1,720,959 research outputs found
Rethinking the role of Research Ethics Committees in the light of Regulation (EU) No 536/2014 on clinical trials and the COVID‐19 pandemic
No full textResearch Ethics Committees (RECs)—or Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), as they are known in the US—were created about 50 years ago to independently assess the ethical acceptability of research projects involving human subjects, their fundamental role being the protection of the dignity and rights of research participants. In this paper we develop some critical reflections about the current situation of RECs. Our starting point is the definition of the role they should ideally play, a role that should necessarily include a collaborative approach and the focus on the ethics component of the review. This ideal is unfortunately quite far from reality: inadequacies in the functioning of RECs have been discussed for decades, along with reform proposals. Both in the US and in the European Union (EU), reforms that aim at the centralization of the review process were recently approved. Even though these reforms were needed, they nonetheless raise concerns. We focus on two such concerns, related in particular to Regulation (EU) No 536/2014: the risk of narrowing the scope of the ethics review and that of disregarding the local context. We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic paved the way for the transition towards the centralized model and that an analysis of its impact on the research review process could provide some interesting insights into possible shortcomings of this new model. We conclude by identifying three objectives that define the role of a REC, objectives that any reform should preserve
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
Development of particle-based biofilms for degradation of xenobiotic organic compounds
No full textThe aim of the experiments performed in this work was to develop a biofilm airlift suspension (BAS) process for the degradation of a mixture of organic sulfonates contained in the infiltration water from a contaminated site. To achieve this goal, active biomass growing on the contaminating xenobiotic organics as the sole source of carbon was obtained by enriching a mixed microbial culture sampled from an activated sludge treatment plant. After kinetic characterisation, the enriched culture was inoculated in the BAS reactor, where it colonised carrier particles and formed stable and uniform biofilms. In spite of the slow growth and degradation kinetics (mu(max) = 0.014h(-1)), due to high biomass concentration (up to 12gvs L-1) a high rate process was performed in the BAS reactor, achieving a degradation capacity of 8.7kg(COD)m(-3) d(-1), with an overall degradation efficiency of 70% based on COD measurements. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
High-rate degradation of aromatic sulfonates in a biofilm airlift suspension reactor
No full textA wastewater containing aromatic sulfonates was treated in a laboratory-scale biofilm airlift suspension (BAS) reactor. The general objective of the experiments was to assess the performance of a particle-based biofilm reactor in the biodegradation of refractory organic compounds under varying operating conditions. To this end, the reactor was inoculated with a mixed culture of biomass, adapted to grow on the leachate as the sole source of carbon, which colonized carrier particles in the reactor and formed stable and uniform biofilms. Depending on their degradation kinetics (characterized in independent experiments) and the fraction of specific degraders in the biofilms, aromatic sulfonates attain different degradation efficiencies in the BAS reactor, with more compex molecules (e.g., trisusbtituted naphthalene sulfonates and some bisubstituted naphthalene sulfonates) showing the lowest degradation efficiencies. The BAS reactor achieved high biomass concentration (12 g L-1) and an overall degradation efficiency of 67% based on COD measurements for loading rates up to 0.45 kg(COD) kg(vs)(-1) day(-1), corresponding to a specific degradation rate of 0.3 kg(COD) kgvs(-1) day(-1). For higher loading rates, the hydraulic retention time of leachate in the reactor proved to be insufficient for complete degradation of aromatic sulfonate with slow degradation kinetics, resulting in a decrease of overall degradation efficiency. The fast degradation rate of most aromatic sulfonates is attributed to the long biomass retention time and reactor biomass concentration, resulting in high concentrations of degraders for specific compounds
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
- …
