1,720,955 research outputs found
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
Natural Agency: An Ecological Approach
No full textAgency, the capacity to act for a goal or purpose guided by norms, is central to our understanding of the capacities and activities of organisms including human beings. However, its distinctive purposive and normative character has proven difficult to integrate with the scientific understanding of organisms as natural physical entities. The challenge is to show both that agency has a place in the natural causal order of the world as described by natural science (naturalism), and that its distinctive purposive and normative character plays an indispensable role in our understanding of natural phenomena (teleology). The standard approaches, however, either locate agency in the natural causal order of the world but fail to vindicate its distinctive purposive and normative character, or vice versa. My goal is to avoid this dichotomy and instead offer a complete unifying account of natural agency. In the first part of the thesis I address the methodology of naturalism. First, I argue that the standard approaches are committed to an unnecessarily stringent set of assumptions about what naturalism requires. And second, I propose an alternative methodological strategy based on scientific work in complex systems dynamics. In the second part I use this strategy to articulate a novel account of natural agency, The Ecological Theory of Agency. This account is based on recent empirical and philosophical work in evolutionary developmental biology on the organism-environment relation (Walsh 2013). An agent, I propose, is an ecologically embedded purposive system. That is, a system with the gross behavioral capacity to bias its repertoire in response to what its conditions afford for attaining its goals. Then I show how the solution that this account of agency provides generalizes to two other instances of the dichotomy. The first is the problem of bacterial cognition. I show how the ecological approach allows us to navigate a middle way between thinking of unicellular organisms as either mere automata or full-blown cognitive agents. The second is the problem the role that reasons play in the explanation of action. I show that the ecological approach avoids thinking of reasons as either exclusively causes or exclusively norms.Ph.D
Naturalizing Biological Agency: Constitutive and Dynamical Strategies
Full text linkThe view that organisms are agents—and that organismal agency is fundamental to explaining biological phenomena—has become a central topic in the philosophy of biology (Walsh 2015; Moreno & Mossio 2015; Corning et al. 2023). Unlike standard causal-mechanical approaches, however, the concept of agency carries distinct teleological and normative implications that must be naturalized to be scientifically legitimate. But what exactly does naturalism require? And what counts as an adequate naturalization? I propose two desiderata: causal-location and explanatory indispensability, and compare two naturalistic accounts of agency—the organizational or constitutive account (OA) (Moreno & Mossio 2015) and the ecological or dynamical account (EA) (Walsh 2015). I argue that while OA satisfies causal-location at the cost of explanatory adequacy, EA achieves explanatory adequacy while remaining silent on causal-location. This leads to a dilemma between causal reductionism (OA) and teleological primitivism (EA), rooted in differing criteria for what naturalism requires. I distinguish two increasingly demanding grades of scientific naturalism: scientific emergentism and scientific essentialism, and argue that the dilemma arises from OA’s commitment to the latter and EA’s to the former. I conclude by showing how the emergentist criterion can resolve the dilemma by integrating OA and EA into a two-stage strategy that satisfies both desiderata
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
Natural Agency: An Ecological Approach
Full text linkAgency, the capacity to act for a goal or purpose guided by norms, is central to our understanding of the capacities and activities of organisms including human beings. However, its distinctive purposive and normative character has proven difficult to integrate with the scientific understanding of organisms as natural physical entities. The challenge is to show both that agency has a place in the natural causal order of the world as described by natural science (naturalism), and that its distinctive purposive and normative character plays an indispensable role in our understanding of natural phenomena (teleology). The standard approaches, however, either locate agency in the natural causal order of the world but fail to vindicate its distinctive purposive and normative character, or vice versa. My goal is to avoid this dichotomy and instead offer a complete unifying account of natural agency. In the first part of the thesis I address the methodology of naturalism. First, I argue that the standard approaches are committed to an unnecessarily stringent set of assumptions about what naturalism requires. And second, I propose an alternative methodological strategy based on scientific work in complex systems dynamics. In the second part I use this strategy to articulate a novel account of natural agency, The Ecological Theory of Agency. This account is based on recent empirical and philosophical work in evolutionary developmental biology on the organism-environment relation (Walsh 2013). An agent, I propose, is an ecologically embedded purposive system. That is, a system with the gross behavioral capacity to bias its repertoire in response to what its conditions afford for attaining its goals. Then I show how the solution that this account of agency provides generalizes to two other instances of the dichotomy. The first is the problem of bacterial cognition. I show how the ecological approach allows us to navigate a middle way between thinking of unicellular organisms as either mere automata or full-blown cognitive agents. The second is the problem the role that reasons play in the explanation of action. I show that the ecological approach avoids thinking of reasons as either exclusively causes or exclusively norms.Ph.D
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
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