote your report. Do not tell people about Bims. It is too hard a thing to explain to anybody. The fact that you understand it is just proof that you are very smart. Instead, just tell them about your report. It is much easier to understand. You get the new papers in the area there. Most people may care about who did it. Hardly anybody will give a damn about how it is done. By promoting your report, you will do good for yourself. It acts as advertizing for you. Users will also see that there is a list of related report. So they actually can navigate bims by area of interest. The list of report is still there but it is much less useful. The order of reports is determined without regard for any user interest. The report homepage has links to related reports. Now these may not be the best links. But at least I have a user interest to start with and I tried to build relationships that actually could matter to a potential user.

Let me dwell a little on these links to related reports. There surly are many ways to find related reports. I use the machine learning models. Thus I look at the last six issues. A couple of reports are related if they have give high scores to the same papers. The main advantage of this approach is that it does not relate to report size. You can make your report as restrictive as you like using filtering. It will not affect your report relationships as filtering does not impact machine learning. Now sure the results could be improved. But it is unclear to assess whether one method is better than another. I popped the question to Gavin of how am I doing for his report. He politely opined that they are useful. Your opinion on the reports linked to yours would be interesting to me, in particular, if I miss a report that you think ought to be linked to yours. Note that at this time I limit the display by two limits. The first is that I do not display more than six related reports. The second is the relationship strength has to be above critical number I made up off the top of my head. Yes, a fixed number is very crude. I could do with help to do something better.

Report relationships by topic between reports are not the only ones. There are also administrative relationships that concern selectors. If are the selector of a report, then its homepage links to the reports that you maintained before. And the old reports have a link to the new ones. Clearly since this structure is dynamic, things can quickly get complicated. Representing the structure in computer files is easy enough. But it is another matter to lay out these relationships in English. I need to write templates that will get this English text correct and enjoyable to read under any circumstances seen in the data This is no mean feat. For example, this year we started had a report with two selectors. I was not ready for that. For a few weeks, I was ashamed to be able to show only one selector. Now if one of the couple maintained one report and the other maintained a couple of reports in the past, but the second one she did start but then handed it over to her friend, and then took it back from her, while the friend took on another report that is now managed by a third person etc… oh dear! You see that already makes for a mess. I will have to deal with such cases when they occur. You understand that to build a set of templates that deals with these situations is challenging and not really gratifying.

This is close to a full-time job for me. It is completely unpaid. I will struggle on. But in the absence of expansion, there are no major restructuring plans. I will complete a form to create reports. Otherwise changes will be minor.

Both write:

Once again, we thank you for your support and the time you spend to keep your reports up to date and your comments to improve the system. Wishing everyone a successful 2024.