1,721,133 research outputs found
Asbestos, leaded petrol, and other aberrations: comparing countries’ regulatory responses to disapproved products and technologies
No full textIndustrial innovation churns out increasingly unnatural products and technologies amid scientific uncertainty about their harmful effects. We argue that a quick regulatory response to the discovery that certain innovations are harmful is an important indicator for evaluating the performance of an innovation system. Using a unique hand-collected dataset, we explore the temporal geography of regulatory responses as evidenced by the years in which countries introduce bans against leaded petrol, asbestos, DDT, smoking in public places, and plastic bags, as well as introducing the driver’s seatbelt obligation. We find inconsistent regulatory responses by countries across different threats, and that countries’ level of economic development is often not a good predictor of early bans. Moreover, an early introduction of one ban is not strongly related to the relative performance in regard to another ban, which raises possible questions about the coherence of regulatory responses across different threats
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
Editorial: the dark side of innovation
No full textWe provide a broad discussion of the dark side of innovation, before introducing the papers of the special issue. We start with a critical reply to optimists, complementing the list of indicators showing steady human progress with a list of indicators that show sustained deterioration (largely due to innovation). We then outline some relevant dimensions of harmful innovation, before distinguishing between the types of harm brought on by innovation. We conclude with an overview of the SI papers
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
Corporate growth and industrial dynamics: evidence from French manufacturing
No full textThis work explores basic properties of the size and growth rates
distributions of firms at the aggregate and disaggregate levels.
Using an extensive dataset on French manufacturing firms, we
investigate which properties of firm size distributions and growth
dynamics characterize the aggregate dynamics and are, at the same
time, robust under disaggregation. Our analysis is based on
non-linear robust regression methods which have never been applied
before to this kind of data. The growth rates distributions we
observe are well described by a Subbotin distribution with a shape
parameter significantly lower than , suggesting a noticeable
departure from the Laplace behavior reported in previous works on
Italian and US data. At the same time, the variance of growth rates
depends negatively on size and the relationship does not seem to be
linear, with larger firms possibly displaying lower variability in
their growth dynamics. At the disaggregate level, we observe
significant heterogeneity in the firm size distributions across
sectors while the shape of the sectoral growth rates density
displays a surprising degree of homogeneity
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
Concerns about the consequences of patenting on scientometric research
No full textOur concerns about the practice of patenting scientometric techniques began with an electronic notification alerting one of us to a patent entitled “Scientometric methods for identifying emerging technologies” (Abercrombie et al., 2015). This came to our attention after we had already embarked on a research program to apply scientometric methods for the identification of emerging technologies here at the JRC.JRC.B.3 - Territorial Developmen
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