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It has been difficult to open up the black box of knowledge production. We use unique international data on the publications, citations, and affiliations of mathematicians to examine the impact of a large, post-1992 influx of Soviet mathematicians on the productivity of their U.S. counterparts. We find a negative productivity effect on those mathematicians whose research overlapped with that of the Soviets. We also document an increased mobility rate (to lower quality institutions and out of active publishing) and a reduced likelihood of producing "home run" papers. Although the total product of the preexisting American mathematicians shrank, the Soviet contribution to American mathematics filled in the gap. However, there is no evidence that the Soviets greatly increased the size of the "mathematics pie." Finally, we find that there are significant international differences in the productivity effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and these international differences can be explained by both differences in the size of the émigré flow into the various countries and in how connected each country is to the global market for mathematical publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors describe the characteristics of papers published in volumes 163 and 164 of the publication. The present several charts related tot he contributions made to the publication, including one categorizing the papers based on type and subject area of research, another on the countries from which the contributions were submitted and one on decisions made for submissions. They commend those that participated in the production of the journal.

The past 10 years have seen a doubling of the number of papers submitted to the Annals, and a 5-fold increase in the number of institutions with access to the journal. Electronic access is now far more important than print access. Papers from British authors dominated the first 20 years of the journal, but the rest of Europe is now more important, with Scandinavia and The Netherlands being the major continental sources. North America is the other major source. For British papers, there has been a big growth in government authors, and a decline in papers from industry and armed forces. From many possible topics, trends are selectively reviewed in: standards and exposure limits; measurement methods and criteria; sampling strategy and statistics; fibres; control banding; dermal exposure; and evaluation of control. For the future, we will continue to have the same aims and standards, but the changes of the past few years, and the growth of new approaches such as open access, have emphasized the difficulty of forecasting. The growth in submissions from countries which we presently regard as ‘developing’, and especially the growth in higher education in China, and the amount of occupational disease there, are bound to have major impacts. Perhaps the English language will not continue to dominate scientific publishing, but in any case an eastward shift in the source of papers must lead to other changes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BACKGROUND Non-invasive selection of developmentally competent human oocytes may increase the overall efficiency of human assisted reproduction and is regarded as crucial in countries where legal, social or religious factors restrict the production of supernumerary embryos. The purpose of this study was to summarize the predictive value for IVF success of morphological features of the oocyte that can be obtained by light or polarized microscopic investigations. METHODS Studies about oocyte morphology and IVF/ICSI outcomes were identified by using a systematic literature search. RESULTS Fifty relevant articles were identified: 33 analysed a single feature, 9 observed multiple features and investigated the effect of these features individually, 8 summarized the effect of individual features. Investigated structures were the following: meiotic spindle (15 papers), zona pellucida (15 papers), vacuoles or refractile bodies (14 papers), polar body shape (12 papers), oocyte shape (10 papers), dark cytoplasm or diffuse granulation (12 papers), perivitelline space (11 papers), central cytoplasmic granulation (8 papers), cumulus–oocyte complex (6 papers) and cytoplasm viscosity and membrane resistance characteristics (2 papers). None of these features were unanimously evaluated to have prognostic value for further developmental competence of oocytes. CONCLUSIONS No clear tendency in recent publications to a general increase in predictive value of morphological features was found. These contradicting data underline the importance of more intensive and coordinated research to reach a consensus and fully exploit the predictive potential of morphological examination of human oocytes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents a list of books on biological science, including Antipredator Defenses in Birds and Mammals, by Tim Caro.

The article discusess steps for processing papers for the publication within the perodical, along with internal peer-review process.

Cites several research papers for publication in the "Geophysical Journal International," publication. "Poroelastic fluid effects on shear for rocks with soft anisotropy," by J. G. Berryman; "New constraints on subduction zone structure in northern Cascadia," by T. Nicholson, M. Bostock and J. F. Cassidy; "3-D seismic endoscopy: multiscale analysis and dynamic azimuthal filtering of borehole waves," by H. P. Valero and G. Saracco; "An updated global earthquake catalogue for stable continental regions: reassessing the correlation with ancient rifts," by S. M. Schulte and W. D. Mooney.

The authors encourages authors to provide full disclosure, full citation and full discussion of their related work following their discovery of sibling manuscripts in 2003. They offer some suggestions as to why authors fail to offer such disclosure. These include the responsibility of authors to offer results as coherent and integrated as possible, clear instruction for authors to provide related papers with their submission and that the practice was committed to increase the possibility that a paper will be accepted for publication.

The article reports on appointments and nominations in the journal's editorial panel and on the status of submissions. Robin Henderson was succeeded by Christian Robert as joint editor. A number of associate editors were appointed including Paul Fearnhead and Piotr Fryzlewicz. From 2005-2006, six papers were accepted while 261 papers were rejected.

The article presents a list of forthcoming research papers appearing in this journal including "Scaling of stagnant-lid convection with Arrhenius rheology and the effects of mantle melting," by Jun Korenaga, "A glassy lowermost outer core," by Vernon F. Cormier and "Iterative generalized cross-validation for fusing heteroscedastic data of inverse ill-posed problems," by Peiliang Xu.

The article presents a list of publications related to geophysics including "Uncertainty in Ocean Mass Trends From GRACE," by Katherine J. Quinn and Rui M. Ponte, "D Nonperiodic Homogenization for the Seismic Wave Equation," by Yann Capdeville, Laurent Guillot and Jean-Jacques Marigo, and "Receiver Function Inversion by Trans-Dimensional Monte Carlo Sampling," by N. Piana Agostinetti and A. Malinverno.

With the rapid development of biomedical sciences, contradictory results on the relationships between biological responses and material properties emerge continuously, adding to the challenge of interpreting the incomprehensible interfacial process. In the present paper, we use cell proliferation on titanium dioxide nanotubes (TNTs) as a case study and apply machine learning methodologies to decipher contradictory results in the literature. The gradient boosting decision tree model demonstrates that cell density has a higher impact on cell proliferation than other obtainable experimental features in most publications. Together with the variation of other essential features, the controversy of cell proliferation trends on various TNTs is understandable. By traversing all combinational experimental features and the corresponding forecast using an exhausted grid search strategy, we find that adjusting cell density and sterilization methods can simultaneously induce opposite cell proliferation trends on various TNTs diameter, which is further validated by experiments. This case study reveals that machine learning is a burgeoning tool in deciphering controversial results in biomedical researches, opening up an avenue to explore the structure–property relationships of biomaterials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the lessons drawn by the Dutch railways in their contacts with the Japanese railway sector over the last two decades. The transfers described in this paper do not result from a thorough problem analysis by policy-makers followed by a conscious policy transfer. Rather they result from largely uncoordinated actions that led to a growing consciousness within the Dutch railway sector of the existence of a useful benchmark located in the Japanese railway practices. The paper attempts to provide an answer to a number of questions: how have these contacts appeared, which factors contributed to or impeded their appearance, which lessons were learned, how are these lessons perceived by the railway sector, how much has been implemented, and is there more to come? To do this, the paper starts by providing an overview of the Dutch railway context, highlighting a few elements that were conducive to more openness for new solutions and presenting the main differences between the Dutch and Japanese institutional contexts, before presenting the contacts that took place, some resulting publications and their main findings. Using an explorative survey method, the paper then presents the perceptions of top and senior representatives of the Dutch railway sector who visited Japan, shedding more light on the perception that the sector currently has of the nature of the Japanese lessons and on the extent to which these are likely to be implemented. The paper then draws some general conclusions about this learning process, the change in stance that took place during the last two decades and on the remaining challenges for further learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an approach for automatic extraction of measured values from the astrophysical literature, using the Hubble constant for our pilot study. Our rules-based model – a classical technique in natural language processing – has successfully extracted 298 measurements of the Hubble constant, with uncertainties, from the 208 541 available arXiv astrophysics papers. We have also created an artificial neural network classifier to identify papers in arXiv which report novel measurements. From the analysis of our results we find that reporting measurements with uncertainties and the correct units is critical information when distinguishing novel measurements in free text. Our results correctly highlight the current tension for measurements of the Hubble constant and recover the 3.5σ discrepancy – demonstrating that the tool presented in this paper is useful for meta-studies of astrophysical measurements from a large number of publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our web submission system, Manuscript Central by ScholarOne, has been in operation since September 1, 2006. The present issue of Microscopy and Microanalysis contains the first paper to appear in print after traversing this system electronically (see the paper by Fuseler et al.). The time elapsed from submission to print publication was under seven months. This is a significant improvement over the old paper-based methods where a manuscript often took more than a year to appear in print. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can one foresee whether young scientists will publish successfully during their careers? For academic biologists on four continents, we evaluated the effects of gender, native language, prestige of the institution at which they received their PhD, the date of their first publication (relative to the year of PhD completion), and their pre-PhD publication record as potential indicators of long-term publication success (10 years post-PhD). Pre-PhD publication success was the strongest correlate of long-term success. Gender, language, and the date of first publication had ancillary roles, with native English speakers, males, and those who published earlier in their career having minor advantages. Once these aspects were accounted for, university prestige had almost no discernable effect. We suggest that early publication success is vital for aspiring young scientists and that one of the easiest ways to identify rising stars is simply to find those who have published early and often. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A paper by Schilling et al. (Am J Epidemiol 2006;164:1141–4) addresses a crucial issue for epidemiologists: limited peer access to questionnaires. This limited access hampers the ability to evaluate and improve the questions used by investigators and, in turn, the quality of some of the self-reported data. The authors of this commentary analyzed recent publications in core epidemiology journals, finding that self-reported data were used in 64% of articles, but key questions were seldom printed in the article (9%), and open access to complete questionnaires (16%) was rarely provided. Only 47% of articles even discussed validation; of these, only 67% actually validated questions used in the study. The authors join Schilling et al. in making recommendations to improve questionnaire access and collaboration. A first step, proposed before, involves investigators posting their questionnaires on a website concurrently with publication of their article. Journal editors should require online access to full questionnaires for published articles and inclusion of key questions within the article when possible. Funding agencies should take the lead in increasing access and collaboration by developing a searchable database. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents information on achievements of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) in the year 1970. The 21st Annual AIBS Meeting was held at Indiana University, where over 950 research papers were presented by members of the 14 professional biological societies participating. An AIBS Conference on Education in Biology was held in 1970. The 2nd AIBS Interdisciplinary Meeting was held at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, June 27 to July 1, 1970. In 1970, the journal "BioScience" was published twice monthly for the first time in its history.

The article discusses the paper from the Commission on Undergraduate Education in the Biological Sciences (CUEBS) Symposium held in the U.S. The paper focuses on the relationship between research participation and good teaching. The publication of CUEBS, "Biology for the Non-Major," has raised questions about the structure of a biology course intended for the nonmajor. It cites that the replies on the questions have been edited into a book to present several perceptions represented in the letters of respondents. The author also stresses that the same technique was applied to address the problem of the assumed relationship that exists between research participation and good teaching.

The article focuses on the life and works of President LaMont C. Cole, Vice-President George L. McNew, and secretary-treasurer Richard S. Cowan, officers of American Institute of Biological Sciences Inc. for 1969. It offers detailed information on their career interests, their contributions in AIBS, and their awards. Also given are their academic achievements and their active participation in the AIBS activities. It states that in various journals, Cole published 75 scientific papers, more than 100 scientific publications by McNew, and 30 scientific papers by Cowan.

In this article, the author thanks all those who have contributed in the success of the journal. He states that the journal's performance continues to improve and mentions about the rise in the number of journals' articles downloaded. He discusses rise in investment in research related to microbial ecology and informs about the efforts put in by the journal's publications department in providing efficient service to the authors and editors.

The authors attempted to catalog the use of procedures to impute missing data in the epidemiologic literature and to determine the degree to which imputed results differed in practice from unimputed results. The full text of articles published in 2005 and 2006 in four leading epidemiologic journals was searched for the text imput. Sixteen articles utilizing multiple imputation, inverse probability weighting, or the expectation-maximization algorithm to impute missing data were found. The small number of relevant manuscripts and diversity of detail provided precluded systematic analysis of the use of imputation procedures. To form a bridge between current and future practice, the authors suggest details that should be included in articles that utilize these procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors compare subgroup analyses as outlined in grant applications and their related publications. Grants awarded by the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) from 2001 onward that were finalized before March 1, 2010, were studied. Of the 79 grant proposals, 50 (63%) were intervention studies, 18 (23%) were diagnostic studies, and 6 (8%) were prognostic studies. Subgroups were mentioned in 49 (62%) grant applications and in 53 (67%) publications. In 20 of the 79 projects (25%), the publications were completely in agreement with the grant proposal; that is, subgroups that were prespecified in the grant proposal were reported and no new subgroup analyses were introduced in the publications. Of the 149 prespecified subgroups, 46 (31%) were reported in the final report or scientific publications, and 143 of the 189 (76%) reported subgroups were based on post-hoc findings. For 77% of the subgroup analyses in the publications, there was no mention of whether these were prespecified or post hoc. Justification for subgroup analysis and methods to study subgroups were rarely reported. The authors conclude that there is a large discrepancy between grant applications and final publications regarding subgroup analyses. Both nonreporting prespecified subgroup analyses and reporting post-hoc subgroup analyses are common. More guidance is clearly needed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using insights from the ‘socio-economics of labour markets’ and building upon critical realist meta-theory, this paper offers the first sketch of a socio-economic model of labour markets as an alternative to the orthodox model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the disparity of the publication of research in developing countries. He states the importance of research in knowing how to manage the prevalence of diseases in developing countries and in contrast, identifies the anomalies that exist in different research reports. He also indicates the review process that editors do for the papers' publication.

The article presents the discussion on retraction of several high-profile medical publications highlighting gaps in peer review. Topics include covering the costs of designing and conducting the research for publication fees; and qualified researchers being identified and matched to manuscripts based on expertise using artificial intelligence-based recruiting systems.

The article presents the author's views on the developments of the journal "Social Problems." The journal now officially begins a new editorship in Washington State University, Vancouver. The author and his editorial team believe that it also comes with a responsibility to preserve core values and practices. According to the author, "Social Problems" has a distinctive identity that includes a commitment to social justice. The author and his colleagues believe that papers published in Social Problems should address an important social problem that should be able to clearly explain the importance of their research as it relates to a social problem or public issue and should be theoretically informed, as well as methodologically sound. The author is thankful to the reviewers and the writers for their scholarly work on critical social issues.

The publishers would like to apologize to the authors of this paper for an error which occurred between proof stage and publication.On page 229, the first column contains the line ‘(total of 11 males)’ between paragraphs two and three, this line should have appeared in the second column after the sentence ‘For analysis purposes, these three groups were finally grouped into two Group A: persons in employment (16 males) and Group B: persons out of employment (five males) and economically inactive persons (six males)’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers news briefs concerning the field of biosciences. U.S. President Ronald Reagan awarded the National Medal of Science to Philip Handler, an American biochemist. William W. Reynolds has been named director of the BioThermal Research Institute. "Economic Incentives for Clean Air" is the title of a recent publication by the Air Pollution Control Association.

The article presents a list of recent publications related to economics. The list here includes, "The Distribution of Wealth"; "The Genesis of Capital"; "Subjective and Objective View of Distribution"; "The Economy of High Wages"; "The Scope of Political Economy"; "Women Wage-Earners: Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future"; "A Social Policy for the Church, and Other Papers on Social Subjects"; "The Labor Movement"; "Labor and the Popular Welfare"; "Peons of the South"; "The Coal Crisis and the Paralysis of British Industry"; "The Problem of the Unemployed"; "The Government and Labor"; "Old Age Pensions"; "The English Poor Law and Old Age"; "The Condition of the Western Farmer, As Illustrated by the Economic History of a Nebraska Township"; "Investigations of Mortgages and Farm and Home Proprietorship in the United States"; "A Short Account of England's Foreign Trade in the Nineteenth Century"; "The Effect on English Trade of the Investment of English Capital Abroad"; "Is Money a Mere Commodity?"; and "Total Utility Standard of Deferred Payments."

The article presents information on the publication of various reports and research papers related to economics and finances in the United States. Some light is thrown upon the question as to the rate at which the subdivision of landed property has gone on in France of late years by M. de Foville, in an article published in the September 1892 issue of the journal "Economiste Français." In the current issue of the journal "Vierteljahrschrit fü Volkswirthschaft," writer Theodor Buck gives an account of the striking accumulations of specie, or its equivalent, made by the Russian government in recent years. The volume of notes outstanding remained stationary until the autumn of 1891, when the expenses called for by the crop failure and general distress led to an additional issue of seventy-five millions. The first part of the Report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, designed to throw light on the effects of tariff legislation, has been issued, and contains an examination of the course of money wages and of retail prices in the twenty-eight months from June 1889, to September 1891.

The article offers information related to the October 2012 issue of the "Forestry: An International Journal of Forest Research." Topics discussed include the publication of the journal five times yearly on behalf of the Great Britain Institute of Chartered Foresters, the types of articles which can be published in the journal, and the people who reviewed the articles in the periodical.