Search

Quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) has been proposed as a scientific domain that can enable efficient and informative drug development. During the past several years, there has been a notable increase in the number of regulatory submissions that contain QSP, including Investigational New Drug Applications (INDs), New Drug Applications (NDAs), and Biologics License Applications (BLAs) to the US Food and Drug Administration. However, there has been no comprehensive characterization of the nature of these regulatory submissions regarding model details and intended applications. To address this gap, a landscape analysis of all the QSP submissions as of December 2020 was conducted. This report summarizes the (1) yearly trend of submissions, (2) proportion of submissions between INDs and NDAs/BLAs, (3) percentage distribution along the stages of drug development, (4) percentage distribution across various therapeutic areas, and (5) nature of QSP applications. In brief, QSP is increasingly applied to model and simulate both drug effectiveness and safety throughout the drug development process across disease areas.

Agroecology is recognised as a socio-political and agricultural praxis and as a scientific domain. However, the dominant anthropocentric narrative that views nature as an exploitable resource is st...

espanolJose Felipe Flores es uno de los cientificos del siglo XVIII mas olvidados hoy en dia. Sin embargo, siempre estuvo muy activo en varios ramos de las ciencias. Obro ademas por el desarrollo del conocimiento cientifico en Guatemala. Por eso quiso viajar por Europa. De este periplo quedan algunas cartas y un diario, inedito y desconocido hasta hoy, debido a una equivocada identificacion de su autor. En este articulo, es este diario el que vamos a glosar y analizar. Trataremos la cuestion de su autor y de su historia y estudiaremos su dimension cientifica, con la mencion que en el se hace de los avances cientificos y de los sabios con los cuales se encuentra el doctor Flores. EnglishJose Felipe Flores is one of the scientists of the eighteenth century who is totally forgotten by now. However, he always was very active in several sections of the scientific domain. Moreover, he always did what he could for the development of the scientific knowledge in Guatemala. That is why he travelled through Europe. Of this travel, he left letters and a diary, unpublished and unknown until today, because of a wrong identification of its author. With this article, we intend to study this particular diary. After the evocation of its author and its history, we will observe its scientific dimension, with the mentions of the scientific development and of the contacts between the Guatemalan doctor and the European scientists.

Philosophical discussions of disagreement typically focus on cases in which the disagreeing agents are aware that they are disagreeing and can pinpoint the proposition that they are disagreeing about. Scientific disagreements are not, in general, like this. Here we consider several case studies of disagreements that do not concern first-order factual claims about the scientific domain in question, but rather boil down to disputes regarding methodology. In such cases, it is often difficult to identify the point of contention in the dispute. Philosophers of science have a useful role to play in pinpointing the source of such disagreements, but must resist the temptation to trace scientific debates to disputes over higher-level philosophical accounts.

Computational analysis and modeling of the evolution of trends is an important area of research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) because of its socio-economic impact. However, no large publicly available benchmark for trend detection currently exists, making a comparative evaluation of methods impossible. We remedy this situation by publishing the benchmark TRENDNERT, consisting of a set of gold trends and downtrends and document labels that is available as an unrestricted download, and a large underlying document collection that can also be obtained for free. We propose Mean Average Precision (MAP) as an evaluation measure for trend detection and apply this measure in an investigation of several baselines.

The primary intention of any scientific work is to share the gained knowledge and to contribute to the knowledge and progress in the scientific domain. The wide range of journals and conferences, each with specific submission requirements, can be difficult to navigate, especially for young scientists without extensive experience. But a suitable publication strategy can be helpful, especially at the beginning of a scientific career. Using the annual conference of the German Association for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS) e.V. as an example, this editorial highlights fundamental differences, advantages and disadvantages, as well as assistance in selecting the right form of submission.

The modern Digital Universe changes and expands at a speed that every two years double the amount of data. It leads to a situation when huge accumulated flows of information can no longer be covered by traditional scientific search and built into a relevant scientific research framework. The authors argue that there is a need for using modern statistics and scientometric application packages for solving research tasks in the primary trends of the information economy. The article presents a comparative analysis of various scientometric programs and describes a new approach to identifying and visualizing patterns and transient regularities in the scientific literature on the basis of a study of global publication flows in the last 25 years in the subject area of «labour economics» represented in the Web of Science.The authors conceptualize and visualize scientific domain of «labour economics» within the framework of the timing diagram of the evolution of research fronts. They introduce the search algorithm for active research fronts in the global information flow using CiteSpace V.0 and highlight the most critical trends and principal points of research clusters for the past decade on labour economics and its core studies. The paper determines most perspective citation spikes that could potentially become the center of new scientific knowledge in this area and outlines opportunities for future research.

Free-space optical (FSO) communication offers much higher data rates when compared to other available underwater communication technologies. It has been used for decades in scientific and military applications, but until recently no commercial products were available. With the advent of commercially available FSO technology, the number of applications in the commercial and scientific domain has greatly expanded. This paper provides a short overview over commercially available FSO technology and highlights their use in current and future projects.

In recent decades the use of forensic science in investigations and therefore its subsequent presentation within the courts has increased exponentially, fuelled by an increase in scientific advances, development of databases and greater access to scientists and their expertise. This explosion in the use of forensic evidence has not been limited to one single scientific domain, as there are a broad range of scientific disciplines, encompassed by the general umbrella term' forensic science'. Many of these involve commonly applied methodologies and are accepted by the courts with limited scrutiny. Where tensions exist concerning the use of science in the courtroom is when novel or emerging sciences and scientific techniques are introduced. This may be particularly evident when the demands of the investigatory phase, where those working want to apply all possible tools at their disposal to gather as much evidence as possible and the needs of the courts, where the evidence must scientifically robust and admissible for it to be presented before a jury, come together. This paper examines the implications for the court for emerging or novel sciences and scientific techniques. In such cases, the potential rewards of implementing the scientific process and the information these may contribute to an investigation provides a temptation to investigators to push for their operational use, with the unintended consequence of posing an issue to the court when considering whether to admit the evidence into the judicial process.

Science mapping (SM) is an effective and useful methodology for studying and understanding the structural and dynamic features of a scientific domain through constructing, analysing, and visualising bibliometric networks. Hence, using the method has been given substantial attention in many fields, including the built environment (BE). Research in BE involves many diverse domains, subjects, or topics. Objective mapping and understanding of the knowledge in these domains warrants SM. This chapter contains an introduction to the topic of applying SM in BE research. The purpose, essentially, is to contribute to addressing the broader question of how to use SM in BE. A tutorial is included to demonstrate, step by step, how three software packages, VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and Gephi, can be applied together to conduct robust/deep SM-based research. This chapter could help researchers and other interested stakeholders to undertake quality research using SM.

Relational databases are prevalent in handling large and complex databases; however, writing the SQL queries can be a tedious task for databases. Recent studies for automating the task of translating natural language text to SQL query are not robust to queries having multi-table dependencies. Also, considering the lack of such research in scientific domain, we introduce ACL-SQL, a dataset with complex queries depending on up to five tables and benchmark the dataset on a simple approach. Evaluation shows that our approach is reasonably precise and can be adopted for practical applications. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/rohitshantarampatil/sql-nlp.

Transfer learning technologies have not been well explored in the scientific domain of audio signal processing. This chapter provides a brief introduction to transfer learning followed by a generic tool for feature space adaptation, which comprises a fundamental step toward the successful application of such technologies.

Optimization problems frequently appear in any scientific domain. Most of the times, the corresponding decision problem turns out to be NP-hard, and in these cases genetic algorithms are often used to obtain approximated solutions. However, the difficulty to approximate different NP-hard problems can vary a lot. In this paper, we analyze the usefulness of using genetic algorithms depending on the approximation class the problem belongs to. In particular, we use the standard approximability hierarchy, showing that genetic algorithms are especially useful for the most pessimistic classes of the hierarchy.

To explain the origins of new scientific ideas, historians and philosophers of science point to examples where scientists appear to have drawn analogies between their scientific domain and some very different domain. By contrast, research from the psychology lab suggests that those kinds of analogies are very difficult to obtain in even the simplest situations. To resolve this potential conflict, we examine the analogies that occur in psychology lab group and formal colloquium settings. This approach can be viewed as a crosssectional approximation of an historical analysis. We find that as the setting moves further away from the original discovery, the way different types of analogies appear to be used changes. In particular, analogies between very different domains are never used in reasoning in the lab group, whereas they are frequently used in reasoning in formal colloquium presentations. Yet, we find that analogy between very similar domains remains an important source of new ideas and a method for solving problems in scientific settings.

Mobility of doctoral students is considered a critical factor which contributes to the doctoral graduate research performance and the knowledge transfer. The research productivity of doctoral students is still more critical for those novel research groups which have to overcome several barriers before they reach a reasonable stability in research productivity. Getting started with a novel group could take several years until the group reaches a minimum productivity, depending on the field of study. Besides, internationalization of a novel group means its regular participation in the international research networks in the respective scientific domain. This contribution presents a case study of the impact of international mobility of doctoral students in the global research productivity of the hosting novel research group. The increase in research productivity due to mobility of doctoral students is shown analyzing the evolution of the number of articles published and comparing it to the critical decisions of internationalization taken by the group, suggesting a relationship between both arguments. Results show that the impact of the doctoral mobility reaches 45% of the total productivity in a period of 12 years.

Domain knowledge map, a.k.a., scholarly network, construction as an important method can describe the significant characters of a selected domain. In this research, we will address three fundamental problems for scholarly network generation. Firstly, two different methods will be investigated to associate keywords on the graph: Co-occur Domain Distance and Citation Probability Distribution Distance. Secondly, this paper will construct domain (core journals and conference proceedings) knowledge and domain referral (domain citation) scholarly networks, and propose a novel method to integrate those graphs by optimizing the nodes and their linkage. Finally, the paper will propose an innovative method to evaluate the accuracy and coverage of scholarly networks based on training keyword oriented Labeled-LDA model and validate different domain or domain referral graphs.

As a typical representative of research in various scientific domains, methods and models always play as a critical role. These methods and models are numerous and heterogeneous, and usually need to be manually sorted out and classified systematically, which is often time-consuming and laborious. Therefore, this paper proposes a solution for methods and models classification automatically based on community detection algorithms in the scientific domain. The co-words network extracted from the literature data could be divided into different communities based on different detection algorithms. Meanwhile, the keywords of methods and models are automatically divided into different categories. As a case study, this paper analyzed the literature data in the human resource management (HRM) domain. We compared the results obtained by six community detection algorithms, such as Louvain, Girvan Newman (GN), with technical indicators and expert validation. At last, the keywords of the methods and models in the HRM domain classified into 12 communities. The results shown that our research provides an effective method that can effectively classify the methods and models automatically in the scientific domain.

As a cross-disciplinary scientific domain, a great deal of research on landscape geochemistry has been conducted since its establishment. However, the used methods lack the ability of revealing the...

This paper studies the combined effect of affiliation with prestigious universities, underwriters, and venture capitalists on the valuation of biotech ventures at IPO and their post-IPO performance. We argue that affiliation to a prestigious university provides the affiliated firm with a quality signal in the scientific domain. The pure quality signaling effect of the affiliation is isolated from the substantive benefits it provides by performing a difference-in-difference approach based on the scientific reputation of scientists in firms' upper echelons. The signal is stronger the weaker is the scientific reputation of scientists of the focal IPO-firm and is additive to those provided by prestigious venture capitalists and underwriters. Results for a sample of 254 European biotech ventures that went through an IPO between 1990 and 2009 confirm our predictions.

Dendrimers and dendrimer-based delivery systems are potential biomedicines in the rapidly growing field of nanomedicine. At present, dendrimers are drawing attention in the scientific domain due to their unique structural features, physiological properties and biological attributes. These multifunctional nanomaterials provide unique platforms for targeting, imaging, diagnostics and theranostics. The rationale of this article is to offer insight into the pulmonary delivery of these multifunctional nanomaterials. This review examines reports on inhaled dendrimers which have been published in the last few years. The article begins by describing the relevant background knowledge of dendrimers, dendrimer synthesis schemes and their potential advantages as nanomaterials. It progresses to the pulmonary applications of dendrimers, with special emphasis on pressurized metered-dose inhalers (pMDIs), soft mist inhalers (SMI), nebulizers and dry powder inhalers (DPI). Additionally, this review article contains a dedicated section discussing the biocompatibility challenges and clinical outcomes of dendrimer-based nanotherapeutics. In summary, this review is the first comprehensive account of inhaled dendrimers to appear in recent years.

The number of journal articles in the scientific domain has grown to the point where it has become impossible for researchers to capitalize on all findings in their relevant discipline. Information is stored in these articles in a number of ways, including figures that describe important results. In organic chemistry, these figures often present chemical schematic diagrams that graphically define the structures of carbon-based compounds. These diagrams are intuitive for an expert to comprehend, but they are not designed for machines. This work presents ChemSchematicResolver, a software tool that can be used to identify chemical schematic diagrams within the figure of a document, resolve any R-group substituents within them, and convert the resulting diagrams to a machine-readable format in a high-throughput, autonomous fashion. The tool includes a new algorithm that is used to identify relevant diagrams and a mechanism that combines these data with contextual information from the rest of the document for the creation of highly relational databases. It includes support for a variety of general R-group structures, the first time this is available in any open-source chemical schematic diagram extraction tool. It is presented alongside a self-generated evaluation set, on which the most important assessment metric, precision, achieved 83-100% for all assessed areas. The ChemSchematicResolver tool is released under the MIT license and is available to download from www.chemschematicresolver.org.

Spin-polarization can be essential in many cases of vital importance to the procedures of chemical and biological function. Its realization and utilization have been drawing intensively growing attention for over half a century, whereby numerous strategies get developed with related mechanisms proposed. Furthermore, spintronics has evolved as a scientific domain in which efforts are made to better understand the electron's intrinsic quantum properties based on its angular momentum. To date, an effective approach for aligning the electrons’ spin usually employs an external magnetic field, which may not be viable or efficient in all applications. This review emphasizes on the advances of spintronics where the polarization of spin is able to be implemented by other means than an external magnetic field. The key role of chiral structures for filtering the electrons on spin along with the approaches applied to monitor the polarization of spin will get introduced. Moreover, theoretical frameworks rationalizing the experimental results obtained are also presented herein. The thread running through all of these will be the proposal and evolution of Chiral-Induced Spin Selectivity (CISS) effect.

Understanding semantic word shifts in scientific domains is essential for facilitating interdisciplinary communication. Using a data set of published papers in the field of information retrieval (IR), this paper studies the semantic shifts of words in IR based on mining per-word topic distribution over time. We propose that semantic word shifts not only occur over time, but also over topics. The shifts are examined from two perspectives, the topic-level and the context-level. According to the over-time word-topic distribution, stable words and unstable words are recognized. The diverging and converging trends in the unstable type reveal characteristics of the topic evolution process. The context-level shifts are further detected by similarities between word vectors. Our work associates semantic word shifts with the evolving of topics, which facilitates a better understanding of semantic word shifts from both topics and contexts.

Text mining is an emerging topic that advances the review of academic literature. This paper presents a preliminary study on how to review solar irradiance and photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting (both topics combined as “solar forecasting” for short) using text mining, which serves as the first part of a forthcoming series of text mining applications in solar forecasting. This study contains three main contributions: (1) establishing the technological infrastructure (authors, journals & conferences, publications, and organizations) of solar forecasting via the top 1000 papers returned by a Google Scholar search; (2) consolidating the frequently-used abbreviations in solar forecasting by mining the full texts of 249 ScienceDirect publications; and (3) identifying key innovations in recent advances in solar forecasting (e.g., shadow camera, forecast reconciliation). As most of the steps involved in the above analysis are automated via an application programming interface, the presented method can be transferred to other solar engineering topics, or any other scientific domain, by means of changing the search word. The authors acknowledge that text mining, at its present stage, serves as a complement to, but not a replacement of, conventional review papers.

The recent popularization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for use in terrestrial remote-sensing science has brought a class of inexpensive and largely unmeasured set of sensors into the scientific domain. Remote-sensing science demands high-quality data for information production and requires that the radiometric and spectral characteristics of imaging systems are known. This study compared the radiometric and spectral characteristics of 10 imaging systems commonly used in UAV research. From very inexpensive board-level cameras, consumer-grade cameras and purpose built remote-sensing systems were tested. The results show that sensor non-linearity with respect to radiance is a major limitation in producing reliable results. Spectral results demonstrated a degree of similarity between sensors with broad overlapping spectral bands being the norm. Careful attention to radiometric correction and spectral characterization will enhance the quality of the data produced from these systems.

BACKGROUND: Peer review is used to determine what research is funded and published, yet little is known about its effectiveness, and it is suspected that there may be biases. We investigated the variability of peer review and factors influencing ratings of grant applications. METHODS: We evaluated all grant applications submitted to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research between 2012 and 2014. The contribution of application, principal applicant and reviewer characteristics to overall application score was assessed after adjusting for the applicant’s scientific productivity. RESULTS: Among 11 624 applications, 66.2% of principal applicants were male and 64.1% were in a basic science domain. We found a significant nonlinear association between scientific productivity and final application score that differed by applicant gender and scientific domain, with higher scores associated with past funding success and h-index and lower scores associated with female applicants and those in the applied sciences. Significantly lower application scores were also associated with applicants who were older, evaluated by female reviewers only (v. male reviewers only, −0.05 points, 95% confidence interval [CI] −0.08 to −0.02) or reviewers in scientific domains different from the applicant’s (−0.07 points, 95% CI −0.11 to −0.03). Significantly higher application scores were also associated with reviewer agreement in application score (0.23 points, 95% CI 0.20 to 0.26), the existence of reviewer conflicts (0.09 points, 95% CI 0.07 to 0.11), larger budget requests (0.01 points per $100 000, 95% CI 0.007 to 0.02), and resubmissions (0.15 points, 95% CI 0.14 to 0.17). In addition, reviewers with high expertise were more likely than those with less expertise to provide higher scores to applicants with higher past success rates (0.18 points, 95% CI 0.08 to 0.28). INTERPRETATION: There is evidence of bias in peer review of operating grants that is of sufficient magnitude to change application scores from fundable to nonfundable. This should be addressed by training and policy changes in research funding.

In the philosophy of science, we can consider debates about the nature of non-causal explanations in general (e.g. Reutlinger, Saatsi 2018; Lange 2017) and then especially those in the life sciences (e.g. Huneman, 2018; Kostic 2020). These debates are accompanied by the development of a new mechanism that is becoming the major response to the nature of scientific explanation in the life sciences (e.g. Craver, Darden 2013; Craver 2006); and also by the development of a design explanation (e.g. Eck, Mennes 2016) that represents a modern variant of a functional explanation. In this paper, we will methodically: 1. evaluate the plurality of explanatory strategies in contemporary science (chapter 2). 2. describe the mechanical philosophy and mechanistic explanation (Glennan 2016; Craver, Darden 2013, etc.) (chapter 3). 3. explicate the role of mechanisms in code biology (Barbieri 2015, 2002, etc.) and its relation to the new mechanism (chapter 4). 4. fulfill the main goal of the paper – to apply mechanistic explanations in code biology (Barbieri 2019, etc.) and to apply their suitability for this scientific domain (chapter 5).

Research based on system justification theory has shown that women's self-perceptions may be altered by the motivation to justify the system and its inequalities. Self-perceptions being built on past experiences, the present study aimed to explore how system justification motivation induced through a system dependency manipulation may alter both women's recall of autobiographical memories and their behavior. Women who were led to feel highly dependent on the social system perceived themselves as more competent and recalled memories of higher competence in the verbal domain compared with the negatively stereotyped scientific domain. Women's behavioral choices (between doing a verbal or a math exercise) also revealed a higher preference for the gender stereotype-consistent verbal exercise in the high-system dependency condition, as compared with the low-system dependency condition. These results suggest that gender stereotypes may not only satisfy self- or group-serving motivation but also the need to perceive the system in a positive light.

The Sun is the source of life in our solar system. Our species has observed it for thousands of years without noticing changes in it. However, since the end of the Middle Ages, we have started to notice that upon closer inspection—preferably not done with the naked eye, because looking at the Sun damages the retina—the Sun does show variability. Carrington, who brought the study of the Sun into the scientific domain, observed in September 1859 what is still the most powerful solar eruption ever recorded. Since then, we have discovered that the Sun is in fact very active and its activity varies over short and long time scales. In this chapter, we review the structure of the Sun and its atmosphere, and we analyze the variations observed. In doing so, we use some state-of-the-art tools for solar investigation that are available online not only to scientists but also to the general public.

Molecular pathology is an essential part of pathology complementing conventional morphological tools to obtain a correct integrated diagnosis with appropriate assessment of prognosis and prediction of response to therapy, particularly in cancer. There is a concern about the situation of molecular pathology in some areas of Europe, namely, regarding the central role of pathologists in assessing somatic genomic alterations in cancer. In some countries, there are attempts that other laboratory medicine specialists perform the molecular analysis of somatic alterations in cancer, particularly now when next generation sequencing (NGS) is incorporated into clinical practice. In this scenario, pathologists may play just the role of "tissue providers," and other specialists may take the lead in molecular analysis. Geneticists and laboratory medicine specialists have all background and skills to perform genetic analysis of germline alterations in hereditary disorders, including familial forms of cancers. However, interpretation of somatic alterations of cancer belongs to the specific scientific domain of pathology. Pathologists are necessary to guarantee the quality of the results, for several reasons: (1) The identified molecular alterations should be interpreted in the appropriate morphologic context, since most of them are context-specific; (2) pre-analytical issues must be taken into consideration; (3) it is crucial to check the proportion of tumor cells in the sample subjected to analysis and presence of inflammatory infiltrate and necrosis should be monitored; and 4) the role of pathologists is crucial to select the most appropriate methods and to control the turnaround time in which the molecular results are delivered in the context of an integrated diagnosis. Obviously, there is the possibility of having core facilities for NGS in a hospital to perform the sequence analysis that are open to other specialties (microbiologists, geneticists), but also in this scenario, pathologists should have the lead in assessing somatic alterations of cancer. In this article, we emphasize the importance of interpreting somatic molecular alterations of the tumors in the context of morphology. In this Position Paper of the European Society of Pathology, we strongly support a central role of pathology departments in the process of analysis and interpretation of somatic molecular alterations in cancer. The proposal for this position paper was approved by the Publication Task Force of the European Society of Pathology (ESP), and this approval was subsequently verified by the Council of ESP. We thank Mar Varela, Dolors Cuevas, Ana Velasco and Jordi Temprana for help in writing the manuscript.

Exploration of document collections is a complex task. One way to do this is to cluster the initial collection hierarchically and then label each cluster with a set of extracted terms. Good labelling should help exploration. We focus on the scientific domain and particularly on collections of abstracts of articles. Abstract is commonly a brief of a paper that outlines the research area, the challenge, the proposed solution and the results; so it could be used instead of a full article despite the difficulties related to its shortness. In this paper, we propose a new method HCBasic for labelling hierarchical clusters. It is particularly tuned for articles' abstracts and compared to three other methods: MTWL, hierMTWL and ComboBasic. To evaluate the quality of the labelling algorithms we did A/B testing in which eight volunteers searched for the articles that they were familiar with in the labelled cluster tree. We show that there is no single winner in terms of quality, and different methods are preferable in different cases.

Folk nomenclature is habitually established for species that have attained high utilitarian and cultural significance by custodians of such plants worldwide. Such folk names assigned to species often carry etymological values such as therapeutic effects, morphological features, mythical connotations, and their allegorical values. This research sought to unveil the etymology in folk nomenclatures of Sphenostysis stenocarpa (Hosch ex A. Rich) Harms (African Yam Bean). Three hundred and fifty respondents were randomly selected from 13 local communities in Ebonyi State in South-eastern, Nigeria. Data were collected through oral interviews with semi-structural questionnaires, along with focused group discussions. Analysis of data was carried out using simple statistical methods involving frequencies and percentages. The results recorded ten folk nomenclatures assigned to this species in seven dialects affiliated to cultural values within these communities. Etymologically, the results also revealed that out of the ten folk names of AYB cryptic connotations, five reflected their trust in the gods that answered their prayers, two were attributed to the healing potentials inherent in this crop for medicine, three names were associated with the seeds, while one referred to feminist attachment to the crop, another to its resilience/ adaptability to climatic stress and one as a sustainer of farmers. Considering that folk nomenclature is based mainly on qualitative data and the information outside the scientific domain, they are nonetheless highly valued because they are based on long-term interactions, utilization and observations of the custodians of these natural resources. However, these data are equally vulnerable to erosion if not properly documented and conserved for posterity.

Terrestrial ecosystem services (ES) are vulnerable to land use and land cover changes (LULCC). These changes are triggered by different drivers of change (e.g., economic, social, political, environmental - climate change). Understanding the potential future LULCC is an effective way to anticipate the impacts on ES supply. In recent years, some researchers applied different spatial modelling methods to assess the potential LULCC future impacts on ES supply, but so far, no systematic review was carried out. This work aims to do a bibliographic review about future LULCC and their implications on ES supply (provisioning, regulating, and cultural services). After a rigorous bibliographic review, we identified 957 papers. However, only 79 papers meet the criteria to be used in the review. The results showed that (i) the studies have been mainly focused on Asia (55.70%) and Europe (17,72%); (ii) the most common and extensively used models to project future LULCC were cellular automata (30.86%), CLUE-S model (8.64%) and Land Change Modeler (8.64%); and (iii) the most used methods to assess future impacts on ES were the InVEST model (24.04%), and equations used in previous works (12.5%). These studies were mainly focused on measuring future impacts on provisioning (44.11%) and regulating services (43.59%). Also, most of the works lack external validation. The diversity of studies evaluated allowed to recognise gaps and outline insights into the current scientific research on this scientific domain, representing an essential contribution to the current state of knowledge by supporting both practitioners and scientists.

O corpo docente dos cursos de Tecnologia em Radiologia é formado majoritariamente por Bacharéis e Tecnólogos, estes professores não têm em sua graduação, disciplinas voltadas à docência, portanto não são, profissionalmente, preparados para atuarem como professor na sua formação inicial. Dessa forma, é comum que dificuldades surjam no processo ensino-aprendizagem, especialmente no início da atividade docente. Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo identificar as necessidades formativas para desenvolvimento de práticas didático-pedagógicas de professores dos cursos de Tecnologia em Radiologia, analisando e refletindo sobre o perfil destes docentes relacionando ao processo ensino-aprendizagem emergentes das suas práticas em sala de aula. Trata-se de uma revisão bibliográfica, onde procurou-se entender o perfil dos docentes dos cursos de Tecnologia em Radiologia e associar às suas práticas docentes e necessidades formativas. Foi realizado um estudo a partir de artigos publicados nas bases de dados Scielo, Lilacs e Pubmed no período 1998 a 2020 no idioma português, a partir da combinação dos descritores: Docente, Formação Inicial, Formação Pedagógica, Práticas Didático-pedagógicas, Processo Ensino-aprendizagem. Observou-se que o conhecimento pedagógico isoladamente não consegue tornar o processo ensino-aprendizado eficaz, uma vez que o domínio técnico e científico colabora ativamente com a construção das bases tecnológicas repassadas aos discentes. O professor do curso de Tecnologia em Radiologia precisará contemplar conhecimento científico, técnico, prático e pedagógico para aprimorar o desempenho em seu trabalho docente. É importante que o professor prossiga na formação continuada e faça um aprofundamento teórico-metodológico dos conhecimentos em sua formação profissional além da aquisição de conhecimentos pedagógicos.

In the scientific domain, millions of research papers in many different languages are published throughout the globe every year. This causes not only information overload, but because of the language barrier, researchers might not understand or even find articles that could be relevant for their work. Therefore, in the field of psychology, the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID) and its partners have created PubPsych ( https://www.pubpsych.eu/ ), an open access vertical search engine for psychological literature, tests, treatment programs and research data (metadata, not the content itself). We discuss the motivation for creating the system, design decisions, connected problems and our solutions, especially concerning multilingual information.

Research and development in the biosensors for medical applications remain a focused area benefiting industry, society and knowledge production alike. The framework established is conducive to innovation and rapid assimilation of technological change. At the advent of nanotechnology, the various biosensor classes have been benefited in different ways, scales and rates. This paper studies the nanotechnology-driven shifting of the biosensor innovation system towards new concepts and the broadening, in depth and extent, of its science base. The scientific domain of (nano)biosensors has been studied using a roadmapping framework, especially developed to handle the dynamics and scopes of academic research. The results indicate that the sector seized the opportunities that nanotools offered to solve technology problems and revisit old concepts for optimizing the traditional platforms. Yet, the ability to control nanoeffects fuels a new transition towards bioelectronic integration that sets entirely new horizons for future trajectories.

This study aimed at identifying the leadership and management characteristics of volleyball coaches in Jordan from the perspective of the players according to the variables of (the club and the training age). The sample of study was chosen randomly. It consisted of 94 players and constituted about 78% of the total population. The researchers used the descriptive approach with its survey image. The scale of the Leadership and management characteristics was used. The scale consisted of 43 items which were distributed to four domains (The personal domain, the professional domain, the social domain and the scientific domain). The means, standard deviations, One-Way Anova and Scheffe test for multiple comparisons were used. The results of study showed that the leadership and management characteristics among the coaches of volleyball were of a high degree. The study results also showed that there are statistically significant differences in the leadership and management characteristics for the responses of the players with regard to the variable of training age in favor of (less than 5 years). The researchers recommends about the necessity of using the leadership and management characteristics of the coaches when planning for the training courses, as well as putting them within the content of the programs for promoting the coaches in the field of volleyball.

We examined the development of interest in first-year university students in a lower secondary school teachers’ program as well as connections between learners’ belief systems and interest. Students’ mathematics-related belief systems include their personal understanding of the nature of mathematics as a scientific domain (in the present study: aspects of process, application, schema, and formalism). Data (N = 92) on beliefs and mathematical interest were collected at the beginning of the first (T1) and second terms (T3). In addition, students’ interest was assessed at the ends of both terms (T2 and T4). Results showed that (1) students’ interest in mathematics remained stable during the first academic year, (2) application beliefs showed positive correlations with interest in the first but not the second term, and (3) application beliefs at the beginning of the term predicted students’ interest at the end of term in the second but not the first term; moreover, process, schema, and formalism beliefs did not predict interest in the first or in the second term. We discuss these results with respect to the influence of belief systems on interest but also with respect to possible effects that are based on differences between school mathematics and university mathematics.

The politics of conception in India can be traced back to the birth of the world's first test-tube baby in 1978. This article focuses on an incident where scientists and clinicians were involved in a heated contest over ascription of intellectual credit for the birth of the first test-tube baby in India. It traces the controversy surrounding claims and counter-claims within the medical domain that appear to have emerged as a corollary to the rapid expansion of assisted conception in India. The article emphasizes the fact that this contentious issue played out largely in the media and shows that the generation of scientific credibility and reward is produced and ascribed both inside and outside the scientific domain. In so doing the article offers a glimpse into the unique ability of cultural activity to shape and recast the perception of science and scientific outcomes.

Beyond intuitions: A biological interpretation of cognition How can the study of cognition become an ordinary science that is intrinsically connected to the other natural sciences? Since the cognitive revolution in and around psychology, ‘cognition’ has become the standard term to refer to the processes that make us – humans – intelligent. The interpretation of this cognitive domain and cognition itself, however, has never become really clear. First, cognition is a mental concept that is conceptually linked with theories and ideas that are not self-evidently connected to the world as described by the natural sciences. In addition, cognition tends to remain a phenomenon that we recognize ‘on sight’, without the need for an explicit demarcation criterion, a ‘mark of the cognitive’. In this paper, I abandon this intuition-based demarcation of cognition and propose an unequivocal biological one. This biological demarcation does not build on our current intuitions concerning cognition and in any many cases will not be in line with these. As a consequence, the direct conceptual connection between cognition and the traditional notion of ‘mind’ will be cut and the term ‘cognition’ will acquire a fundamentally different meaning. However, the term ‘cognition’ can and will be maintained, as with its new meaning it still refers to the processes that make us humans – as well as other organisms – intelligent: it still covers the scientific domain that its original form was meant to cover, although now with some additional areas. The proposal states that cognition is to be interpreted as the interactions between organisms and their environments together with the organismal structures specifically involved in this interaction. This proposal gives a specific material foundation to cognitive phenomena, which can act as the empirical basis for existing and new cognitive theory formation that will place human cognition unequivocally in the wider framework of living organizations. Some of the implications of the proposal will be further illustrated by differentiating between agents and organisms. When organisms rather than agents form the focal point for cognition, due consideration can be given to ongoing research on intelligence in bacteria, plants and fungi, as well as research concerning the fundamental roles played by nervous systems in animals.

Research in computational science (CS) poses several challenges, stemming both from the scientific domain being studied and the sophisticated IT infrastructures used by the CS researchers. IT infrastructures typically consist of the latest and most powerful supercomputers, high-performance networks and high-capacity data storage services that are provided, developed and operated by IT experts who do not have in-depth understanding of the CS problems being studied. This "standard service approach" has been a very useful tool for streamlining the interaction between IT and application domain users. However, in many cases it has started to become a limiting factor that may prevent realizing the full potential of the IT services when tackling the most challenging CS research topics. The partnership initiative pi(CS) established at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) aims at transforming the relationship between Computational Scientists and IT service providers from a service-centered approach to an integrated partnership. The partnership between CS researchers and IT service provider allows IT services to better address the requirements of CS in an optimized and efficient manner. In addition to describing this model and its background and results achieved so far, the paper sheds some light on future development and assessment activities. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The field of nanomedicine is a rapidly growing scientific domain. Nanomedicine encompasses a diverse number of active pharmaceutical ingredients. Submissions of Investigational New Drugs and New Drug Applications have risen dramatically over the last decade. There are over 50 nanomedicines approved for use by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Because of the fundamental role pharmacists will play in therapeutic and administrative decisions regarding nanomedicines, it is imperative for future pharmacists to gain exposure early in their training to this rapidly evolving class of drugs. This commentary describes nanomedicines, discusses current regulatory challenges, and provides recommendations for judicious incorporation of nanomedicine topics into the Doctor of Pharmacy curriculum based on emerging pharmaceutical and clinical science applications.

The volume of published papers provided by the scientific community has increased over the last years in a drastic way. This fact has led to having a considerable growth of the topics covered by different publications. Despite topics under discussion on these publications were usually regarded as cutting edge subjects when released in conferences and journals, the restless evolution of science may have faded their relative importance away over the years. This issue undoubtedly poses big challenges to those researchers interested in gathering information to enrich their own background. Consequently, the development of a system able to automatically organize and provide relevance to scientific papers should play a crucial role to address the aforementioned problem. In this paper, the Webelance framework is presented. It makes use of a lexicon and Machine Learning techniques to accomplish these tasks. It has been built by using specific metrics for the scientific domain to measure the relative importance of papers. Several experiments using more than 50 , 000 articles focused on the medicine domain have been addressed to illustrate the viability of the proposal. The obtained results both confirm the usability of the system and its good performance.

Collaborative knowledge creation processes have received increasing attention in recent years, both in the scientific domain as well as in the policy realm. Collaborations in Research & Development (R&D) – in the literature often referred to as R&D networks – have become key for successfully generating new knowledge as a basis for innovation. Although a strong interconnectedness between national R&D actors supports the intra-regional knowledge diffusion, aiming for international embeddedness is an important pillar of policy and corporate strategies, since it allows firms to tap into different sources of knowledge. Hence, we propose an empirical agent-based simulation model of knowledge creation in a characteristic knowledge-driven industry, namely the semiconductor sector. With a special emphasis on collaborative knowledge creation, we investigate the effects of R&D networks on knowledge output, especially accounting for the role of international collaboration links.

In the post-SOX era, research on audit committees (AC) has evolved into a distinct scientific domain devoted to the analysis of corporate oversight and its effect on financial reporting and internal control quality. Numerous studies have contributed to the identification of potential determinants of AC effectiveness and possible performance effects associated with the AC oversight process. Nevertheless, the scarcity of studies that offer a holistic view on AC research impedes a profound understanding of the antecedent elements and emerging themes in this field within recent decades. Applying a combination of citation, co-citation, and social network analysis to 92 articles published in six leading accounting journals, we comprehensively map the intellectual structure of AC research. Thus, we contribute to the literature by offering insights on major publication trends, chronological developments, and underlying relationships between different strands of the AC literature as part of the accounting discipline. Our findings reveal a high level of homogeneity in AC-related studies published in the leading accounting journals, especially when it comes to sample selection and methodological approaches.

Liposomes and liposomes-based drug delivery systems are promising carriers in the rapidly evolving field of nanomedicine. Liposomes are receiving growing attention in the scientific domain owing to their distinctive structural characteristics, physiological features and biological properties. These versatile lipid vesicles represent unique platforms for drug delivery, targeting, diagnostics, imaging as well as theranostics. The main objective of the present article is to present insights into the pulmonary delivery of these versatile cargos for nanomedicine. Inhalable liposomes for pulmonary delivery present unique advantages as they are formulated from phospholipids similar to endogenous pulmonary surfactant. The article begins by unfolding the important background information about liposomes and their key advantages as nanomaterials. In the subsequent section, various liposomes and proliposome formulations are summarized with a special emphasis on their physicochemical properties, aerosolization performance and in-vivo aerodynamic behavior. Additionally, this article includes a segment devoted to recent status on clinical trials of liposomal formulations for treating pulmonary diseases. Moreover, the present article contains a section dedicated to the market potential and scientific challenges related to inhalable liposomes. In summary, this article is a comprehensive report of inhalable liposomes to appear in recent years.

Nanomaterials and nanotechnologies (NNs) have been shaping the wastewater treatment process unprecedentedly. Bibliometric methods are regarded as an indispensable light to guide direction in scientific domain. The present study aims to investigate the role of NNs in wastewater treatment with bibliometric techniques based on SCI databases from 1997 to 2016. Results showed that China (962), USA (324) and Iran (140) are the most productive countries. Chinese Academy of Sciences (149), Tongji University (49), and Harbin Institute of Technology (40) from China are the most contributive institutions. China and USA played central roles in cross-national cooperation, but the top three Chinese institutions displayed limited vitality in overseas communication. Rsc Advances (108) was the most productive journal followed by Desalination (97) and Desalination and Water Treatment (96). The research direction of NNs in wastewater treatment was bound up with new NNs. Novel preparation methods and nanostructures were powerful impetus for its progress. Nanomaterials like graphene, nanotube, magnetic nanoparticle, and silver nanoparticle were hotpots in this field. Current and potential application of NNs in wastewater treatment as well as challenges were reviewed based on bibliometric results. This study also provided researchers future-minded advice about research topic selection. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s11671-018-2649-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Synthesising arguments motivate changes to the conceptual tools, theoretical structure, and evaluatory framework employed in a given scientific domain. Recently, a broad coalition of researchers has put forward a synthesising argument in favour of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (‘EES’). Often this synthesising argument is evaluated using a virtue-based approach, which construes the EES as a wholesale alternative to prevailing practice. Here I argue this virtue-based approach is not fit for purpose. Taking the central concept of niche construction as a case study, I show that an agenda-based approach better captures the pragmatic and epistemological goals of the EES synthesising argument and diagnoses areas of empirical disagreement with prevailing practice.

The problem of how to select suitable peer-review experts for scientific evaluation has been recognized by scientific communities around the world. This paper proposes the use of Scientometrics methods such as the scientific domain ontology and co-word analysis to implement the principle of intelligent information processing on the problem in order to find the "small" scientific communities with the same target systems of scientific concepts and research contexts as those to be evaluated and hence in turn to select the most "knowledgeable" and suitable peer-review experts for the evaluation.

A further refinement to our previously published “target-bound pharmacophore modeling approach” is reported herein. Instead of relying on “random” pharmacophores—which is the most commonly used approach in literature—phrmacophoric “hot spots” were selected based on highly contributing amino acid residues to inhibitor binding. Highly contributing amino acid residues were identified based on energy footprints obtained from molecular dynamics and thermodynamic calculations. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt in the literature to use this approach. Previously, docking energy was used to create energy-based pharmacophores, however, docking scores, in many cases, are artifacts and questionable. Hence, we introduce the concept of per-residue energy decomposition footprints obtained from molecular dynamics ensembles in order to create more reliable pharmacophore modeling which can be implemented in drug discovery workflows. The purpose of this work is not to compare the validity of this approach against previously reported ones, but rather to introduce a more rational approach to the scientific domain. Further computational and experimental validations would be advised. Herein, we applied the developed protocol in order to identify novel BACE1 inhibitors and results were validated against experimentally determined inhibitors with known activity against BACE1. This protocol was found promising to identify hits with higher binding affinities when compared against experimentally determined inhibitors. Other post-dynamic binding analysis for the identified hits was also presented in this report as a roadmap towards the design of potential BACE1 inhibitors as anti-Alzheimer Agents.