1,720,964 research outputs found

    Towards policy analysis 2.0

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    One approach to dealing with complexity in a public policy context is horizontality, the act of working across the various ministries and divisions of a government in order to harness the organization’s capacity and resources and direct them towards the addressing of complex problems. And one prominent mechanism for promoting horizontality is greater organization-wide collaboration, knowledge sharing and active knowledge seeking amongst a network of government knowledge workers commonly referred to as policy analysts. The emergent use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches within organizations has raised the possibility that we have entered a new knowledge era - Enterprise 2.0 - that can address the horizontality problem, facilitate the sharing of knowledge between policy analysts and across organizations, and promote transformative governance. This research investigated how policy formulation processes in the government of the Canadian province of British Columbia are being affected by the adoption of Web 2.0 tools internally within the organization as a way to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration amongst government policy analysts. Semi-structured interviews with members of corporate policy units in the Government of British Columbia were conducted (n = 14), and an on-line questionnaire was completed by Government of British Columbia policy analysts (n = 129). These mixed methods form the basis for a triangulation approach to assessing the research questions. Respondents conceptualized policy analysis as rooted in an apolitical synthesis of evidence and best practices from a variety of sources, leading to a recommendation designed to support decision-making. The diversity and reach of the policy analyst’s organizational social network is related to their length of service in the organization and is an important supplement to the analyst’s knowledge base. There was little evidence that technology networks generally, and Web 2.0 tools specifically, play a prominent role in facilitating the knowledge organization; in fact, policy analysts may refrain from sharing knowledge with colleagues using technology networks in order to avoid contributing to their colleagues' information overload. Following the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), attitudes, followed by subjective norms, were the strongest and most consistent predictors of the policy analyst’s intention to collaborate and share knowledge with their colleagues. Perceived behavioural control was not a factor, leading to the possibility that while policy analysts may believe and be told that knowledge sharing and collaboration are advantageous, they may not feel they have the authority, latitude or ability to do so. A significant gender result was consistently revealed, that women were found to be less supportive of knowledge sharing and collaboration than men, a result possibly due to a culture dominated by masculine characteristics. The findings have implications for public sector organizations seeking to provide support for knowledge workers to make effective use of the organizational social network, new collaboration technologies and organizational capacity to address complex public policy problems. Interested readers should consult http://jlphdcand.wordpress.com for updated versions of this research, and related work.Graduat

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    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

    Variations on the Author

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    “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

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    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

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    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

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