1,720,957 research outputs found
Tracheal stenosis diagnosed on pulmonary ventilation/perfusion scan
No full textA 68-year-old woman, who had undergone coronary artery bypass surgery 5 months previously, was presented with cough, breathlessness and an elevated D-dimer. She was initially thought to have suffered a pulmonary embolus. A ventilation/perfusion scan demonstrated tracheal stenosis, which required dilation and endobronchial stent deployment. Tracheal stenosis is a well-recognised complication of endotracheal intubation; however, the onset of symptoms is often insidious and the diagnosis delayed.</p
Monitoring of the depth of sedation in the intensive care unit
No full textPharmacological sedation on the intensive care unit (ICU) is frequently required to enable treatment to be safely and effectively delivered. However, its use is not without risk, especially if no attempt is made to monitor the depth of sedation. Commonly utilized sedation-scoring systems are easy to use, but unfortunately neuromuscular paralysis negates their usefulness and they are always open to criticism because of being subjective in nature. Consequently attention has been directed at the use of the processed EEG to monitor sedation. Auditory evoked responses have received much attention in the anaesthetic literature for monitoring awareness under anaesthesia, but practical problems may limit their usefulness in the intensive care unit. The Bispectral Index can be monitored with easily interpretable and portable equipment and shows promise as a depth of sedation monitor in this setting.</p
Improving post-operative morbidity and mortality
No full textIn certain groups of patients the risk of peri-operative death can be as high as 35% with up to 80% these deaths occurring in patients who develop post-operative multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS). Patients at increased risk of death are easily identifiable prior to surgery. This is achieved by various objective methods of assessing the patient's physiological reserve and severity of pathological insult inflicted. Improving or optimising tissue perfusion and oxygenation during the peri-operative period can reduce this excess mortality. Adequate fluid resuscitation is the essential first step in maximising cardiac contraction and cardiac output leading to improved tissue perfusion. This is followed by the cautious use of inotropes if required. However, the beneficial effects of increased cardiac output needs to be carefully balanced against the increased myocardial oxygen demand with inotrope use. Although these interventions have an associated cost with increased attention required from medical staff and increased use of monitoring equipment, in reality not only is a reduction in mortality and complications seen in optimised patients but also a reduction in intensive care stay and hospital length of stay, resulting in an overall lower cost of treatment. Despite the large individual patient benefit and the financial savings associated with optimising high-risk surgical patients, many hospitals 'lack adequate facilities' or foresight to institute these preventative measures.</p
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
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