1,720,965 research outputs found
The Economics of Cars
No full textThe automotive sector represents more than a simple industry. It embodies the economic and technological power of nations, the lifestyle and consumption patterns of societies, the dynamics of urban and territorial development, and acts as a national barometer of economic success and failure. This book explains how the car industry works and analyses the challenges both for the sector and for the economies that rely on the industry for jobs, growth and innovation. It explores an industry that has been under severe pressure in industrialized countries for many years – factories have closed, jobs have gone and brands and manufacturers have disappeared – yet world production has never been higher, reaching new peaks annually. The authors investigate how western and Japanese manufacturers still dominate the market, despite the challenge posed by Korean, Chinese and Indian competitors. They examine how changing environmental policies and consumer preferences are moving the industry towards electric vehicles; how usage patterns are evolving, favouring car-sharing; and how advances in electronics and digitalization are set to further reshape the sector with autonomous and self-driving vehicles. The book offers readers a short, non-technical guide to the workings of a fast-moving industry that remains of huge importance to both national and global economies
Collaborative supplier development for Lean implementation: a case study
No full textEnterprises face numerous barriers when dealing with Lean implementation campaigns, especially if the companies’ dimensions are small. Recent studies highlighted the struggles of small firms in dealing with Lean implementation barriers, but few discussed the importance of collaborative supply chain relationships to overcome these barriers. This article depicts a case study undertaken in a company that shows how a collaborative customer-supplier relationship can help small-medium enterprises enter the Lean philosophy. The methodology used in this paper is a case study carried out in one Italian mechanical company working mainly as a tier-two supplier in the automotive sector. The implementation of Lean in this firm was prompted and actively supported by a tier-one automotive firm settled in Italy. The outcome of this paper depicts a successful Lean implementation in an SME thanks to the use of Lean Thinking tools, the collaborative relationship between customer-supplier and the support given by the first to the latter. This research limit lies in using a single case study and the lack of a long-term study period. This paper can help managers, practitioners, and firms understand the potentiality and opportunities given by the collaboration between different supply chain actors, ensuring a successful Lean implementation
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
Sensitivity of Regulated Streamflow Regimes to Interannual Climate Variability
Full text linkThe simultaneous growth in climate‐driven alterations of the hydrologic cycle and global freshwater demand threatens the security of anthropogenic and ecologic uses of streamflows. However, the impact of damming on the response of river regimes to long‐term climate variability has not been fully disclosed yet. Here, this issue is assessed by investigating temporal patterns in the occurrence probability of different flow ranges upstream and downstream of a selection of dams in the Central‐Eastern United States. We found that long‐term fluctuations of low flows are propagated unaltered from unregulated to regulated regimes. In the majority of cases, the same applies to the entire spectrum of streamflows, although discharge interannual variability is significantly amplified by large multipurpose structures. Water supply dams instead smooth long‐term streamflow fluctuations, though at the cost of systematically filtering out medium‐to‐high discharges. Accordingly, in Central‐Eastern United States, dams are unable to mitigate the sensitivity of flow regimes to long‐term hydroclimatic fluctuations and, thus, do not support the security of anthropogenic and ecologic uses of regulated streamflows
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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