1,720,963 research outputs found

    Pesticide fate in cultivated mountain basins: The improved DynAPlus model for predicting peak exposure and directing sustainable monitoring campaigns to protect aquatic ecosystems

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    Agricultural activities can involve the use of plant protection products (PPPs) and the use of such chemicals can occur near surface waters bodies, thus creating a potential for adverse effects on aquatic ecosystems. In mountain watersheds, where runoff fluxes are particularly rapid due to side slopes, exposure is generally characterized by short but intense concentration peaks. Monitoring campaigns are often inadequate or too expensive to be carried out and modelling tools are therefore vital for exposure assessment and their use is encouraged by current legislation. However, currently adopted models and scenarios (e.g., FOCUS for PPPs) are often too conservative and/or “static” to accurately capture exposure variability, and the need for more realistic and dynamic tools is now one of the major challenges for risk assessment. In a previous work, the new fate model DynAPlus was developed to improve pesticide fate predictions in cultivated mountain basins and was successfully evaluated against chlorpyrifos water concentrations measured in a mountain stream in Northern Italy. However, the need for some model improvements (e.g., the inclusion of dissolved organic matter and macrophytes in water) was highlighted. In this work, DynAPlus was improved by replacing the water-sediment unit with ChimERA fate, a recently-published model capable of predicting bioavailable chemical concentrations in shallow water environments accounting for the presence and temporal variations of particulate/dissolved organic carbon and primary producers. The model was applied to preliminarily characterize the risk associated to the use of four PPPs (two insecticides and two fungicides) in a sub-basin of the Adda River (Valtellina Valley, Northern Italy), surrounded by apple orchards. Results revealed the potential magnitude of exposure peaks for the four PPPs and suggested that monitoring campaigns should prioritize, in the selected case study, chlorpyrifos, etofenprox and fluazinam. The potential role of DynAPlus in providing more realistic exposure predictions for ecological risk assessment, as well as for planning efficient monitoring campaigns and help pesticide management practices, was also stressed

    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

    Author Index

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    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

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    We 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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