1,720,991 research outputs found

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Democratic backsliding and resilience in extraordinary times: Poland and Italy during the Covid-19 crisis

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    We investigate the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis on the quality and survival of democracy in a country. We start from the idea that such crises entail a risk of democratic backsliding, as governments could exploit the state of emergency to concentrate power in their own hands and derogate to democratic rules beyond the realm and past the duration of the emergency. We reconsider this argument and contend that the pandemic’s backsliding effect, if any, depends on the prior quality and consolidation of democratic institutions, the robustness of the state of emergency regulation, and the government’s loyalty to democracy. We analyse Poland and Italy, which were both at risk of ‘pandemic backsliding’ even though for different reasons. While democracy in Italy has proved resilient, we find that backsliding in Poland resulted from a combination of malleable democratic institutions weakened by years of pre-pandemic executive aggrandizement and an authoritarian-leaning government willing to exploit the crisis

    De-democratisation at the times of COVID-19

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    The Covid-19 crisis raised concerns of organisations monitoring the quality of democracy (Freedom House, V-dem Institute, EIU or Idea) that the pandemic could be used in a long term to justify the permanent strengthening of incumbents’ power leading to the weakening of democracy. The report is aimed at investigating potential threats to liberal democracy in connection with the adopted mechanisms to combat the coronavirus pandemic, basing on two cases of EU members – Italy and Poland in the period 2020-summer 2021. The qualitative research on implemented laws (“Covid-19 legislation”) in both countries and focus interviews with lawyers have been conducted to assess the impact of the regulations and the governments’ practices on the state of democracy. The report consists of two main parts – the theoretical framework and empirical study. The former section presents the notion of democratic backsliding and autocratisation, the issue of connection of democratic backsliding/autocratisation processes with states of emergency and possible scenarios of impact of Covid-19 on democracy. The empirical part – on Italy and Poland – includes a review of major features of political systems of the analysed states and the state of democracy before the Covid-19 pandemic, an outline of the basic data on Covid-19 and analysis of legal instruments adopted at the time of coronavirus in terms of their impact on democracy, basing the relevant section on three dimensions in which democratic backsliding and autocratisation can take place: public contestation, political participation and executive limitation. As far as the main finding is concerned, the analysed cases of Italy and Poland prove that the Covid-19 pandemic can, but does not always have to, negatively affect the state of democracy. Much depends on the question whether the democratic backsliding occurred already before the pandemic. If it did, the Covid-19 crisis can strengthen the previous de-democratisation processes. It is possible even without the formal introduction of a state of emergency (which often has a potential to generate undemocratic tendencies), as it was indicated in the case of Poland

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods
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