1,720,954 research outputs found
Progressive versus Catastrophic Loss of Ability to Walk: Implication for the Prevention of Mobility Loss
No full textOBJECTIVES: Loss of mobility is an important functional outcome that can have devastating effects on quality of life and the ability of older persons to remain independent in the community. Although a large amount of research has been done on risk factors for disability onset, little work has focused on the pace of disability progression. This study characterizes the development of severe walking disability over time and evaluates risk factors and subsequent mortality as they relate to mobility disability with progressive or catastrophic onset. DESIGN: Population-based prospective cohort study with annual follow-up assessments for up to 7 years SETTING: Three communities of the Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly. PARTICIPANTS: There were 5,355 persons not disabled at baseline and the first follow-up who had adequate data available to classify mobility disability during subsequent follow-ups. MEASUREMENTS: Severe mobility disability was defined as the need for help from a person to walk across a room or inability to walk across a room. Those developing severe mobility disability were classified as having progressive mobility disability if they had been unable to walk half a mile in either of the prior 2 years. They were classified as having catastrophic mobility disability if they reported having been able to walk half a mile in two previous annual interviews. RESULTS: The overall incidence of severe mobility disability was 11.6 cases/1,000 person years. Those age 85 and older or having three or more chronic conditions at baseline were significantly more likely to develop progressive disability than catastrophic disability. Stroke, hip fracture, and cancer occurring during follow-up were associated with very high risk of severe mobility disability. For stroke and hip fracture, the risk was twice as high for catastrophic disability as for progressive disability, but this difference did not reach statistical significance. Risk for catastrophic disability from cancer was significantly greater than for progressive disability. Half of catastrophic disability subjects had stroke, hip fracture, or cancer in the year immediately preceding this disability. Incident heart attack did not predict severe mobility disability. Among those who developed severe mobility disability, type of disability did not influence subsequent survival for the first 3 years, but beyond 3 years those with catastrophic disability had a relative risk of death of 0.4 (95% confidence interval 0.2-0.9) compared with those with progressive disability. CONCLUSION: The observation that risk factors and mortality outcomes were both different for progressive and catastrophic mobility disability supports the value of ascertaining the pace of disability development as a useful characterization of disability. Further progress in developing prevention and treatment strategies may be made by taking the pace of disability development into account
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
Change in Muscle Strength Explains Accelerated Decline of Physical Function in Older Women With High Interleukin-6 Serum Levels
No full textOBJECTIVES: To test whether accelerated sarcopenia in older persons with high interleukin (IL)-6 serum levels plays a role in the prospective association between inflammation and disability found in many studies. DESIGN: Cohort study of older women with moderate to severe disability. PARTICIPANTS: Six hundred twenty older women from the Women's Health and Aging Study in whom information on baseline IL-6 serum level was available. MEASUREMENTS: Self-report of functional status, objective measures of walking performance, and knee extensor strength were assessed at baseline and over six semiannual follow-up visits. Potential confounders were baseline age, race, body mass index, smoking, depression, and medical conditions. RESULTS: At baseline, women with high IL-6 were more often disabled and had lower walking speed. After adjusting for confounders, women in the highest IL-6 tertile (IL-6>3.10 pg/mL) were at higher risk of developing incident mobility disability (risk ratio (RR) = 1.50, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.01-2.27), disability in activities of daily living (RR = 1.41, 95% CI = 1.01-1.98), and severe limitation in walking (RR = 1.61, 95% CI = 1.09-2.38) and experienced steeper declines in walking speed (P <.001) than women in the lowest IL-6 tertile (IL-6 < or =1.78 pg/mL). Decline in knee extensor strength was also steeper, but differences across IL-6 tertiles were not significant. After adjusting for change over time in knee extensor strength, the association between high IL-6 and accelerated decline of physical function was no longer statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS: Older women with high IL-6 serum levels have a higher risk of developing physical disability and experience a steeper decline in walking ability than those with lower levels, which are partially explained by a parallel decline in muscle strength
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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