130,435 research outputs found
Life after death: Widowhood and volunteering gendered pathways among older adults
No full textBACKGROUND Spousal loss is one of the most traumatic events an individual can experience. Studies on behavioral changes before and after this event are scarce. OBJECTIVE This study investigates gender differences in pathways of volunteering before and after transition to widowhood among older adults in the United States. METHODS We use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study and estimate fixed effects models with lags and leads to identify pathways of volunteering on a sample of 1,982 adults aged 50 and over. RESULTS The results show a U-shaped pattern with a decline in volunteering activities before the death of the partner and then a slight process of adaptation and recovery. The process is strongly gendered, with women considerably more resilient than men. Whether death was expected or not influences the effect of the partner's death on volunteering, likely due to the pre-death burden of caregiving. Looking at the role of the partner's volunteering before death, we found for both genders, but especially for women, that the odds of volunteering increase (decrease) if the partner was (was not) volunteering (complementarity hypothesis). CONTRIBUTION Given the positive effects of volunteering both for the volunteer and the society as a whole, our findings contribute to the literature highlighting that critical family events may affect participation in society of older people and demonstrating the heterogeneity of the effects, especially in terms of gender differences
From intentions to births:
No full textIn the literature pregnancy intentions are studied in isolation from intentions pertaining to other spheres of life. In this paper, we overcome this gap and investigate birth intentions and subsequent outcomes in a context of multiple life course domains encompassing partnership, education, work and residence. Using longitudinal data from the Household and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA), we examine the matching processes of birth intentions and outcomes separately for women and men under the assumption that life courses are gendered. Results show that adults do often have multidimensional plans and that intentions other than childbearing facilitate or hinder the realisation of fertility intentions depending on whether they are expressed by men or women. Planning to move in a new dwelling is functional to the realization of birth intentions if expressed by men while other intentions, like changing job, or resuming studies, hinder childbearing only if they are stated by women. Finally, having a cohabiting relationship is a pre-condition for the realization of childbearing intentions for both men and women. The findings provide a new interpretation of the gap between intended and actual fertility and a new explanation of the fact that birth intentions remain often unrealised
MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations
No full textInformation overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe 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
"Closing the R&D Gap, Evaluating the Sources of R&D Spending"
No full textBoth spending and tax policies have been implemented in the United States with the goal of stimulating private sector research and development (R&D). Karier questions whether current R&D policy, especially the research and experimentation tax credit, can contribute to closing the gap between nondefense expenditures on R&D in the United States and such expenditures in other countries, such as Japan and Germany. He also explores possible changes to our current R&D policy to make it more effective.
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe 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
Scholarly Communication and Publishing Lunch and Learn Talk #11: The ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund
No full textAt the May 2014 talk, you will learn about the ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund--what it is, why we do it, how it works, and how the program is going so far
The R&D Tax Incentives
No full textThis article sets out some background information and reflections of the author on the R&D tax incentive schemes included in the Common Corporate Tax Base (CCTB) Proposal. In particular the author analyzes the stimulus to private R&D through ad hoc tax incentives included in the CCTB Proposal and dives into the actual provisions included in the Proposal highlighting the most relevant issues connected with their design and interpretation. Moreover, the author explores the interaction between the CCTB Proposal and the granting by Member States of domestic R&D tax incentives
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