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Many studies have shown that childhood circumstances can have long term consequences that persist until old age. To better understand the transmission of early life circumstances, this paper analyses the effects of health and financial situation during childhood on quality of life after retirement as well as the mediating role of later life health, educational level, and income in this association. Moreover, this study is the first to compare these pathways across European regions. The analyses are based on data of 13,092 retirees aged ≥ 60 and ≤ 85 years from the fifth wave of the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with full information on childhood and later life measures of health, educational level, financial situation, and quality of life as well as relevant covariates. Five European regions are studied: Central-Western Europe (Austria, Germany), Central-Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia), Northern Europe (Denmark, Sweden), Southern Europe (Italy, Spain), and Western Europe (Belgium, France, The Netherlands). Path analysis is used to identify the direct and indirect effects of childhood measures on quality of life. We find retirees’ quality of life to be associated with childhood finances and health in all five European regions. While both the direct and indirect effects of childhood health are rather moderate and homogeneous across regions, especially the direct effects of childhood finances on quality of life after retirement display a distinct North-South gradient being strongest in Southern Europe. Potential explanations for the regional variations are differences in the countries’ welfare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following academic globalization, successful integration into the international research community is a fundamental interest for all participating countries. The success of these internationalization processes, however, are often under scrutiny, and the results are rarely unequivocal. This holds true for Central and Eastern Europe, which usually is described as a semiperipheral region of global knowledge production. Analyzing the publication and citation indices of 365 Hungarian social scientists in one national (Hungarian Scientific Bibliography) and two global (Scopus, Google Scholar) databases, we explicate the current international impact of Hungarian academic research while exploring pivotal factors behind the major differences between databases. Our results indicate that Hungarian scholars lag behind their peers in neighboring countries, necessitating effective policy measures. To this end, the analysis recommends the use of standardized global publication databases instead of national datasets, while still acknowledging the shortcomings of the latter in research assessment protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eastern Europe has been the object of orientalising discourses portraying it as a region defined by problematic statehood, underdevelopment, and nationalist‐religious warmongering. These discourses have produced 19th‐century mental maps of Europe contrasting a perceived 'core' European area ending with the Frankish Empire's eastern border and coinciding with later Enlightenment influence and an indistinct 'Orient' or 'East', bypassed by "modernising" processes. This contribution focuses on (post‐)Cold War discourses in social science and shows how these discourses re‐produce 19th‐century layers of orientalising map‐making and keep East‐West differences alive by tracing deficient, fragile or repressive state institutions back to alleged Eastern European 'mentalities'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last twenty years, Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL) became a leading database and repository offering a highly specialized and comprehensive collection of full text indexed documents in the fields of Humanities and Social Science publications from and about Central and Eastern Europe. Journal articles, eBooks and Grey Literature items are included in 50+ languages, allowing access to the primary source in one repository and fostering the language diversity in academic research and publishing. The dissemination process of the content in CEEOL includes the following discovery systems: Google Scholar, ProQuest´s Serial Solutions, Summon, Primo Central, Alma, EBSCO´s EDS Discovery Service and Knowledge Base, TDNet and OCLC. The CEEOL´s partnership with Clarivate Analytics allows Web of Science editors having access to the CEEOL platform for easier analysis, selection and indexing of CEEOL journals that interest the Web of Science community. Institutional subscribers (states’, universities’, institutes’ libraries, etc.) worldwide appreciate CEEOL for providing researchers, scholars, students, librarians and library patrons the access to indexed and archived Journals, eBooks and Grey Literature documents from and about Central and Eastern Europe by leading academic and scholarly publishers. The Bulgarian collection of journals and books holds a special place in CEEOL due to the high quality of scientific content and the depth and the completeness of the digital archives of the Bulgarian periodicals. CEEOL is a unique source of information for the development of Bulgarian humanities and social sciences for the past over 30 years, and that source could be used more widely in Bulgaria for supporting this development in the future. The study uses a comparative approach and analyzes the results of some of the business analytics tools of the CEEOL system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Eastern European countries have some of the highest rates of cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, much of which cannot be adequately accounted for by conventional CVD risk factors. Psychosocial and socioeconomic factors may affect risk of CVD, but relatively few studies on this issue have been undertaken in Eastern Europe. We investigated whether various psychosocial factors are associated with CVD mortality independently from each other and whether they can help explain differences in CVD mortality between Eastern European populations.Methods: Participants were from the Health, Alcohol and Psychological factors in Eastern Europe (HAPIEE) cohort study in Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic, including a total of 20,867 men and women aged 43-74 years and free of CVD at baseline examination during 2002-2005. Participants were followed-up for CVD mortality after linkage to national mortality registries for a median of 7.2 years.Results: During the follow-up, 556 participants died from CVD. After mutual adjustment, six psychosocial and socioeconomic factors were associated with increased risk of CVD death: unemployment, low material amenities, depression, being single, infrequent contacts with friends or relatives. The hazard ratios [HRs] for these six factors ranged between 1.26 [95% confidence interval 1.14-1.40] and 1.81 [95% confidence interval 1.24-2.64], fully adjusted for each other, and conventional cardiovascular risk factors. Population-attributable fractions ranged from 8% [4%-13%] to 22% [11%-31%] for each factor, when measured on average across the three cohorts. However, the prevalence of psychosocial and socioeconomic risk factors and their HRs were similar between the three countries. Altogether, these factors could not explain why participants from Russia had higher CVD mortality when compared to participants from Poland/Czech Republic. Limitations of this study include measurement error that could lead to residual confounding; and the possibilities for reverse causation and/or unmeasured confounding from observational studies to lead to associations that are not causal in nature.Conclusions: Six psychosocial and socioeconomic factors were associated with cardiovascular mortality, independent of each other. Differences in mortality between cohorts from Russia versus Poland or Check Republic remained unexplained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]