(via Ramune Kubilius, Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center at Northwestern University)
Registration for the Midwest / MLA (Medical Library Association) 2023 Conference is now open. The meeting will take place online from Wednesday, October 11, to Friday, October 13.
The keynote speaker is Kayte Spector-Bagdady, JD, MBe. She will speak on “Data Sharing for Justice” on Thursday, October 12, from 8:45 to 9:45 AM CDT.
Large-scale collections of health data and biospecimens allow researchers to analyze correlations among genetic variants, behavior, environment, and outcomes to improve population health. But the data sets needed to support such efforts often fail to reflect the demographic distribution of disease. The disconnect between the diversity of research participants and the overall US clinical population can lead to misleading results, incorrect diagnoses, or findings that are not socially contextualized for historically excluded patients. This talk explores the current state of data sharing regulation that has allowed this to happen, complex patient response, and will make practical suggestions for moving forward.
The plenary speaker is Alexandre Amar-Zifkin, BA, MLIS. His talk, titled “Exploring Impacts of Automated Indexing on Completeness of MeSH Terms”, will take place on Friday, October 13, from 10:00 to 11:00 AM CDT.
The use of controlled vocabulary to identify relevant articles is a central element of bibliographic database instruction in health sciences. Learners are taught that searching with MeSH yields precise results, and that MeSH increases an article’s findability and reliably describes an article’s contents. Indexing for MEDLINE – the application of MeSH to records – was done completely by human indexers until 2011. Since April 2022, MeSH are assigned via automated, algorithmic indexing (AI). MeSH assigned by AI are based on terms in title, abstract, and terms and indexing of ‘neighbouring’, related records, with human review and curation of results as appropriate. We ask: how well does AI identify key concepts of an article and represent them in MeSH?
We reviewed a sample of automated records from early 2023 to determine whether their main concepts were adequately represented with MeSH. We identify some challenges faced by the algorithm, and discuss some ways to search around them.
For more information, and to register, please go here. Note that the registration deadline is Tuesday, October 10, at 12:00 PM CDT.