1,720,957 research outputs found
Soil Analytical Capabilities for Sustainable Land Management Across National Soil Services in the Mediterranean
No full textSoil monitoring is essential for pursuing several sustainable development goals including ‘Zero Hunger’ and ‘Life on Land’. This study examined the status of national soil monitoring laboratories in Mediterranean countries through a multi-country survey to assess strengths and gaps. The results showed that most national soil labs performed basic tests related to soil health and agricultural management, such as texture, pH, and nutrient analysis. However, fewer labs performed more specific tests that are also relevant to these applications such as compaction and biological analysis. Furthermore, tests required for assessing soil pollution, such as heavy metals, were conducted only by few labs. This was mostly due to a lack of equipment like atomic absorption spectrometers. In total, 75% of labs reported good quality of the instruments and frequent calibration. The staff were generally well qualified, with most holding graduate degrees, and women comprised 58% of the staff. Many national services started using electronic reports and provided result interpretation for end users, but not all used lab information systems. The findings highlight the need for better equipment, more advanced testing, and stronger digital management systems. Addressing these issues will help harmonize soil data and support sustainable land management and agriculture in the region
Agricultural land measures for climate change adaptation in arid regions: Can the farmers do it alone?
Full text linkClimate change has become an unequivocal issue; changing precipitation patterns and climate variability will have disastrous impacts on the fragile agricultural land resources of arid regions. Farmers, equipped with indigenous knowledge and readily available resources, are the most direct stakeholder interacting with agricultural lands; examining farmers’ capacity to successfully implement farm-level adaptive measures is a pressing matter. This paper provides an overview on various agricultural measures for climate change adaptation in arid regions and discusses some major relevant constrains and the extent of farmers’ capabilities to implement such strategies. Various techniques such as shifting sowing dates, conservation agriculture, and rainwater harvesting have shown potential to serve as adaptive strategies. These can help reduce crop failure risks, improve soil moisture conservation and increase water availability for crops, and could help adapt to precipitation variability in arid regions. However there is strong evidence that many farmers in arid regions may not be able to implement such strategies successfully as adaptive measures and there is no clear evidence that climate variability is currently less of a risk with existence of such measures. This can be attributed to the various constraints such as the need for reliable access to resources, climatic data, and research output by farmers for successful implementation. These constraints could be circumvented by institutional-level measures such as agricultural subsidies, relevant and dynamic policies, and programs. Overwhelming evidence suggests that this is only possible by involvement of various stakeholders in the planning process such as researchers, farmers and the private sector
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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