1,720,958 research outputs found
Mathematics in elementary and middle schools: Do girls suffer performance deficits under stereotype threat?
No full textDefining hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS) structure by confirmatory factor analysis: a contribution to validation for oncological settings
No full textBackground: Despite its popularity, not a definitive word has yet been said about the latent structure of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). The present work is a contribution to this issue: statistically identifying the best tool structure helps in understanding which constructs the tool actually detects. Participants and methods: Five hundred and twelve Italian consecutive hospitalized cancer patients completed the HADS together with a form for the collection of personal and clinical data. Two confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were carried out to test the validity of both two- and one-factor models, whereas qualitative and quantitative (i.e. Akaike information criterion) indices were used to assess which model among them would fit better with the observed data. Finally, two multigroup CFAs were carried out to test the factorial invariance across gender and disease phase (diagnostic, therapeutic) of the best-fitting model. Results: Although both considered models provide a good fit to the observed data, the two-factor model is more adequate; it is invariant across gender and disease phase. Conclusions: The present study gives evidence for using HADS to detect anxious and depressive states separately as originally suggested by its authors. Given that this work involved only Italian cancer inpatients, replications in different cultural/national contexts are recommended. © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Society for Medical Oncology. All rights reserved
A contribution to the validation of the Needs Evaluation Questionnaire (NEQ): a study in the Italian context
No full textBackground and object: An accurate assessment of patients' needs is a core point in improving treatment adherence, satisfaction, and quality of life of care receivers. The Needs Evaluation Questionnaire (NEQ) is a practical and short instrument designed to record hospitalized patients' necessities. The present paper is a contribution to its factorial definition, useful in enhancing the understanding of NEQ psychometric properties and in supporting its use in research as well as in current practice. Method: Six hundred consecutive hospitalized cancer patients completed the NEQ together with a form for the collection of personal identification and clinical data. The initial sample was randomly split into two subsamples, and we then conducted: (1) an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on Subsample 1; (2) a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the factor structure resulting from EFA on Subsample 2; (3) a comparison between the factor structure resulting from CFA and a unidimensional factor solution. Results and conclusions: EFA revealed the presence of five factors (i.e. informative needs, needs related to assistance/care, relational needs, needs for psychoemotional support, and material needs) explaining a total of 50.5% of the variance. CFA confirmed the validity of the correlated five-factor solution emerging from EFA, demonstrating how the theoretical model provided a good fit to the observed data. Finally, we demonstrated that the five-factor solution was more appropriate in the reconstruction of the observed data than the unidimensional factor solution. According to the present data and despite the limitations raised, using NEQ as a five-factor questionnaire is functional and recommendable. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
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
- …
