1,721,013 research outputs found
A systematic review of methodology applied during preclinical anesthetic neurotoxicity studies: important issues and lessons relevant to the design of future clinical research
No full textSummary
Preclinical evidence suggests that anesthetic agents harm the developing brain
thereby causing long-term neurocognitive impairments. It is not clear if these
findings apply to humans, and retrospective epidemiological studies thus far
have failed to show definitive evidence that anesthetic agents are harmful to
the developing human brain.
Aim: The aim of this systematic review was to summarize the preclinical stud ies published over the past decade, with a focus on methodological issues, to
facilitate the comparison between different preclinical studies and inform bet ter design of future trials.
Method: The literature search identified 941 articles related to the topic of
neurotoxicity. As the primary aim of this systematic review was to compare
methodologies applied in animal studies to inform future trials, we excluded a
priori all articles focused on putative mechanism of neurotoxicity and the
neuroprotective agents. Forty-seven preclinical studies were finally included
in this review.
Results: Methods used in these studies were highly heterogeneous—animals
were exposed to anesthetic agents at different developmental stages, in vari ous doses and in various combinations with other drugs, and overall showed
diverse toxicity profiles. Physiological monitoring and maintenance of physio logical homeostasis was variable and the use of cognitive tests was generally
limited to assessment of specific brain areas, with restricted translational
relevance to human
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
Children’s and Parents’ Anxiety Levels pre and post Thoracoplasty. Play Specialist-based Intervention beneficial Outcomes
No full textPaediatric surgery elicits anxiety in children and their parents. The present study tests the impact of Play Specialist-based intervention (PS) on children’s and parents’ anxiety pre and post thoracoplasty. The study was held at Gaslini pediatric hospital (Genoa, Italy) and involved families with a child undergoing thoracoplasty to correct children's pectus carinatum (PC) or excavatum (PE). Children provided with PS-based intervention (n=40) were compared with control children (n=32). The mothers of PS children (n=40) were compared with the control mothers (n=32), and the fathers of PS children (n=40) were compared with the control fathers (n=32). Visual Analog Scale (VAS) was administered to assess pre and post thoracoplasty anxiety. T-tests and Analyses of Covariance (ANCOVA), Bayes factors for t-tests and ANCOVA were computed. A significant interaction effect between time and group (i.e., PS and controls) emerged for children, mothers, and fathers. Bonferroni post-hoc analyses revealed that PS children’s and PS mothers’ postoperative anxiety was lower than controls’ postoperative anxiety. PS fathers’ experienced greater preoperative anxiety than controls and no significant differences with control fathers emerged in postoperative anxiety. PS-based intervention emerged to reduce children’s and parents’ anxiety over time, and to diminish children’s and mothers’ postoperative anxiety in comparison with the controls
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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