131,335 research outputs found
Challenging the gold standard: alternatives to the collison for aerosol generation in research
No full textAnimal studies to demonstrate efficacy of medical countermeasures against respiratory disease or biodefense threats require exposure of animals to aerosolized viruses and bacteria. Prior studies have shown that the choice of culture media and relative humidity in the aerosol chamber can impact the dose of infectious agent delivered to animals. Most infectious aerosol studies have involved the use of Collison jet nebulizers which create a small, relatively monodisperse aerosol that targets the deep lung. Collison nebulizers require a relatively large volume of infectious agent and the jets that create the aerosol may damage the agent being aerosolized. Damage resulting from the nebulizer can impact agent infectivity and virulence as well as study reproducibility. We compared the Blaustein Atomizing Module (BLAM) and the Aeroneb, a vibrating-mesh nebulizer, to the existing ‘gold standard’ Collison nebulizer for generation of small particle aerosols containing either a bacterium, F. tularensis, or a virus, influenza or Rift Valley Fever Virus (RVFV) in different exposure chambers. Aerosol performance was assessed by comparing the spray factor (the ratio between the aerosol concentration of an agent and the concentration of the agent in the nebulizer), the reduction in pathogen viability, and the aerosol efficiency (the ratio of the actual aerosol concentration to the theoretical aerosol concentration. In the NOT, the Collison had superior aerosol performance compared to the BLAM and the Aeroneb, while the Aeroneb had superior aerosol performance comparted to the Collison in the whole-body and head-only chambers. Regression analysis revealed increased humidity was associated with improved aerosol performance of F. tularensis, but no environmental factors were associated with improved aerosol performance of influenza or RVFV. This data demonstrates that there is no ‘one size fits all’ choice for aerosol generators, and that further characterization of aerosol generators and factors that affect aerosol performance are needed to improve selection of aerosol equipment. The public health significance of this research is to contribute to the characterization of available aerosol generators to optimize aerosol experiments for a more robust experimental design for developing animal models of respiratory infections and developing therapeutics and vaccines against potential biological weapons
Bulletin: Number 623: Experiments with Commercial Nitrogenous Fertilizers on Apple Orchards
No full text36 pages, 1 article*Experiments with Commercial Nitrogenous Fertilizers on Apple Orchards* (Harlan, J. D.; Collison, R. C.) 34 page
Bulletin: Number 562: High-Nicotine Tobacco
No full text19 pages, 1 article*High-Nicotine Tobacco* (Collison, R. C.; Harlan, J. D.; Streeter, L. R.) 17 page
Bulletin: Number 647: Winter Injury of Baldwin Apple Trees and its Relation to Previous Tree Performance and Nutritional Treatment
No full text13 pages, 1 article*Winter Injury of Baldwin Apple Trees and its Relation to Previous Tree Performance and Nutritional Treatment* (Collison, R. C.; Harlan, J. D.) 11 page
Bulletin: Number 629: Some Facts About Soil Management in a New York Orchard
No full text20 pages, 1 article*Some Facts About Soil Management in a New York Orchard* (Collison, R. C.; Harlan, J. D.) 18 page
Bulletin: Number 503: Final Report on the Cooperative Experiments in Orchard Fertilization
No full text30 pages, 1 article*Final Report on the Cooperative Experiments in Orchard Fertilization* (Collison, R. C.; Harlan, J. D.) 29 page
Bulletin: Volume 646: Fertilizer Responses of Baldwin Apple Trees on an Acid Soil
No full text24 pages, 1 article*Fertilizer Responses of Baldwin Apple Trees on an Acid Soil* (Collison, R. C.; Harlan, J. D.) 22 page
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
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