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The present work was focused to design a cheap, rapid, portable and easy to use filter paper based assay for the qualitative and quantitate analysis of acetone. Sodium alginate gel was loaded with the acetone specific optical signal probe, and subsequently coated onto filter paper surface to design portable colorimetric assays for acetone monitoring. The color of the paper sensor strip was observed to change from dark yellow to light yellowish in the presence of varying concentrations of acetone. Three different color analyzing models including RGB, HSV, and LAB were employed to probe the output optical signal, and their performance was compared in terms of better interpretation of the generated signal. The LAB model was found to provide better analytical figures of merit with a linear response for the acetone concentration ranging from 2.5 to 1500 ppm, and a limit of detection of 0.5 ppm. Furthermore, the specificity of the designed filter paper based sensor was demonstrated against different common interfering compounds. The results demonstrated the potential of our proposed filter paper based sensor as a novel tool for the analysis of acetone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of information technology, scientific social networks (SSNs) have become the fastest and most convenient way for researchers to communicate with each other. Many published papers are shared via SSNs every day, resulting in the problem of information overload. How to appropriately recommend personalized and highly valuable papers for researchers is becoming more urgent. However, when recommending papers in SSNs, only a small amount of positive instances are available, leaving a vast amount of unlabelled data, in which negative instances and potential unseen positive instances are mixed together, which naturally belongs to One-Class Collaborative Filtering (OCCF) problem. Therefore, considering the extreme data imbalance and data sparsity of this OCCF problem, a hybrid approach of Social and Content aware One-class Recommendation of Papers in SSNs, termed SCORP, is proposed in this study. Unlike previous approaches recommended to address the OCCF problem, social information, which has been proved playing a significant role in performing recommendations in many domains, is applied in both the profiling of content-based filtering and the collaborative filtering to achieve superior recommendations. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed SCORP approach, a real-life dataset from CiteULike was employed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is superior to all of the compared approaches, thus providing a more effective method for recommending papers in SSNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many complex physical systems exhibit a rich variety of discrete behavioural modes. Often, the system complexity limits the applicability of standard modelling tools. Hence, understanding the underlying physics of different behaviours and distinguishing between them is challenging. Although traditional machine learning techniques could predict and classify behaviour well, typically they do not provide any meaningful insight into the underlying physics of the system. In this paper we present a novel method for extracting physically meaningful clusters of discrete behaviour from limited experimental observations. This method obtains a set of physically plausible functions that both facilitate behavioural clustering and aid in system understanding. We demonstrate the approach on the V-shaped falling paper system, a new falling paper type system that exhibits four distinct behavioural modes depending on a few morphological parameters. Using just 49 experimental observations, the method discovered a set of candidate functions that distinguish behaviours with an error of 2.04%, while also aiding insight into the physical phenomena driving each behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Semantic Link Network is a general semantic model for modeling the structure and the evolution of complex systems. Various semantic links play different roles in rendering the semantics of complex system. One of the basic semantic links represents cause-effect relation, which plays an important role in representation and understanding. This paper verifies the role of the Semantic Link Network in representing the core of text by investigating the contribution of cause-effect link to representing the core of scientific papers. Research carries out with the following steps: (1) Two propositions on the contribution of cause-effect link in rendering the core of paper are proposed and verified through a statistical survey, which shows that the sentences on cause-effect links cover about 65% of key words within each paper on average. (2) An algorithm based on syntactic patterns is designed for automatically extracting cause-effect link from scientific papers, which recalls about 70% of manually annotated cause-effect links on average, indicating that the result adapts to the scale of data sets. (3) The effects of cause-effect link on four schemes of incorporating cause-effect link into the existing instances of the Semantic Link Network for enhancing the summarization of scientific papers are investigated. The experiments show that the quality of the summaries is significantly improved, which verifies the role of semantic links. The significance of this research lies in two aspects: (1) it verifies that the Semantic Link Network connects the important concepts to render the core of text; and, (2) it provides an evidence for realizing content services such as summarization, recommendation and question answering based on the Semantic Link Network, and it can inspire relevant research on content computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we address the question whether (and to what extent, respectively) altmetrics are related to the scientific quality of papers (as measured by peer assessments). Only a few studies have previously investigated the relationship between altmetrics and assessments by peers. In the first step, we analyse the underlying dimensions of measurement for traditional metrics (citation counts) and altmetrics–by using principal component analysis (PCA) and factor analysis (FA). In the second step, we test the relationship between the dimensions and quality of papers (as measured by the post-publication peer-review system of F1000Prime assessments)–using regression analysis. The results of the PCA and FA show that altmetrics operate along different dimensions, whereas Mendeley counts are related to citation counts, and tweets form a separate dimension. The results of the regression analysis indicate that citation-based metrics and readership counts are significantly more related to quality, than tweets. This result on the one hand questions the use of Twitter counts for research evaluation purposes and on the other hand indicates potential use of Mendeley reader counts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to complete multiple tasks concurrently is a common occurrence both daily life and in occupational activities, which can often include simultaneous cognitive and physical demands. As one example, there is increasing availability of head-worn display technologies that can be employed when a user is mobile (e.g., while walking). This new method of information presentation may, however, introduce risks of adverse outcomes such as a decrement to gait performance. The goal of this study was thus to quantify the effects of a head-worn display (i.e., smart glasses) on motor variability during gait and to compare these effects with those of other common information displays (i.e., smartphone and paper-based system). Twenty participants completed four walking conditions, as a single task and in three dual-task conditions (three information displays). In the dual-task conditions, the information display was used to present several cognitive tasks. Three different measures were used to quantify variability in gait parameters for each walking condition (using the cycle-to-cycle standard deviation, sample entropy, and the “goal-equivalent manifold” approach). Our results indicated that participants used less adaptable gait strategies in dual-task walking using the paper-based system and smartphone conditions compared with single-task walking. Gait performance, however, was less affected during dual-task walking with the smart glasses. We conclude that the risk of an adverse gait event (e.g., a fall) in head-down walking conditions (i.e., the paper-based system and smartphone conditions) were higher than in single-task walking, and that head-worn displays might help reduce the risk of such events during dual-task gait conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research paper recommenders emerged over the last decade to ease finding publications relating to researchers’ area of interest. The challenge was not just to provide researchers with very rich publications at any time, any place and in any form but to also offer the right publication to the right researcher in the right way. Several approaches exist in handling paper recommender systems. However, these approaches assumed the availability of the whole contents of the recommending papers to be freely accessible, which is not always true due to factors such as copyright restrictions. This paper presents a collaborative approach for research paper recommender system. By leveraging the advantages of collaborative filtering approach, we utilize the publicly available contextual metadata to infer the hidden associations that exist between research papers in order to personalize recommendations. The novelty of our proposed approach is that it provides personalized recommendations regardless of the research field and regardless of the user’s expertise. Using a publicly available dataset, our proposed approach has recorded a significant improvement over other baseline methods in measuring both the overall performance and the ability to return relevant and useful publications at the top of the recommendation list. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperation among kin is common in animal societies. Kin groups may form by individuals directly discriminating relatives based on kin recognition cues, or form passively through natal philopatry and limited dispersal. We describe the genetic landscape for a primitively eusocial wasp, Polistes dominula, and ask whether individuals choose cooperative partners that are nearby and/or that are genetic relatives. Firstly, we genotyped an entire sub-population of 1361 wasps and found genetic structuring on an extremely fine scale: the probability of finding genetic relatives decreases exponentially within just a few meters of an individual’s nest. At the same time, however, we found a lack of genetic structuring between natural nest aggregations within the population. Secondly, in a separate dataset where ~2000 wasps were genotyped, we show that wasps forced experimentally to make a new nest choice tended to choose new nests near to their original nests, and that these nests tended to contain some full sisters. However, a significant fraction of wasps chose nests that did not contain sisters, despite sisters being present in nearby nests. Although we cannot rule out a role for direct kin recognition or natal nest-mate recognition, our data suggest that kin groups may form via a philopatric rule-of-thumb, whereby wasps simply select groups and nesting sites that are nearby. The result is that most subordinate helpers obtain indirect fitness benefits by breeding cooperatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University scientific research ability is an important indicator to express the strength of universities. In this paper, the evaluation of university scientific research ability is investigated based on the output of sci-tech papers. Four university alliances from North America, UK, Australia, and China, are selected as the case study of the university scientific research evaluation. Data coming from Thomson Reuters InCites are collected to support the evaluation. The work has contributed new framework to the issue of university scientific research ability evaluation. At first, we have established a hierarchical structure to show the factors that impact the evaluation of university scientific research ability. Then, a new MCDM method called D-AHP model is used to implement the evaluation and ranking of different university alliances, in which a data-driven approach is proposed to automatically generate the D numbers preference relations. Next, a sensitivity analysis has been given to show the impact of weights of factors and sub-factors on the evaluation result. At last, the results obtained by using different methods are compared and discussed to verify the effectiveness and reasonability of this study, and some suggestions are given to promote China’s scientific research ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many results have been obtained when studying scientific papers citations databases in a network perspective. Articles can be ranked according to their current in-degree and their future popularity or citation counts can even be predicted. The dynamical properties of such networks and the observation of the time evolution of their nodes started more recently. This work adopts an evolutionary perspective and proposes an original algorithm for the construction of genealogical trees of scientific papers on the basis of their citation count evolution in time. The fitness of a paper now amounts to its in-degree growing trend and a “dying” paper will suddenly see this trend declining in time. It will give birth and be taken over by some of its most prevalent citing “offspring”. Practically, this might be used to trace the successive published milestones of a research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The safety of highly aggregated tourist crowds is a challenging and important issue. This paper not only provided a comprehensive analysis of the accidents of highly aggregated tourist crowds but also determined the occurrence mechanism and coping paths. Based on the analysis of multiple cases, we found that the variable status of highly aggregated tourist crowds was the result of the interaction of three main elements: multisource pressure, state mutations and management responses. A series of factors interact and result in accidents, and the lack of a management response or a low-quality management response is the root cause of such accidents. A high-quality management response is a basic safety precaution for highly aggregated tourist crowds. Therefore, forming a virtuous circle of multisource pressure, state mutations and management responses is an effective path for coping with accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several network features and information retrieval methods have been proposed to elucidate the structure of citation networks and to detect important nodes. However, it is difficult to retrieve information related to trends in an academic field and to detect cutting-edge areas from the citation network. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that detects the trend as the growth direction of a citation network using network representation learning(NRL). We presume that the linear growth of citation network in latent space obtained by NRL is the result of the iterative edge additional process of a citation network. On APS datasets and papers of some domains of the Web of Science, we confirm the existence of trends by observing that an academic field grows in a specific direction linearly in latent space. Next, we calculate each node’s degree of trend-following as an indicator called the intrinsic publication year (IPY). As a result, there is a correlation between the indicator and the number of future citations. Furthermore, a word frequently used in the abstracts of cutting-edge papers (high-IPY paper) is likely to be used often in future publications. These results confirm the validity of the detected trend for predicting citation network growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientists often perceive a trade-off between quantity and quality in scientific publishing: finite amounts of time and effort can be spent to produce few high-quality papers or subdivided to produce many papers of lower quality. Despite this perception, previous studies have indicated the opposite relationship, in which productivity (publishing more papers) is associated with increased paper quality (usually measured by citation accumulation). We examine this question in a novel way, comparing members of the National Academy of Sciences with themselves across years, and using a much larger dataset than previously analyzed. We find that a member’s most highly cited paper in a given year has more citations in more productive years than in in less productive years. Their lowest cited paper each year, on the other hand, has fewer citations in more productive years. To disentangle the effect of the underlying distributions of citations and productivities, we repeat the analysis for hypothetical publication records generated by scrambling each author’s citation counts among their publications. Surprisingly, these artificial histories re-create the above trends almost exactly. Put another way, the observed positive relationship between quantity and quality can be interpreted as a consequence of randomly drawing citation counts for each publication: more productive years yield higher-cited papers because they have more chances to draw a large value. This suggests that citation counts, and the rewards that have come to be associated with them, may be more stochastic than previously appreciated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basic color terms used in Mandarin Chinese have been controversial since first discussed by Berlin and Kay in 1969. Previous studies showed much inconsistency on what should be considered as basic color terms in Mandarin Chinese. In the present study, we investigated categories of color rather than merely the color terms used by Taiwanese native Mandarin speakers. Using samples conforming to the Berlin and Kay survey, various colors were chosen from a collection of Natural Color System (NCS) colored papers and mounted on a piece of neutral gray card. The card was then mounted on a touch-screen, under D65 illumination. Thirty-two single-character color related Mandarin terms were selected from a Chinese character database according to frequency of use. Participants were required to select the color sample that matched the term by pressing a virtual button on the touch screen. The results show that certain terms can be directly correlated to basic color terms in English, comparable with the results of Berlin and Kay’s original study and those that followed. However, some terms, such as Mo (墨 ink), Tie (鐵 iron), and Cai (菜vegetable), show a wide spread of term maps and inconsistent use among subjects. Principle component analysis (PCA) procedures were used to analysis the commodity of data among subjects. The findings suggest that the basic color categories among Mandarin Chinese speakers are similar to those found in the World Color Survey (WCS), but are represented by wide-spread and inconsistent color terms among speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenge of detecting research topics in a specific research field has attracted attention from researchers in the bibliometrics community. In this study, to solve two problems of clustering papers, i.e., the influence of different distributions of citation links and involved textual features on similarity computation, the authors propose a hybrid self-optimized clustering model to detect research topics by extending the hybrid clustering model to identify “core documents”. First, the Amsler network, consisting of bibliographic coupling and co-citation links, is created to calculate the citation-based similarity based on the cosine angle of papers. Second, the cosine similarity is also used to compute the text-based similarity, which consists of the textual statistical and topological features. Then, the cosine angle of the linear combination of citation- and text-based similarity is considered as the hybrid similarity. Finally, the Louvain method is applied to cluster papers, and the terms based on term frequency are used to label clusters. To test the performance of the proposed model, a dataset related to the data envelopment analysis field is used for comparison and analysis of clustering results. Based on the benchmark built, different clustering methods with different citation links or textual features are compared according to evaluation measures. The results show that the proposed model can obtain reasonable and effective clustering results, and the research topics of data envelopment analysis field are also analyzed based on the proposed model. As different features are considered in the proposed model compared with previous hybrid clustering models, the proposed clustering model can provide inspiration for further studies on topic identification by other researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, we have observed an intensification of science, technology and innovation activities in Brazil. The increase in production of scientific papers indexed in international databases, however, has not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in the impact of publications. This paper presents a methodology for analyzing production and the impact of certain research areas in Brazil related to two aspects: the origin of the journals (national or foreign) and international collaboration. These two variables were selected for being of particular importance in understanding the context of scientific production and communication in countries with emerging economies. The sample consisted of papers written by Brazilian researchers in 19 subfields of knowledge published from 2002 to 2011, totaling 85,082 papers. To calculate the impact, we adopted a normalized indicator called the relative subfield citedness (Rw) using a window of 5 years to obtain measurements evaluated in 2 different years: 2007 and 2012. The data on papers and citations were collected from the Web of Science database. From the results, we note that most of the subfields have presented, from one quinquennium to another, improved performance in the world production rankings. Regarding publication in national and foreign journals, we observed a trend in the distribution maintenance of production of the subfields based on the origin of the journal. Specifically, for impact, we identified a lower Rw pattern for Brazilian papers when they were published in national journals in all subfields. When Brazilian products are published in foreign journals, we observed a higher impact for those papers, even surpassing the average global impact in some subfields. For international collaboration, we analyzed the percentage of participation of foreign researchers and the connection between collaboration and the impact of papers, especially emphasizing the distinction of hyperauthorship papers in terms of production and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although racism has been posited as driver of racial/ethnic inequities in healthcare, the relationship between racism and health service use and experience has yet to be systematically reviewed or meta-analysed. This paper presents a systematic review and meta-analysis of quantitative empirical studies that report associations between self-reported racism and various measures of healthcare service utilisation. Data were reviewed and extracted from 83 papers reporting 70 studies. Studies included 250,850 participants and were conducted predominately in the U.S. The meta-analysis included 59 papers reporting 52 studies, which were analysed using random effects models and mean weighted effect sizes. Racism was associated with more negative patient experiences of health services (HSU-E) (OR = 0.351 (95% CI [0.236,0.521], k = 19), including lower levels of healthcare-related trust, satisfaction, and communication. Racism was not associated with health service use (HSU-U) as an outcome group, and was not associated with most individual HSU-U outcomes, including having had examinations, health service visits and admissions to health professionals and services. Racism was associated with health service use outcomes such as delaying/not getting healthcare, and lack of adherence to treatment uptake, although these effects may be influenced by a small sample of studies, and publication bias, respectively. Limitations to the literature reviewed in terms of study designs, sampling methods and measurements are discussed along with suggested future directions in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although interdisciplinarity is often touted as a necessity for modern research, the evidence on the relative impact of sectorial versus to interdisciplinary science is qualitative at best. In this paper we leverage the bibliographic data set of the American Physical Society to quantify the role of interdisciplinarity in physics, and that of talent and luck in achieving success in scientific careers. We analyze a period of 30 years (1980-2009) tagging papers and their authors by means of the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS), to show that some degree of interdisciplinarity is quite helpful to reach success, measured as a proxy of either the number of articles or the citations score. We also propose an agent-based model of the publication-reputation-citation dynamics which reproduces the trends observed in the APS data set. On the one hand, the results highlight the crucial role of randomness and serendipity in real scientific research; on the other, they shed light on a counterintuitive effect indicating that the most talented authors are not necessarily the most successful ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses several bibliometric indices to explore the temporal course of publication trends regarding the bilingual advantage in executive control over a ten-year window. These indices include the number of published papers, numbers of citations, and the journal impact factor. According to the information available in their abstracts, studies were classified into one of four categories: supporting, ambiguous towards, not mentioning, or challenging the bilingual advantage. Results show that the number of papers challenging the bilingual advantage increased notably in 2014 and 2015. Both the average impact factor and the accumulated citations as of June 2016 were equivalent between categories. However, of the studies published in 2014, those that challenge the bilingual advantage accumulated more citations in June 2016 than those supporting it. Our findings offer evidence-based bibliometric information about the current state of the literature and suggest a change in publication trends regarding the literature on the bilingual advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on three decades of citation data from across scientific fields of science, we study trends in impact factor biased self-citations of scholarly journals, using a purpose-built and easy to use citation based measure. Our measure is given by the ratio between i) the relative share of journal self-citations to papers published in the last two years, and ii) the relative share of journal self-citations to papers published in preceding years. A ratio higher than one suggests that a journal’s impact factor is disproportionally affected (inflated) by self-citations. Using recently reported survey data, we show that there is a relation between high values of our proposed measure and coercive journal self-citation malpractices. We use our measure to perform a large-scale analysis of impact factor biased journal self-citations. Our main empirical result is, that the share of journals for which our measure has a (very) high value has remained stable between the 1980s and the early 2000s, but has since risen strongly in all fields of science. This time span corresponds well with the growing obsession with the impact factor as a journal evaluation measure over the last decade. Taken together, this suggests a trend of increasingly pervasive journal self-citation malpractices, with all due unwanted consequences such as inflated perceived importance of journals and biased journal rankings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates over the pros and cons of a “publish or perish” philosophy have inflamed academia for at least half a century. Growing concerns, in particular, are expressed for policies that reward “quantity” at the expense of “quality,” because these might prompt scientists to unduly multiply their publications by fractioning (“salami slicing”), duplicating, rushing, simplifying, or even fabricating their results. To assess the reasonableness of these concerns, we analyzed publication patterns of over 40,000 researchers that, between the years 1900 and 2013, have published two or more papers within 15 years, in any of the disciplines covered by the Web of Science. The total number of papers published by researchers during their early career period (first fifteen years) has increased in recent decades, but so has their average number of co-authors. If we take the latter factor into account, by measuring productivity fractionally or by only counting papers published as first author, we observe no increase in productivity throughout the century. Even after the 1980s, adjusted productivity has not increased for most disciplines and countries. These results are robust to methodological choices and are actually conservative with respect to the hypothesis that publication rates are growing. Therefore, the widespread belief that pressures to publish are causing the scientific literature to be flooded with salami-sliced, trivial, incomplete, duplicated, plagiarized and false results is likely to be incorrect or at least exaggerated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, computational Grids have proven to be a good solution for processing large-scale, computation intensive problems. However, the heterogeneity, dynamics of resources and diversity of applications requirements have always been important factors affecting their performance. In response to these challenges, this work first builds a Grid job scheduling architecture that can dynamically monitor Grid computing center resources and make corresponding scheduling decisions. Second, a Grid job model is proposed to describe the application requirements. Third, this paper studies the characteristics of commercial interconnection networks used in Grids and forecast job transmission time. Fourth, this paper proposes an application-aware job scheduling mechanism (AJSM) that includes periodic scheduling flow and a heuristic application-aware deadline constraint job scheduling algorithm. The rigorous performance evaluation results clearly demonstrate that the proposed application-aware job scheduling mechanism can successful schedule more Grid jobs than the existing algorithms. For successful scheduled jobs, our proposed AJSM method is the best algorithm for job average processing time and makespan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The paper presents data on the two problems of misconduct and marginality in management, business and economics (MBE) journals and their practices to combat these problems. Design: Data was collected in three phases. First, all publicly retracted papers in MBE journals were identified through keywords searches in 7 major databases (n = 1329 journals). Second, a focused survey was distributed to editors involved in such retractions (n = 64; response rate = 28%). Finally, a survey was administered to all active journals in the seven databases to collect data on editors’ perceptions and practices related to the two problems (n = 937, response rate = 31.8%). Frequency analyses, cross tabulations, and qualitative analyses of open answers were used to examine the data. Results: 184 retracted papers in MBE journals were identified in 2005–2015 (no retraction was found before 2005). From 2005–2007 to 2012–2015, the number of retractions increased by a factor ten with an all-time high in 2015. The survey to journals with reported retractions illustrates how already a few cases of suspected misconduct put a strain on the editorial workload. The survey to all active journals revealed that 42% of the respondents had started to use software to screen all submitted papers, and that a majority recognized the problem of marginality, as indicated by salami-style submissions. According to some editors, reviewers easily spot such submissions whereas others argued that authors may submit thinly sliced papers in parallel to several journals, which means that this practice is only discovered post-publication. The survey question on ways to support creative contributions stimulated a rich response of ideas regarding editorial vision, engaged boards and developmental approaches. The study uses data from three specialized fields, but its findings may be highly relevant to many journals in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to demonstrate the impact of coal enterprises’ vertical integration on the performance of innovation corporate social responsibility (ICSR) and to elaborate its specific transmission path through financing structure and market power. This paper takes the data of A-share listed coal company from 2008 to 2017 as samples, uses input-output table method to measure the degree of vertical integration, and explores the relationship between the four factors through multiple linear regression and Bootstrap method. We found that: (1) the vertical integration of coal enterprises has positive incentives for the promotion of ICSR. (2) Financing structure and market power play a chain intermediary role in this process of incentive. (3) In areas with high marketization process, vertical integration has more significant incentive effect on ICSR. The paper extends the research on the relationship between vertical integration and innovation, which provides a reference for the improvement of China’s supply-side reform and corporate social responsibility (CSR) fulfillment policy. It is helpful to promote the sustainable development of the coal industry, stimulate the innovation vitality of enterprises, and improve the fulfillment of CSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bibliometric indicators are increasingly used to evaluate individual scientists–as is exemplified by the popularity of the many other publication and citation-based indicators used in evaluation. These indicators, however, cover at best some of the quality dimensions relevant for assessing a researcher: productivity and impact. At the same time, research quality has more dimensions than productivity and impact alone. As current bibliometric indicators are not covering various important quality dimensions, we here contribute to developing better indicators for those quality dimensions not yet addressed. One of the quality dimensions lacking valid indicators is an individual researcher’s independence. We propose indicators to measure different aspects of independence: two assessing whether a researcher has developed an own collaboration network and two others assessing the level of thematic independence. Taken together they form an independence indicator. We illustrate how these indicators distinguish between researchers that are equally productive and have a considerable impact. The independence indicator is a step forward in evaluating individual scholarly quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) universities are important bases for science and technology research and play a critical role in China’s National Innovation System. Based on the Web of Science (WoS), this article analyzes the statistics of paper published by MIIT universities and universities from across China including MIIT universities. The results are as follows: (1) Both the MIIT universities and universities nationwide in China have increased their international academic publications, and MIIT have shown a greater increase for the past decade. (2) In terms of U-I-G interaction, for UG relations, the Tug value of MIIT universities has remained stable, while that of universities in China has become declined. For UI relations, the Tui value of both MIIT universities and universities in China has shown steady growth. For UIG relations, MIIT universities have a greater synergistic effect of Triple Helix relationship than universities in China. (3) For more details in seven MIIT universities, universities elected into “Project 985”, including HIT, BUAA, BIT and NPU, have published more papers, and been more synergistic with government and industry (UIG relations) than other three universities, including NUAA, NUST and HEU. Based on the empirical results, we discuss our findings, and make certain suggestions regarding policy incentives, reasonable administrative system and U-I-G interaction mode, which is significant not only for Chinese universities but also for universities in other developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From January 2014, Psychological Science introduced new submission guidelines that encouraged the use of effect sizes, estimation, and meta-analysis (the “new statistics”), required extra detail of methods, and offered badges for use of open science practices. We investigated the use of these practices in empirical articles published by Psychological Science and, for comparison, by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, during the period of January 2013 to December 2015. The use of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) was extremely high at all times and in both journals. In Psychological Science, the use of confidence intervals increased markedly overall, from 28% of articles in 2013 to 70% in 2015, as did the availability of open data (3 to 39%) and open materials (7 to 31%). The other journal showed smaller or much smaller changes. Our findings suggest that journal-specific submission guidelines may encourage desirable changes in authors’ practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted concept encompassing a variety of related aspects, abilities, properties and behaviours. If we wish to study creativity scientifically, then a tractable and well-articulated model of creativity is required. Such a model would be of great value to researchers investigating the nature of creativity and in particular, those concerned with the evaluation of creative practice. This paper describes a unique approach to developing a suitable model of how creative behaviour emerges that is based on the words people use to describe the concept. Using techniques from the field of statistical natural language processing, we identify a collection of fourteen key components of creativity through an analysis of a corpus of academic papers on the topic. Words are identified which appear significantly often in connection with discussions of the concept. Using a measure of lexical similarity to help cluster these words, a number of distinct themes emerge, which collectively contribute to a comprehensive and multi-perspective model of creativity. The components provide an ontology of creativity: a set of building blocks which can be used to model creative practice in a variety of domains. The components have been employed in two case studies to evaluate the creativity of computational systems and have proven useful in articulating achievements of this work and directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explicit model predictive control (eMPC) has been proposed to reduce the huge computational complexity of MPC while maintaining the performance of MPC. Therefore, this control method has been more widely employed in the automotive industry than MPC. In this paper, an eMPC is designed to perform a double-lane-change (DLC) maneuver. This task has been employed to demonstrate the efficacy of controllers in an autonomous driving situation. In this sense, the proposed controller shows better performance than a driver model designed in CarSim at a high vehicle longitudinal velocity. The main contribution of this paper is to present an eMPC for discrete-time linear time-variant (LTV) systems so that the proposed controller can be robust against parameter variation. In a state-space representation of the vehicle, the longitudinal velocity of the vehicle is assumed to be a constant so that the whole system is linear time-invariant (LTI). However, it is inevitable that this velocity varies in an actual driving situation. Therefore, an eMPC controller is designed using an add-on unit to consider the varying parameter without modification of the eMPC solution. The CarSim simulation results of eMPC show enhanced performance compared to that of eMPC for the LTI system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses text data mining to identify long-term developments in tourism academic research from the perspectives of thematic focus, geography, and gender of tourism authorship. Abstracts of papers published in the period of 1970–2017 in high-ranking tourist journals were extracted from the Scopus database and served as data source for the analysis. Fourteen subject areas were identified using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) text mining approach. LDA integrated with GIS information allowed to obtain geography distribution and trends of scholarly output, while probabilistic methods of gender identification based on social network data mining were used to track gender dynamics with sufficient confidence. The findings indicate that, while all 14 topics have been prominent from the inception of tourism studies to the present day, the geography of scholarship has notably expanded and the share of female authorship has increased through time and currently almost equals that of male authorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a bibliometric, citation network-based method for assessing the social validation of novel research, and applies this method to the development of high-throughput toxicology research at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Social validation refers to the acceptance of novel research methods by a relevant scientific community; it is formally independent of the technical validation of methods, and is frequently studied in history, philosophy, and social studies of science using qualitative methods. The quantitative methods introduced here find that high-throughput toxicology methods are spread throughout a large and well-connected research community, which suggests high social validation. Further assessment of social validation involving mixed qualitative and quantitative methods are discussed in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using matching and regression analyses, we measure the difference in citations between articles posted to Academia.edu and other articles from similar journals, controlling for field, impact factor, and other variables. Based on a sample size of 31,216 papers, we find that a paper in a median impact factor journal uploaded to Academia.edu receives 16% more citations after one year than a similar article not available online, 51% more citations after three years, and 69% after five years. We also found that articles also posted to Academia.edu had 58% more citations than articles only posted to other online venues, such as personal and departmental home pages, after five years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on evaluating the systemic risk in interbank networks, proposing a series of measurements: risk distance, risk degree and m-order risk degree. The proposed measurements are formally proven to have good basic and extended properties that are able to reflect the effect of bank size, liability size, liability distribution, and the discount factor on the default risk, not only of a single bank, but also of the entire system. Additionally, the abovementioned properties and the relationship between risk distance and financial contagion indicate the rationality embodied in the proposed measurements. This paper also provides some implications on how to decrease or prevent the systemic risk in an interbank system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As researchers use computational methods to study complex social behaviors at scale, the validity of this computational social science depends on the integrity of the data. On July 2, 2015, Jason Baumgartner published a dataset advertised to include “every publicly available Reddit comment” which was quickly shared on Bittorrent and the Internet Archive. This data quickly became the basis of many academic papers on topics including machine learning, social behavior, politics, breaking news, and hate speech. We have discovered substantial gaps and limitations in this dataset which may contribute to bias in the findings of that research. In this paper, we document the dataset, substantial missing observations in the dataset, and the risks to research validity from those gaps. In summary, we identify strong risks to research that considers user histories or network analysis, moderate risks to research that compares counts of participation, and lesser risk to machine learning research that avoids making representative claims about behavior and participation on Reddit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a formulation for selecting the stage ratios and number of stages in a multistage transmission with a given desired total transmission ratio in a manner that maximizes efficiency, maximizes acceleration, or minimizes the mass of the transmission. The formulation is used to highlight several implications for gear train design, including the fact that minimizing rotational inertia and mass are competing objectives with respect to optimal selection of stage ratios, and that both rotational inertia and mass can often be minimized by increasing the total number of stages beyond a minimum realizable number. Additionally, a multistage transmission will generally provide maximum acceleration when the stage ratios increase monotonically from the motor to the load. The transmission will have minimum mass when the stage ratios decrease monotonically. The transmission will also provide maximum efficiency when the corresponding stages employ constant stage ratios. This paper aims to use this optimization formulation to elucidate tradeoffs between various common objectives in gear train design (efficiency, acceleration, and mass). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Routine Data Quality Assessments (RDQAs) were developed to measure and improve facility-level electronic medical record (EMR) data quality. We assessed if RDQAs were associated with improvements in data quality in KenyaEMR, an HIV care and treatment EMR used at 341 facilities in Kenya. Methods: RDQAs assess data quality by comparing information recorded in paper records to KenyaEMR. RDQAs are conducted during a one-day site visit, where approximately 100 records are randomly selected and 24 data elements are reviewed to assess data completeness and concordance. Results are immediately provided to facility staff and action plans are developed for data quality improvement. For facilities that had received more than one RDQA (baseline and follow-up), we used generalized estimating equation models to determine if data completeness or concordance improved from the baseline to the follow-up RDQAs. Results: 27 facilities received two RDQAs and were included in the analysis, with 2369 and 2355 records reviewed from baseline and follow-up RDQAs, respectively. The frequency of missing data in KenyaEMR declined from the baseline (31% missing) to the follow-up (13% missing) RDQAs. After adjusting for facility characteristics, records from follow-up RDQAs had 0.43-times the risk (95% CI: 0.32–0.58) of having at least one missing value among nine required data elements compared to records from baseline RDQAs. Using a scale with one point awarded for each of 20 data elements with concordant values in paper records and KenyaEMR, we found that data concordance improved from baseline (11.9/20) to follow-up (13.6/20) RDQAs, with the mean concordance score increasing by 1.79 (95% CI: 0.25–3.33). Conclusions: This manuscript demonstrates that RDQAs can be implemented on a large scale and used to identify EMR data quality problems. RDQAs were associated with meaningful improvements in data quality and could be adapted for implementation in other settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biometric recognition technology based on eye-movement dynamics has been in development for more than ten years. Different visual tasks, feature extraction and feature recognition methods are proposed to improve the performance of eye movement biometric system. However, the correct identification and verification rates, especially in long-term experiments, as well as the effects of visual tasks and eye trackers’ temporal and spatial resolution are still the foremost considerations in eye movement biometrics. With a focus on these issues, we proposed a new visual searching task for eye movement data collection and a new class of eye movement features for biometric recognition. In order to demonstrate the improvement of this visual searching task being used in eye movement biometrics, three other eye movement feature extraction methods were also tested on our eye movement datasets. Compared with the original results, all three methods yielded better results as expected. In addition, the biometric performance of these four feature extraction methods was also compared using the equal error rate (EER) and Rank-1 identification rate (Rank-1 IR), and the texture features introduced in this paper were ultimately shown to offer some advantages with regard to long-term stability and robustness over time and spatial precision. Finally, the results of different combinations of these methods with a score-level fusion method indicated that multi-biometric methods perform better in most cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nodes and their connection relationships are the two main bodies for dynamic complex networks. In existing theoretical researches, the phenomena of stabilization and synchronization for complex dynamical networks are generally regarded as the dynamic characteristic behaviors of the nodes, which are mainly caused by coupling effect of connection relationships between nodes. However, the connection relationships between nodes are also one main body of a time-varying dynamic complex network, and thus they may evolve with time and maybe show certain characteristic phenomena. For example, the structural balance in the social networks and the synaptic facilitation in the biological neural networks. Therefore, it is important to investigate theoretically the reasons in dynamics for the occurrence. Especially, from the angle of large-scale systems, how the dynamic behaviors of nodes (such as the individuals, neurons) contribute to the connection relationships is one of worthy research directions. In this paper, according to the structural balance theory of triad proposed by F. Heider, we mainly focus on the connection relationships body, which is regarded as one of the two subsystems (another is the nodes body), and try to find the dynamic mechanism of the structural balance with the internal state behaviors of the nodes. By using the Riccati linear matrix differential equation as the dynamic model of connection relationships subsystem, it is proved under some mathematic conditions that the connection relationships subsystem is asymptotical structural balance via the effects of the coupling roles with the internal state of nodes. Finally, the simulation example is given to show the validity of the method in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper generally builds on the concept of justice in social science. It attempts to interpret this concept in a geographical and particularly in a spatial context. The paper uses the concept of accessibility to define the principle of spatial equity. The main objective of the paper is to propose an approach with which to assess the level of spatial equity in the administrative division of a territory. In order to fulfil this objective the paper theoretically discusses the concept of spatial equity and relates it to other relevant concepts, such as spatial efficiency. The paper proposes some measures of spatial equity and uses the territory of four Central European countries (Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia) as example of the application of the proposed measures and the corroboration of the proposed approach. The analysis is based on the administrative division of four countries and is carried out at different hierarchical levels as defined by the Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics (NUTS). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a bibliographic analysis of Nature articles based on altmetrics. We assess the concern degree of social users on the Nature articles through the coverage analysis of Twitter and Facebook by publication year and discipline. The social media impact of a Nature article is examined by evaluating the mention rates on Twitter and on Facebook. Moreover, the correlation between tweets and citations is analyzed by publication year, discipline and Twitter user type to explore factors affecting the correlation. The results show that Twitter users have a higher concern degree on Nature articles than Facebook users, and Nature articles have higher and faster-growing impact on Twitter than on Facebook. The results also show that tweets and citations are somewhat related, and they mostly measure different types of impact. In addition, the correlation between tweets and citations highly depends on publication year, discipline and Twitter user type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Floating catchment methods have recently been applied to identify priority regions for Automated External Defibrillator (AED) deployment, to aid in improving Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest (OHCA) survival. This approach models access as a supply-to-demand ratio for each area, targeting areas with high demand and low supply for AED placement. These methods incorporate spatial covariates on OHCA occurrence, but do not provide precise AED locations, which are critical to the initial intent of such location analysis research. Exact AED locations can be determined using optimisation methods, but they do not incorporate known spatial risk factors for OHCA, such as income and demographics. Combining these two approaches would evaluate AED placement impact, describe drivers of OHCA occurrence, and identify areas that may not be appropriately covered by AED placement strategies. There are two aims in this paper. First, to develop geospatial models of OHCA that account for and display uncertainty. Second, to evaluate the AED placement methods using geospatial models of accessibility. We first identify communities with the greatest gap between demand and supply for allocating AEDs. We then use this information to evaluate models for precise AED location deployment. Methods: Case study data set consisted of 2802 OHCA events and 719 AEDs. Spatial OHCA occurrence was described using a geospatial model, with possible spatial correlation accommodated by introducing a conditional autoregressive (CAR) prior on the municipality-level spatial random effect. This model was fit with Integrated Nested Laplacian Approximation (INLA), using covariates for population density, proportion male, proportion over 65 years, financial strength, and the proportion of land used for transport, commercial, buildings, recreation, and urban areas. Optimisation methods for AED locations were applied to find the top 100 AED placement locations. AED access was calculated for current access and 100 AED placements. Priority rankings were then given for each area based on their access score and predicted number of OHCA events. Results: Of the 2802 OHCA events, 64.28% occurred in rural areas, and 35.72% in urban areas. Additionally, over 70% of individuals were aged over 65. Supply of AEDs was less than demand in most areas. Priority regions for AED placement were identified, and access scores were evaluated for AED placement methodology by ranking the access scores and the predicted OHCA count. AED placement methodology placed AEDs in areas with the highest priority, but placed more AEDs in areas with more predicted OHCA events in each grid cell. Conclusion: The methods in this paper incorporate OHCA spatial risk factors and OHCA coverage to identify spatial regions most in need of resources. These methods can be used to help understand how AED allocation methods affect OHCA accessibility, which is of significant practical value for communities when deciding AED placements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding why parenting programmes work or do not work, and for whom, is crucial for development of more effective parenting interventions. In this paper we focus on a specific component of Mellow Bumps: reflection on one’s own childhood/past/life. We explore how this component was implemented, how participants engaged with it, the facilitating and constraining factors shaping this, whether and how it appeared to work, or not, and for whom. The paper analyses data from the Process Evaluation of the Trial of Healthy Relationships Initiatives for the Very Early years, which is evaluating two antenatal interventions delivered to vulnerable women, one of which is Mellow Bumps. Data were collected from January 2014 to June 2018 for 28 groups, 108 participants and 24 facilitators in a comprehensive and rigorous Process Evaluation designed to complement the Outcome Evaluation. Data were gathered at various time points using multiple methods, and were synthesised to triangulate findings. The reflective component was implemented with fidelity and participants engaged with it to varying degrees, dependent largely on the coherence of the group. Patchy attendance compromised the coherence of some groups, with the development of rapport, which is key to delivering reflective exercises, more difficult when group composition varied from week to week. Where there was a coherent group, powerful mechanisms of change, leading to stress reduction, included: relief through unburdening, empowerment through support given and received, reduced isolation through sharing anxieties, and control through self-care advice. A minority of highly vulnerable mothers seemed not to benefit from the reflective exercises and were marginalised within their groups. In order to minimise potential harmful effects of such exercises, allocation of participants to groups should strive to maximise group homogeneity. More research is needed to explore how very vulnerable parents can be supported in attending parenting interventions from start to finish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data analysis for flow-based in-vitro receptomics array, like a tongue-on-a-chip, is complicated by the relatively large variability within and between arrays, transfected DNA types, spots, and cells within spots. Simply averaging responses of spots of the same type would lead to high variances and low statistical power. This paper presents an approach based on linear mixed models, allowing a quantitative and robust comparison of complex samples and indicating which receptors are responsible for any differences. These models are easily extended to take into account additional effects such as the build-up of cell stress and to combine data from replicated experiments. The increased analytical power this brings to receptomics research is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The University of KwaZulu-Natal has introduced a new language policy requiring all students who have not done Zulu as a first (or second) language at school to complete a six-month course in Zulu as part of their undergraduate curriculum. Given that English is the medium of instruction that is being used for all their other courses, the time that these students have had to spend learning this new language may be adversely affecting the marks that they could be getting for their other courses. Having to do a course in Zulu is also preventing them from being able to take another course in their chosen area of study. If one were able to randomly assign students to the group who have to take the Zulu course, then any difference in performance between the two groups could be directly attributed to the new language policy that is being introduced at the university. Given the context of this paper, however, such a random allocation is not possible. Students who have not done Zulu at school have to eventually complete a course in Zulu before graduating. If this cohort differs (in any other way) from those who do not have to take this course, then any observed difference in overall performance between the two groups may be a result of these group differences rather than the new rule that has been implemented. Methodology: This paper uses regression adjustment and entropy matching to achieve an appropriate balance between the two groups. Having achieved this balance any difference in the overall performance between the two groups can then be attributed directly to the new language policy that has been implemented. Our results indicate, after matching, that a significant difference in performance between the two groups occurs with Black African Zulu home language speakers in particular not performing as well as students from the other race and language groups. The data came from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the study has been approved by the University Ethics committee and Research committee. Results and conclusions: Using a weighted mean of marks to measure performance, the ATT estimates that result indicate that students in the treated group would all perform significantly better had they been allowed instead to enrol in the non-treated group. Furthermore, Zulu home language speakers, who are not actually forced to take this course, are significantly underperforming whether they have chosen to take this course in Zulu or not. Surprisingly, their underperformance is worse in the treated group. Because one would expect them to be scoring a higher mark for Zulu in this treated group, forfeiting the chance to take another course in their chosen area of study is clearly affecting the type of mark they could be getting for their other courses had they chosen to remain in the non-treated group. With English being the medium of instruction at this university, should the university not also consider introducing a compulsory course in English for these Zulu home language speakers? Females are doing better than males in both groups. The effect being stronger in the treated group suggests that females appear to cope better with the learning of a new language. Significant college effects are also being observed, suggesting that this new language rule possibly needs to be adjusted for the college a student wants to study in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To solve the problem of the deadline-constrained task scheduling in the cloud computing system, this paper proposes a deadline-constrained scheduling algorithm for cloud computing based on the driver of dynamic essential path (Deadline-DDEP). According to the changes of the dynamic essential path of each task node in the scheduling process, the dynamic sub-deadline strategy is proposed. The strategy assigns different sub-deadline values to every task node to meet the constraint relations among task nodes and the user’s defined deadline. The strategy fully considers the dynamic sub-deadline affected by the dynamic essential path of task node in the scheduling process. The paper proposed the quality assessment of optimization cost strategy to solve the problem of selecting server for each task node. Based on the sub-deadline urgency and the relative execution cost in the scheduling process, the strategy selects the server that not only meets the sub-deadline but also obtains much lower execution cost. In this way, the proposed algorithm will make the task graph complete within its deadline, and minimize its total execution cost. Finally, we demonstrate the proposed algorithm via the simulation experiments using Matlab tools. The experimental results show that, the proposed algorithm produces remarkable performance improvement rate on the total execution cost that ranges between 10.3% and 30.8% under meeting the deadline constraint. In view of the experimental results, the proposed algorithm provides better-quality scheduling solution that is suitable for scientific application task execution in the cloud computing environment than IC-PCP, DCCP and CD-PCP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a spatial lag panel smoothing transition regression (SLPSTR) model ty considering spatial correlation of dependent variable in panel smooth transition regression model. This model combines advantages of both smooth transition model and spatial econometric model and can be used to deal with panel data with wide range of heterogeneity and cross-section correlation simultaneously. We also propose a Bayesian estimation approach in which the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and the method of Gibbs are used for sampling design for SLPSTR model. A simulation study and a real data study are conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed model and the Bayesian estimation approach in practice. The results indicate that our theoretical method is applicable to spatial data with a wide range of spatial structures under finite sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]