186,590 research outputs found
Analysis of allergen immunotherapy studies shows increased clinical efficacy in highly symptomatic patients
Background: the assessment of allergen immunotherapy (AIT) efficacy in the treatment for seasonal allergic rhinoconjunctivitis (SAR) symptoms is challenging. Allergen immunotherapy differs from symptomatic therapy in that while symptomatic therapy treats patients after symptoms appear and aims to reduce symptoms, AIT is administered before symptoms are present and aims to prevent them. Thus, clinical studies of AIT can neither establish baseline symptom levels nor limit the enrolment of patients to those with the most severe symptoms. Allergen immunotherapy treatment effects are therefore diluted by patients with low symptoms for a particular pollen season. The objective of this analysis was to assess the effect possible to achieve with AIT in the groups of patients presenting the most severe allergic symptoms.Methods: study centres were grouped into tertiles categorized according to symptom severity scores observed in the placebo patients in each centre (low, middle and high tertiles). The difference observed in the average score in each tertile in active vs placebo-treated patients was assessed. This allowed an estimation of the efficacy that could be achieved in patients from sites where symptoms were high during the pollen season.Results: an increased treatment effect was observed in the most severe patients and was independent of the study analysed and symptom score used.Conclusions: the use of a tertile approach to analyse efficacy in AIT in SAR clinical studies can give a more accurate assessment of potential clinical benefi
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
Histologic and histomorphometric analysis of bone regeneration with bovine grafting material after 24 months of healing. A case report
Anorganic bovine bone mineral matrix (ABBMM) has been reported to have osteoconductive properties and no inflammatory or adverse responses when used as grafting material in sinus augmentation procedures. However, controversy remains in regard to degradation rate of ABBMM. The aim of this study was to histologically and histomorphometrically evaluate the degradation of ABBMM in human bone samples obtained in one patient 24 months after sinus augmentation. Materials and Methods: The histologic and histomorphometric analysis was performed by means of light microscopy in three specimens harvested from the same patient, Results: After 24 months the tissue pattern appeared to be composed of residual particles, some in close contact with the newly formed bone, others separated by translucent areas and osteoid tissues. Newly-formed bone presented different levels of maturation and numerous osteocytes, with greater numbers in bone closer to the grafted particles (27.3% vs. 11.2%, p < 0.05). The histomorphometric analysis showed mean values of 40.84% newly-formed bone, 33.58% residual graft material, 23.84% marrow spaces, and 1.69% osteoid tissue, Conclusions: Even though ABBMM underwent considerable resorption, a great amount of residual grafting material was still present after two years of healing following sinus augmentation. This study confirms that the bovine grafts can be classified as long-term degradation materials
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The 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
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We 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
We 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
Dr. Edward P. Wimberly, ITC, July 2011
This video is a conversation with Dr. Edward P. Wimberly. Dr. Wimberly talks about his book, "No Shame in Wesley's Gospel: A Twenty-First Century Pastoral Gospel". Brad Ost, AUC Woodruff Library, is the interviewer
Author Rights and Scholarly Publishing
Originally posted at
http://blog.library.gsu.edu/2014/10/24/author-rights-and-scholarly-publishing/</p
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