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The study of entropies of hypergroups in scientific disciplines such as chemistry, physics, geometry and coding theory helps us to calculate the chaos of the scientific processes of phenomena. In this respect, different entropies on hypergroups have been defined and their systemic properties have been investigated. This paper introduces the notion of hypernormed entropy on topological hypernormed hypergroups and provides some interesting examples. The study investigates the fundamental properties of this entropy such as invariance under conjugation, invariance under inversion, the logarithmic law, monotonicity for subflows and continuity for direct limits.

Scientific topics vary in popularity over time. In this paper, we model the life cycles of 200 trending topics by fitting the Logistic and Gompertz models to their frequency over time in published abstracts. Unlike other work, the topics we use are algorithmically extracted from large datasets of abstracts covering computer science, particle physics, cancer research, and mental health. We find that the Gompertz model produces lower median error, leading us to conclude that it is the more appropriate model. Since the Gompertz model is asymmetric, with a steep rise followed a long tail, this implies that scientific topics follow a similar trajectory. We also explore the case of double-peaking curves and find that in some cases, topics will peak multiple times as interest resurges. Finally, when looking at the different scientific disciplines, we find that the lifespan of topics is longer in some disciplines (e.g. cancer research and mental health) than it is others, which may indicate differences in research process and culture between these disciplines.

Authorship of a scientific paper is important in recognition of one’s work, and in the academic setting, helps in professional promotion. Conflicting views of authorship have led to disputes and debates in many scientific communities. Addressing ethical issues in medical research and publishing, and conforming to the requirements of international organizations and local research ethics boards (REBs), has become an essential part of the research endeavor. Ethical issues of biomedical authorship have been a matter of debate for years. Authorship problems may involve problems with integrity, including ghost authorship and guest authorship. Some scientific disciplines, such as engineering or social sciences, may not have a firm guideline for authorship criteria; however this article reviews the criteria of authorship recommended by related international organizations of biomedical field and discusses common scenarios that may lead to authorship disputes and misconducts as well as issues related to authorship in multicenter studies. The paper also discusses possible scenarios that might be legitimate to make changes in authorship lists.

Adsorption is a major basic and applied phenomenon in many scientific disciplines. In particular, the design of adsorbents to remove pollutants from wastewater requires advanced knowledge of adsorption isotherms, which are useful tools to identify physicochemical factors that control adsorption performance. Recent modeling of adsorption isotherms has focused on the use of statistical physics. Here, we review the major adsorption isotherm models based on statistical physics. We discuss steric, energetic, and thermodynamic parameters.

The periodic table is one of the best-known systems of classification in science. Because of the information it contains, it raises explanation-seeking questions. Quantum mechanical models of the behaviour of electrons (which describe an electron configuration for each kind of atom) may be seen as providing explanations in response to these questions. In this paper we first address the question ‘Do quantum mechanical models of atoms provide legitimate explanations?’ Because our answer is positive, our next question is ‘Are the explanations provided by quantum mechanical models of atoms mechanistic explanations?’. This question is motivated by the fact that in many scientific disciplines, mechanistic explanations are abundant. Because our answer to the second question is negative, our last question is ‘What kind of explanation do quantum mechanical models of atom provide?’ By addressing these questions, we shed light on the nature of an important type of chemical explanation.

International audience; Our interest is in the development of modeling activities that link knowledge in various mathematical fields and other scientific disciplines. Looking at mathematics education research we highlight the benefits and limitations of "problem-solving" and of approaches that involve translation between the real world and mathematics. Science education seldom takes mathematics into account. Its contribution is the conception of an "empirical referent". Using epistemological studies, we highlight examples of modeling situations supported by a plurality of models and an organization of work that allows students to engage with them. To do this we adopt the theoretical framework of connected workingspaces. A case study shows how students create linkages between the workspaces and the benefits of the connections on their understanding of concepts at stake.; Nous nous intéressons à la conception d’activités de modélisation pour la mise en relation de connaissances dans divers champs des mathématiques et d’autres disciplines scientifiques. En didactique des mathématiques, nous soulignons les apports, mais aussi les limites des approches "problem solving" et "translation entre réalité et mathématiques". La didactique des sciences prend quant à elle peu en compte les mathématiques. Son apport est dans la conception d’un "référent empirique". A partir d’études épistémologiques, nous privilégions des situations de modélisation s’appuyant sur une pluralité de modèles et une organisation du travail des élèves qui leur permette de confronter ces modèles. Nous adoptons pour cela le cadre théorique des espaces de travail connectés. Un exemple de situation montre comment les élèves créent des connexions entre espaces de travail et les apports de ces connexions à leur compréhension des concepts en jeu.

Spatio-temporal data indexed by sampling locations and sampling time points are encountered in many scientific disciplines such as climatology, environmental sciences, and public health. Here, we propose a novel spatio-temporal expanding distance (STED) asymptotic framework for studying the properties of statistical inference for nonstationary spatio-temporal models. In particular, to model spatio-temporal dependence, we develop a new class of locally stationary spatio-temporal covariance functions. The STED asymptotic framework has a fixed spatio-temporal domain for spatio-temporal processes that are globally nonstationary in a rescaled fixed domain and locally stationary in a distance expanding domain. The utility of STED is illustrated by establishing the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimation for a general class of spatio-temporal covariance functions. A simulation study suggests sound finite-sample properties and the method is applied to a sea-surface temperature dataset.

It is relatively easy to state that information retrieval (IR) is a scientific discipline but it is rather difficult to understand why it is science because what is science is still under debate in the philosophy of science. To be able to convince others that IR is science, our ability to explain why is crucial. To explain why IR is a scientific discipline, we use a theory and a model of scientific study, which were proposed recently. The explanation involves mapping the knowledge structure of IR to that of well-known scientific disciplines like physics. In addition, the explanation involves identifying the common aim, principles and assumptions in IR and in well-known scientific disciplines like physics, so that they constrain the scientific investigation in IR in a similar way as in physics. Therefore, there are strong similarities in terms of the knowledge structure and the constraints of the scientific investigations between IR and scientific disciplines like physics. Based on such similarities, IR is considered a scientific discipline.

Open peer review (OPR), where review reports and reviewers’ identities are published alongside the articles, represents one of the last aspects of the open science movement to be widely embraced, although its adoption has been growing since the turn of the century. This study provides the first comprehensive investigation of OPR adoption, its early adopters and the implementation approaches used. Current bibliographic databases do not systematically index OPR journals, nor do the OPR journals clearly state their policies on open identities and open reports. Using various methods, we identified 617 OPR journals that published at least one article with open identities or open reports as of 2019 and analyzed their wide-ranging implementations to derive emerging OPR practices. The findings suggest that: (1) there has been a steady growth in OPR adoption since 2001, when 38 journals initially adopted OPR, with more rapid growth since 2017; (2) OPR adoption is most prevalent in medical and scientific disciplines (79.9%); (3) five publishers are responsible for 81% of the identified OPR journals; (4) early adopter publishers have implemented OPR in different ways, resulting in different levels of transparency. Across the variations in OPR implementations, two important factors define the degree of transparency: open identities and open reports. Open identities may include reviewer names and affiliation as well as credentials; open reports may include timestamped review histories consisting of referee reports and author rebuttals or a letter from the editor integrating reviewers’ comments. When and where open reports can be accessed are also important factors indicating the OPR transparency level. Publishers of optional OPR journals should add metric data in their annual status reports.

We examined whether the publication characteristics of various scientific disciplines exhibit age-related trends. Our analysis was based on two large data sets comprising all major scientific disciplines. Citation data for European Research Council grant holders (ERC, n = 756) were obtained from Google Scholar. Publication data for Hungarian researchers (HUN, n = 2469) were obtained from the Hungarian Scientific Work Archive. The evaluated performance parameters include the number of citations received and the number of high quality first/last author papers published in the last five years. We designated the time between maximum growth and the achieved maximal annual value of total citations as the Golden Age of a researcher. Regarding citation growth, the mean age at the highest growth was 41.75 and 41.53 years for ERC grantees and Hungarian researchers, respectively. Each discipline had different values, with mathematics (38.5 years, ERC) and biology (34.7 years, HUN) having the youngest mean age of highest citation growth and agriculture (45.2 years, ERC) and language sciences (49.9 years, HUN) having the oldest mean age. The maximal growth of publications occurred at 44.5 years, with physics starting first (40.5 years, HUN) and language sciences as last (51.4 years, HUN). Most academic careers require decades to reach their peak and the length of the period of maximum performance varies across disciplines. The most creative time period is rising and is currently in the second half of the forties. Identifying the Golden Age in diverse research careers may be of substantial help in the distribution of grants and tenure positions.

How do scientific disciplines evolve? This is one of the fundamental problems of the dynamics of science. This study confronts this problem here by investigating the evolution of experimental physics, which plays a vital role for the progress of science in society. In particular, the main aim of this article is to analyze the structure and endogenous processes of experimental physics to explain and generalize, whenever possible, the properties of the evolution of applied sciences in the phase of continuous expansion of the universe of science. Empirical analysis here suggests the following properties of the dynamics of science: (a) scientific fission, the evolution of scientific disciplines generates a process of division into two or more research fields that evolve as autonomous entities, creating new disciplines of scientific specialization; (b) ambidextrous drivers of science, the evolution of scientific disciplines by scientific fission is due to scientific discoveries or new technologies; (c) higher growth rates of the scientific production are in new research fields of a scientific discipline rather than old ones; (d) average duration of the growth phase of scientific production in research fields is about 80 years, almost the period of one generation of scholars. Overall, then, this study explains, whenever possible, the relationships that support scientific change of disciplines to develop comprehensive properties of the evolution of science directed to economic, technological and social progress.

The academic world is developing rapidly with many new countries becoming significant contributors to research. One important strategic issue is to ensure that the collaboration network develops at least in the same pace as the academic world is developing. This study proposes a new method to compare countries’ growth in research, thus highlighting that Indonesia, Iran and Pakistan are the countries with the highest growth among all countries with more than 10,000 Scopus publications in 2018. A new indicator for collaboration intensity is also proposed, which makes it easy to check to what extent the collaboration pattern incorporates countries with rapid growth. Using Sweden and Indonesia as examples, the study shows differences on national level as well as between different scientific disciplines. Whereas Sweden’s collaboration is very much focusing on other mature research countries with low growth, Indonesia’s collaboration is including other countries with rapid growth. In terms of policy, the study and the proposed methodology support better-informed strategy decisions as regards the prioritisation of countries for research collaboration. It argues that there is a need for strategies and policy support at different levels, if a more balanced mix of research collaboration is to be obtained. To manage rapid changes, it might be necessary to shift from a mainly reactive development of the collaborations to a more proactive one that fosters links to the rapidly developing research countries.

Lee et al. (2019) recently proposed a number of quantitative modeling techniques and practices culminating with a recommendation for the creation of registered model reports. In addition to increasing transparency, trust, and robustness of modeling practices, registered model reports seem likely to increase the visibility and dissemination of quantitative models to researchers from other scientific disciplines (including other behavioral and non-behavioral sciences). In addition to the recommendations proposed by Lee et al. (2019), interdisciplinary communication and collaboration will be improved if researchers include the function of the quantitative model within registered model reports. Here, the function of a quantitative model refers to the contexts (e.g., questions, data types) and goals (e.g., description, prediction, exploration) surrounding the scientist’s use of a model. Explicitly specifying the function of a model will allow for more accurate and fair tests of quantitative models and appropriate tests of model generalizability to novel research questions.

During the last years, high-energy astrophysics has not been considered at the same level as other scientific disciplines. In doing so, there is a very high risk neglecting the $$\gamma $$-ray energy band that has a strong importance to solve some still open issues. This paper is focused, in particular, on the galactic cosmic ray origin issue, and it shows how only a coexistence of low-energy (MeV–GeV) and high-energy (GeV–TeV) $$\gamma $$-ray instruments can allow us to solve this century-old issue.

The open access (OA) publication model is evolving and gaining support in the international scientific community. However, there is no evidence regarding the open access pathways being used in educational research or regarding the relationship between its subject categories and various scientometric indicators. The objective of this study was to use InCites to analyse documents published in journals from 2010 to 2016 in the SSCI categories of ‘Education and Educational Research’, ‘Education, Scientific Disciplines’ and ‘Education, Special’. The percentage of documents published in the Gold OA model increased gradually over the period studied and was higher than in the Green OA model. ‘Education, Scientific Disciplines’ was the subcategory with the highest percentage of documents published in the Gold OA. There was greater international collaboration on articles and reviews in Gold OA, especially in the pure model (publications in Gold Open Access journals), and the percentage of articles cited was higher in the Green OA and Gold OA models than in a non-OA model. There was no evidence that the Gold OA hybrid was cited more often than Green OA, and both had more impact than Gold OA pure. The Category Normalized Citation Impact values and the presence of documents in first quartile journals were higher in OA than in non-OA models. A more detailed analysis of the percentiles of the most cited publications clearly demonstrates that OA publications dominated the top percentiles of most cited articles to a greater degree than non-OA publications. The ‘Education, Special’ subcategory showed the greatest international collaboration and the highest percentage of cited documents.

The use of microfluidics has benefitted numerous scientific disciplines towards further advancements in sectors such as plant and pollution monitoring, diagnostic systems, detection of pathogenic microorganisms, and detection of harmful substances. Advancements in scientific disciplines are achieved when researchers have access to required materials and equipment. This is true of microfluidic technologies. However, an on-going challenge to widespread access to microfluidic technologies is the expense and complexity of microfluidic fabrication systems. In the last decade, numerous efforts have been realized for the development of microfluidic fabrication methods that do not require a cleanroom facility and other expensive equipment. These fabrication methods typically have varying parameters and restrictions that inhibit the speed of fabrication and customization of microfluidic chip features. The following work explores a straightforward method for rapid fabrication of microfluidic chip systems using a combination of stressed polystyrene sheets and computerized micromilling. A quantitative analysis of the anisotropic shrinking properties of the stressed polystyrene sheet is completed with experimentation on various geometric features. These experiments will aid in future use of this technology. The proposed fabrication method can inexpensively fabricate a flow-based microfluidic gradient mixer in under an hour with inexpensive fabrication equipment.

The issue whether science can be correctly submitted to ethical judgment has been widely debated especially in the 1960s. Those who denied the legitimacy of such a judgment stressed that this would entail an undue limitation of the freedom of science; those who defended such a limitation laid stress on the great dangers that an uncontrolled growth of scientific knowledge has already produced and would continue to produce against humankind. This sterile debate can be settled by recognizing that scientific knowledge can and must be evaluated, as far as its validity is concerned, exclusively through the methodological criteria admitted by the professionals of the single scientific disciplines concerned, and no ethical judgment is pertinent from this point of view. Nevertheless, if we consider science as a particular system of social activities, entailing concrete procedures, conditions and applications, the ethical evaluation of these actions is pertinent and correct. A second question is whether or not the inclusion of these ethical investigations in the specific domain of philosophy of science is correct. If one conceives philosophy of science simply as an epistemology of science consisting in a logical-methodological investigation about the language of scientific theories, this broadening would appear spurious. This view, however, is too narrow and dated: a fully fledged philosophical investigation on the complex phenomenon of science cannot prevent important outlooks and instruments of the philosophical inqujiry (in particular ethics) from legitimately pertaining to the philosophy of science.

Predatory publishing is a major threat to contemporary publishing, as it offers 'to unaware scientist's', a quick open-access publication against fees without peer-review procedures.. Lack of peer-review leads to unethical practices, as plagiarism, publication of unscientific falsified data, and even unsafe clinical practices. As these journals threaten the credibility of academic publishing, significant work has been done from many scientific teams, in the last years, in establishing discriminating criteria between predatory and legitimate publishing. In the present review, we include mechanisms used by predatory editors to convince eager researchers to submit to their journals. We also provide useful links giving information about potential predatory journals and publishers, as well as scholarly writing. Joining the efforts of different scientific disciplines which compiled "green" lists with journals in their field, we conducted a "green" list with genuine orthopaedic research journals based on the directory of open-access journals (DOAJ) and Thomson Reuters journal citation reports. Ninety-six legitimate orthopaedic journals were identified based on the Thomson Reuters journal citation reports. One hundred thirty hits were found on the DOAJ site using the keywords "orthopaedics, orthopedics, sports medicine, musculoskeletal, trauma, traumatology, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, cartilage, bone, hand, shoulder, knee, hip, foot, wound." Twenty-one journals on the DOAJ site occurred overlapping with keywords. Researchers and clinicians in the field of orthopaedics are advised to use all available tools in order to recognize predatory practices and avoid publishing in predatory journals.

Registered reports present a substantial departure from traditional publishing models with the goal of enhancing the transparency and credibility of the scientific literature. We map the evolving universe of registered reports to assess their growth, implementation and shortcomings at journals across scientific disciplines.

In his target article, Mechner provides a bio-behavioral analysis of effects called “aesthetic.” He then examines hundreds of such effects across a wide range of literary, artistic, and scientific disciplines and concludes that they consist of a composite of elements that produce what he calls “surprise-tinged” emotional responses in individuals with an appropriate learning history. In my commentary, I first suggest an operational, or functional, analysis of some of the terms Mechner uses in his analysis, including “surprise, “familiar,” and “priming.” I then provide a brief functional analysis of stimuli we call “aesthetic,” “artistic,” or “beautiful.” In so doing, I use my own history with music and as a musician to address two general questions about behavior we call “aesthetic”: what kinds of responses occur and under what circumstances, and what kinds of learning histories might be responsible for them? Although I identify some problems with Mechner’s interpretation, for example, that he introduces several vague concepts and often opts for explanations that are circular and that do not identify basic behavioral principles, in general I commend him for tackling such a complex topic in such a thorough and thoughtful manner.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the dynamics of cross-disciplinary research in health-related fields as affected by individual and institutional factors. We examine the topics of more than 500,000 doctoral dissertations from U.S. institutions in six major disciplines in 1996–2014. We find that (1) the overall extent of cross-disciplinary studies has remained steady over the years, while there is an increasing trend of cross-disciplinary research between biological sciences and engineering, as well as biological sciences and behavioral sciences, especially in recent years; and (2) at the subject level, the cross-disciplinary research around neuroscience is rapidly increasing, and neuroscience is becoming one of the most important bridges across subjects in various disciplines. A further investigation shows that the tendency to conduct cross-disciplinary neuroscience research is driven by an institutional trend that occurs across various departments, and there is an association between lagged neuroscience funding input and the production of cross-disciplinary neuroscience dissertations. Overall, our results offer new insights into the dynamic nature of cross-disciplinary research in health, the role of topics as bridging different disciplines, and human and funding capital in building the bridges.

Scientific communication relies on clear presentation of data. Logarithmic scales are used frequently for data presentation in many scientific disciplines, including ecology, but the degree to which they are correctly interpreted by readers is unclear. Analysing the extent of log scales in the literature, we show that 22% of papers published in the journal Ecology in 2015 included at least one log-scaled axis, of which 21% were log–log displays. We conducted a survey that asked members of the Ecological Society of America (988 responses, and 623 completed surveys) to interpret graphs that were randomly displayed with linear–linear or log–log axes. Many more respondents interpreted graphs correctly when the graphs had linear–linear axes than when they had log–log axes: 93% versus 56% for our all-around metric, although some of the individual item comparisons were even more skewed (for example, 86% versus 9% and 88% versus 12%). These results suggest that misconceptions about log-scaled data are rampant. We recommend that ecology curricula include explicit instruction on how to interpret log-scaled axes and equations, and we also recommend that authors take the potential for misconceptions into account when deciding how to visualize data. Logarithmic scales are frequently used in ecological data display, but the degree to which they are understood is not clear. Here, the authors survey members of the Ecological Society of America and find that only 56% of respondents correctly interpreted data presented on log–log axes.

We consider the Lane–Emden boundary value problems which appear in chemical applications, biochemical applications, and scientific disciplines. The Lane–Emden problem is transformed into an equivalent integral equation. The optimal homotopy analysis method is used to solve two specific models. The first problem models reaction–diffusion equation in a spherical catalyst, while the second problem models the reaction–diffusion process in a spherical biocatalyst. We obtain reliable analytical solutions of the concentrations and the effectiveness factors. Numerical results and graphs show the reliability and efficiency applicability of the employed method.

The importance of laboratory instruction for science students is widely recognized, although this is a question in tertiary education that remains largely unresolved. In this work a proposal for evaluating laboratory instruction in a plant physiology course is presented and examples of questions used for one of the topics covered in the course are shown. The proposal includes the use of specifically designed multiple choice questions (MCQ) in the exams to assess the cognitive domain. Different items used in the plant physiology exams during the 2000–2012 period to evaluate two of the topics were categorized using the blooming biology tool. The questions were classified as lower- (memorization) and higher- (critical thinking) order cognitive skills (LOCS and HOCS, respectively) plus an intermediate order, LOCS/HOCS (application). Though MCQ have been indicated to be prone to evaluate mainly rote memory, our results show that less than 25% of the questions used belonged to the LOCS category. Scores obtained by the students for these MCQ were similar for theory and laboratory instruction. The evaluation model presented is easily transferable to assess a great variety of practical laboratory activities of different scientific disciplines and helps to avoid the dichotomy theory/practice usually found among students.

We quantified several different elements that reflect writing styles of scientific papers in four related disciplines: physics, astrophysics, mathematics, and computer science. Text descriptors such as the use of punctuation characters, the use of upper case letters, use of quotations, and other descriptors that are not based on the words used in the papers were extracted from each document. Based on these features alone an automatic classifier was able to identify the discipline of the paper with accuracy much higher than mere chance, showing that different disciplines can be differentiated by their writing styles, and without using their content directly as reflected by common words used in the papers. The study showed statistically significant differences between the different disciplines such as use of acronyms, sentence length, word length, and more. Our findings also show changes in writing styles in specific disciplines over time. For instance, mathematicians and computer scientists began to use less acronyms starting from 2006, and there is a dramatic decrease of the average of punctuation characters in mathematics papers. These observations suggest that even in closely related disciplines there are differences in the scientific communication expressed through writing styles, demonstrating the existence of a “signature” writing style developed in each discipline. These findings should also be taken into account when a multidisciplinary group of collaborators assign writing duties on a joint scientific manuscript.

The increasing availability of highly resolved spatio-temporal data leads to new opportunities as well as challenges in many scientific disciplines such as climatology, ecology or epidemiology. This allows more detailed insights into the investigated spatially extended systems. However, this development needs advanced techniques of data analysis which go beyond standard linear tools since the more precise consideration often reveals nonlinear phenomena, for example threshold effects. One of these tools is the recurrence plot approach which has been successfully applied to the description of complex systems. Using this technique’s power of visualization, we propose the analysis of the local minima of the underlying distance matrix in order to display driving forces of spatially extended systems. The potential of this novel idea is demonstrated by the analysis of the chlorophyll concentration and the sea surface temperature in the Southern California Bight. We are able not only to confirm the influence of El Nino events on the phytoplankton growth in this region but also to confirm two discussed regime shifts in the California current system. This new finding underlines the power of the proposed approach and promises new insights into other complex systems.

The essential function of scientific disciplines is to generate knowledge using the scientific method. In a context characterised by acknowledgement of methodological complementarity and the existence of innumerable mechanisms for production (articles, theses…) and dissemination (databases, platforms…), production is a measure of any given discipline’s normative development and projection. As a result of this situation, in Pedagogy—and, more specifically, in Educational Theory—we can witness a growing concern with systematising knowledge in a complex and dynamic context and based on reference frameworks. Therefore, this article aims to describe scientific production in Educational Theory, with the intention of discovering the creation and dissemination processes involved in theses retrieved from the Spanish doctoral theses database TESEO (2001–2015). A descriptive-comparative census study was carried out, with a total of n = 229 sampling units. The results show the following: thematic axes, which categorise thesis content into groups, are present; dissemination is influenced by the non-specific use of keywords, as well as by the area’s organisation and structure in different universities; there are no statistically significant differences in terms of author gender. In conclusion, we can identify an ever greater intention to provide the area with more scientific content but little concern with increasing this content’s visibility in databases such as TESEO. All in all, research production in Spain relating to Educational Theory is a good representative sample of researchers’ efforts to project their interest in discovering, understanding and improving education. Therefore, special care should be taken when compiling production data in databases.

Publication hit lists of authors, institutes, scientific disciplines etc. within scientific databases like Web of Science or Scopus are often used as a basis for scientometric analyses and evaluations of these authors, institutes etc. However, such information services do not necessarily cover all publications of an author. The purpose of this article is to introduce a re-interpreted scientometric indicator called “visibility,” which is the share of the number of an author’s publications on a certain information service relative to the author’s entire œuvre based upon his/her probably complete personal publication list. To demonstrate how the indicator works, scientific publications (from 2001 to 2015) of the information scientists Blaise Cronin (N = 167) and Wolfgang G. Stock (N = 152) were collected and compared with their publication counts in the scientific information services ACM, ECONIS, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, Infodata eDepot, LISTA, Scopus, and Web of Science, as well as the social media services Mendeley and ResearchGate. For almost all information services, the visibility amounts to less than 50%. The introduced indicator represents a more realistic view of an author’s visibility in databases than the currently applied absolute number of hits in those databases.

We present a bibliometric comparison of publication performance in 226 scientific disciplines in the Web of Science (WoS) for six post-communist EU member states relative to six EU-15 countries of a comparable size. We compare not only overall country-level publication counts, but also high quality publication output where publication quality is inferred from the journal Article Influence Scores. As of 2010---2014, post-communist countries are still lagging far behind their EU counterparts, with the exception of a few scientific disciplines mainly in Slovenia. Moreover, research in post-communist countries tends to focus relatively more on quantity rather than quality. The relative publication performance of post-communist countries in the WoS is strongest in natural sciences and engineering. Future research is needed to reveal the underlying causes of these performance differences, which may include funding and productivity gaps, the historical legacy of the communist ideology, and Web of Science coverage differences.

A global North-South divide in research, and its negative consequences, has been highlighted in various scientific disciplines. Northern domination of science relevant to climate change policy and ...

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) have rapidly developed into unique tools for probing diverse systems of interest to different scientific disciplines with angstrom–femtosecond resolution. Claudio Pellegrini provides an overview of the milestones in the development of XFELs and their unique capabilities.

Part I Summary of relevant topics from 1923 to present—including: Currie (Anal Chem 40:586–593, 1968) detection concepts & capabilities; International detection & uncertainty standards; Failure of classical 14C dating and birth of new scientific disciplines; Exploratory nuclear data analysis of 85Kr monitors found coincident with the collapse of the Iron Curtain (1989); Faulty statistics proved responsible for mistaken assertions that Currie’s L C yields excessive false positives; Low-level counting and AMS for atmospheric 37Ar and µmolar fossil/biomass carbon in the environment; Erroneous assumption that our low-level background is a Poisson Process, linked to ~8 % spurious anticoincidence events. Part II Exact treatment of bivariate Poisson data—solved in 1930s by Przyborowski and Wilenski, Krakow University, for detecting extreme trace amounts of a malicious contaminant (dodder) in high purity seed standards. We adapted their treatment to detection capabilities in ultra-low-level nuclear counting. The timing of their work had great historical significance, marking the start of World War II, with the invasion of Poland (1939).

Seismomatics is the fusion of mathematics, statistics, physics and data mining at the service of those scientific disciplines interested in the space–time analysis of natural or anthropogenic catastrophes. This special issue on seismomatics has been motivated by a conference of the same name, which took place in Valparaiso (Chile) from 5th to 9th of January 2015. The selection of papers comprises both new methodological proposals and a wide range of applications related to natural or anthropogenic catastrophes. We highlight statistical analysis of marine macroalgae, of annual minimum water levels of the Nile River, of massive data on chlorophyll, of temperature maxima recorded over a complex topography, and of airborne pollutants in relation to the spatial spread of human population across Europe.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the practices, knowledge, confidence, and attitude toward oral cancer among Japanese oral health professionals (J-OHPs) and to identify Japanese-specific problems in oral cancer practices by comparing them between Japan and Australia. A questionnaire survey regarding oral cancer practices among Australian oral health professionals (Au-OHPs) was conducted in Australia in 2014-2015. The questionnaire was translated into Japanese, and a Web-based questionnaire survey was conducted among 131 Japanese dentists (J-Dentists) and 131 dental hygienists (J-DHs) in 2016. To compare the J-OHPs' findings with the Au-OHPs', the data of Australian dentists (Au-dentists) and Australian dental hygienists (Au-DHs) were extracted from the Australian survey. Those findings were then compared via a statistical analysis. Eighty-two J-Dentists, 55 J-DHs, 214 Au-Dentists, and 45 Au-DHs participated in this study. Only 34.1 % of J-Dentists and 36.4 % of J-DHs performed oral cancer screenings on their patients; J-OHPs were significantly less likely to perform them than Au-OHPs. The level of knowledge and confidence regarding oral cancer among JOHPs were significantly lower than among Au-OHPs. About 90 % of J-OHPs felt that they needed additional training in oral cancer practices. Less than 40 % of J-OHPs performed oral cancer screenings in their patients. The low level of knowledge and confidence regarding oral cancer among JOHPs may contribute to their low performance of oral cancer practices. Therefore, further education and training programs for oral cancer practices should be provided to Japanese OHPs for the prevention and early detection of oral cancer.

In sociology of science much attention is dedicated to the study of scientific networks, especially to co-authorship and citations in publications. Other trends of research have investigated the advantages, limits, performances and difficulties of interdisciplinary research, which is increasingly advocated by the main lines of public research funding.This paper explores the dynamics of interdisciplinary research in Italy over ten years of scientific collaboration on research projects. Instead of looking at the output of research, i.e. publications, we analyse the original research proposals that have been funded by the Ministry of University and Research (MIUR) for a specific line of funding, the Research Projects of National Interest (PRIN). In particular, we want to see how much interdisciplinary research has been conducted during the period under analysis and how changes in the overall amount of public funding might have affected disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration. We also want to cluster the similarities and differences of the amount of disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration across scientific disciplines, and see if it changes over time. Finally, we want to see ifinterdisciplinary projects receive an increasing share of funding compared to their disciplinary bounded counterparts. Our results indicate that while interdisciplinary research diminishes along the years, potentially responding to the contraction of public funding, research that cut across disciplinary boundaries overall receives more funding than research confined within disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, the clustering procedure do not indicate clear and stable distinction between disciplines, but similar patterns of disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration are shown by discipline withcommon epistemological frameworks, which share compatible epistemologies ofscientific investigations. We conclude by reflecting upon the implications of our findings for research policies and practices and by discussing future research in this area.

Individual adoption of technology is crucial for the success of technology implementation and has thus attracted much attention from researchers. Recent advances in citation-based analysis have been suggested as being efficient for analyzing knowledge dissemination within scientific disciplines. This article presents a case that examines the technology acceptance research through the newly developed citation-based approach, in particular main path analysis and edge-betweenness clustering analysis. Based on the citation network constructed from a total of 1555 journal articles from the period 1989 to 2014, the most critical 50 citations were identified and used as the basis to map the major knowledge flow in technology acceptance research. In addition, edge-betweenness based clustering was used to classify the citation network into coherent groups. As a result, five distinct research fronts were identified, namely e-learning, mobile-commerce, e-health, e-tourism, and technology post-acceptance research. This case study highlights the theoretical development trajectories, and identifies the most active research fronts of technology acceptance research, providing a research-based platform for further scholarly discussions.

During the past few decades, research on and work in phenomenology has increased remarkably in the Nordic countries. One concrete manifestation of (and perhaps also a partial reason for) this development is the Nordic Society for Phenomenology (NoSP), which was established in 2001 in order to promote dialogue and cooperation between phenomenologists in the Nordic countries. This forum has been highly successful and has attracted a lot of attention. Membership statistics speak for themselves: in 2004, the Society had about 100 members, by 2008, the amount of members had tripled and, today, the Society already has more than 800 members. In light of these numbers, it hardly comes as a surprise that NoSP has also attracted a lot of attention outside the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). The number of submissions for the annual meetings of the Society indeed makes it evident that the Nordic countries constitute and comprise an important focal point in contemporary phenomenological research. Does phenomenology from the Nordic countries amount to a distinct Nordic perspective on this branch of philosophy? Although the Nordic countries do share a set of ethnic, religious, and historical characteristics, and although there is something like a recognizable cultural unity in the Nordic region, there is no clearly identifiable Nordic approach to phenomenology. Nevertheless, when taking a bird’s eye perspective on the way phenomenology has developed in the region, one noteworthy feature is the extent to which phenomenologists have engaged and cooperated with other traditions, schools of thought, and scientific disciplines. Ties have been made with analytic philosophy, critical theory, pragmatism, and

The goal of this article is to call attention to different ways in which logic was understood in the thirteenth century. Thus, it will recall some relevant historical facts related to the problem of classifying logic among scientific disciplines. This problem involved methodological questions linked to the form of presenting both the scientific disciplines and the books by which they were transmitted. Next, it will stress the contexts that led Medievals to raise questions about the nature of logic and why these issues were necessarily accompanied by considerations on the relation of logic to the disciplines dealing with language. Finally, it will analyze a change in perspective with respect to the status of logic, which moves from a science of human discourse to a science of mental acts.

The aim of this study is to reveal potential influences on two different teaching approaches, one that is student-focused and one that is teacher-focused. Five hypotheses were derived and tested with two representative surveys among German professors in the years 2009 and 2011. Regression analyses indicate that selective incentives for teaching have a very weak effect on the teaching approach, whereas the particular scientific disciplines seem to exert a considerable impact. In addition, the following influential factors that foster a student-focused teaching approach were identified: continuing pedagogical training (only for professors at research universities) and interaction among professors regarding teaching. In terms of gender differences, it was detected that female professors at research universities prefer a more student-focused approach to teaching.

This article is based on German and Japanese sources and shows how around 1900 European psychiatric concepts and practices embedded themselves into emerging scientific Japanese discourses. The article argues that now forgotten German–Japanese exchanges in the field of psychiatric pathology, together with the historical development of psychiatric care, were central mechanisms for the establishment of a distinctly psychiatric discourse in Japan prior to its broad institutionalization. Three discursive strategies were key: Japanese and German experts from a range of medical fields reinvented a body of traditions loosely related to actual pre-modern cultural practices; they engaged in comparative evaluations of psychiatric conditions; and, through the simple but effective transformation of specific concepts and termini at the margins of European psychiatry, these experts contributed to the transfer not only of a psychiatric discourse but also affected the power relations on a national and international scale as European psychiatry permeated into new territory, namely the Japanese landscape of emerging modern scientific disciplines.

The content and purpose of written unit plans in mathematics is an under-researched area. In this article, we provide a brief overview of research on teachers’ planning processes and the place of mental and written plans. We report on data from a questionnaire completed by 357 teachers from Victorian Catholic primary schools, where we focused on possible elements of written unit plans for primary mathematics, and the relative importance which teachers attributed to these elements. We then discuss 48 written unit plans which were provided to us by primary schools from which the 357 teachers were drawn. There was considerable variation in the length, intended teaching time, and level of specification of key ideas in these plans. We discuss this variation, and some discrepancies between the ratings of teachers of the importance of certain elements and their presence in the plans we examined. We also suggest potentially productive areas of future enquiry.

The phenomenon of protein aggregation and amyloid formation has become the subject of rapidly increasing research activities across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Such activities have been stimulated by the association of amyloid deposition with a range of debilitating medical disorders, from Alzheimer's disease to type II diabetes, many of which are major threats to human health and welfare in the modern world. It has become clear, however, that the ability to form the amyloid state is more general than previously imagined, and that its study can provide unique insights into the nature of the functional forms of peptides and proteins, as well as understanding the means by which protein homeostasis can be maintained and protein metastasis avoided.

Individuals’ moving behavior (e.g., residential mobility) is an emerging topic in many scientific disciplines. One specific aspect is the distance between parents and their children (i.e., parent–child proximity). Although determinants and moderators of parent–child proximity can be manifold, we concentrated on the psychological concepts self-esteem and affect by assessing explicit (i.e., conscious) and implicit (i.e., automatic) aspects. Besides well-known correlates of moving behavior (e.g., education), we found that participants (N = 1,765; cross-sectional design) with high positive explicit affect and low negative implicit affect moved further away from their parents’ homes. Therefore, parent–child proximity may not be only based on fundamental sociocultural and socioeconomic needs (e.g., income, family bonds), but also on automatic psychological aspects, such as implicit affect.

In this study we analyse a corpus of 300 randomly selected research paper titles written in English and published between 1998 and 2012 in the most prestigious journals in the field of Astrophysics, an under-researched discipline from a linguistic standpoint. We specifically address issues related to the evolution of titles, their length, their lexical density, their type distribution and their semantic content. Our findings reveal a trend towards relatively long titles with a high lexical density, a preference for nominal and simple titles over verbal and compound ones, a very low occurrence of question constructions, and a prevalence of purpose and results over methods as key research concepts expressed in titles. We compare our findings with the results of previous studies on titles in other scientific disciplines and provide explanations for the differences and similarities observed. This research was partially supported by Grant No. 1039-13-06-B from the University of the Andes Research Center.

Scientific co-authorship of African researchers has become a fashionable topic in the recent scientometric literature. Researchers are investigating the effects, modes, dynamics and motives of collaboration in a continental research system which is in an embryonic stage and in different stages of development from country to country. In this article we attempt to provide some additional evidence by examining both patterns of collaboration at country and continental levels and the scientific disciplines emphasised. Our findings indicate that the continent's research emphasises medical and natural resources disciplines to the detriment of disciplines supporting knowledge based economies and societies. Furthermore, we identify that the collaborative patterns in Africa are substantial higher than in the rest of the world. A number of questions related to research collaboration and its effects are raised.

Recent analyses of internet search volume hypothesized a decline of public interest toward themes related to environment, biodiversity conservation and fishery. These analyses were based on Google Trends, which is a measure of how frequently a term is searched in Google, in proportion to the total of searches performed. Google Trends is a measure of relative search, and this may make difficult assessing temporal trends. I evaluated whether relative declines in internet search volumes represent genuine decline in interest toward environmental-related themes, by comparing trends of terms representing various themes, including environment, computer science, other disciplines (astrophysics) and leisure. Similar values of relative decline were detected for environmental terms, for computer science terms, and for other scientific disciplines. Conversely, an increase was observed for leisure related terms. This suggests that interest toward the environment is not truly decreasing. The apparent decline of environmental and scientific terms is most likely caused by the increasing use of internet for aims unrelated to science and technology, such as leisure. Internet search tools are a powerful source of information, but users should be aware of the complexity of analysing their data: using unrelated terms as benchmark may help to identify genuine trends.

Background Attention to the role of context in shaping individuals’ coping strategies is necessary. This study used the Salutogenic Model (SM) as a framework to identify the coping strategies of oral health profession students from three countries. Methods Students from Australia, New Zealand and Chile were invited to participate in this cross-sectional study, and were given a questionnaire including socio-demographics, the Perceived Stress Scale, The SOC-13 and the Brief COPE. Descriptive analysis, correlation analysis and profile analysis were computed using SPSS v 20.0. Results Eight-hundred and ninety-seven valid questionnaires were returned, achieving a 44 % response rate. The coping dimension that the participants most commonly reported using was “Active Coping” with a mean value of 5.9 ± 1.5. Chilean respondents reported higher stress levels (19.8 vs. 17.7) and a lower Sense of Coherence (55.6 vs. 58.0) compared to Australian/New Zealand participants (p

There are many recent conceptions of early mathematics education, which differ considerably concerning motivation and objectives. The efficiency and foundation of most of these programs are not sufficiently evaluated by now. Therefore, it is a crucial question, how early mathematics education should be designed. The objective of this paper is to find a sustainable concept for early mathematics education which is based on empirical research across various scientific disciplines. This concept is meant to ensure that children are supported in their individual development to achieve sound basic mathematical competencies as a basis for further mathematical learning processes. A competence-oriented concept like this requires considerable skills and knowledge of the educators, wherefore a broad range of supporting measures is required for a successful implementation. As part of the project TransKiGs in Berlin, this concept was implemented and evaluated, so this paper finishes with a short view on the implementing measures and results of the evaluation study.

Many journals in the physical sciences require authors to submit assurances of compliance with human subjects and other research ethics standards. These requirements do not cover all disciplines equally, however. In this paper we report on the findings of a survey of perceptions of ethical and managerial problems from journal editors in political science and related disciplines. Our results show that few journals in political science require assurance statements common to journals for other scientific disciplines. We offer some reasons for this as well as some recommendations for implementing ethical assurance safeguards for political science.

The access to bibliographic and citation databases allows to evaluate scientific performance, and provides useful means of general characterisation. In this paper we investigate the clustering of Iberian universities, resulting from the similarity in the number and specific nature of the scientific disciplines given by the Essential Science Indicators database. A further refining of the analysis, as provided by PCA, clearly reveals the relationship between the universities and the scientific disciplines in the main groups. Similarity between universities is not dictated only by the number of areas in the ranking, but also stems from the nature of the ranked scientific areas and the specific combination in each university.