1,720,955 research outputs found
Variations in cardiac interventions: doctors' practices and views
No full textObjectives: To investigate referral rates for cardiac interventions by clinical specialty, to document doctors' reasons for referrals and to explore doctors' perceptions of the factors that influenced their clinical decisions. Study design. Doctors completed a clinical decision-making exercise involving, in total, 6093 electronic patients with cardiac disease, and subsequently took part in the semi-structured interviews about influences on their decisions. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and coded using a thematic approach, with the coding categories derived from the data. Study setting: Eighty-eight doctors (GPs, care-of-the-elderly specialists, cardiologists) participated in the full study, in seven areas in southern, central and northern England. Complete interview data were analysed for 76 of these. Principal findings: Not all patients who were eligible for specific investigations or treatment received these. The extent of variations in clinical decisions differed by type of intervention. Apart from the general reasons for referrals, doctors raised nine main influences on their actual decision making. The most commonly reported influence (‘barrier’) was poor access to equipment for intervention, which increased thresholds for investigation and treatment. Conclusions: The current emphasis on achieving targets in the British NHS has led to a focus on easily measurable, but crude, process targets such as waiting lists. This study points to the need to include a broader quality assurance element to investigate the cluster of system failures which lead to variations in clinical decisions and thereby to inequitable treatment. <br/
Which doctors are influenced by a patient's age? A multi-method study of angina treatment in general practice, cardiology and gerontology
No full textBackground: Elderly patients with cardiovascular disease are relatively undertreated and undertested.
Objectives: To investigate whether, and how, individual doctors are influenced by a patient?s age in their investigation and treatment of angina.
Design: Process-based judgement analysis using electronic patients, semistructured interviews.
Setting: Primary Care, Care of the Elderly and Cardiology in England.
Participants: Eighty five doctors: 29 cardiologists, 28 care of the elderly specialists and 28 general practitioners (GPs).
Main outcome measures: Testing and treatment decisions on hypothetical patients.
Results: Forty six per cent of GPs and care of the elderly doctors, and 48% of cardiologists treated patients aged 65+ differently to those under 65, independent of comorbidity. This effect was evident on several decisions: elderly patients were less likely to be prescribed a statin given a cholesterol test, referred to a cardiologist, given an exercise tolerance test, angiography and revascularisation; more likely to have their current prescriptions changed and to be given a follow-up appointment. There was no effect of specialty, gender or years of training on influence of patient age. Those doctors who were influenced by age were on average five years older than those who were not. Interviews revealed that some doctors saw old age as a contraindication to treat.
Conclusions: Age, independent of comorbidity, presentation and patients? wishes, directly influenced decision-making about angina investigation and treatment by half of the doctors in the primary and secondary care samples. Doctors explicitly reasoned about the direct influence of age and age-associated influences
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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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