1,721,028 research outputs found
Obesity during chidhood: an analysis of a cohort of newborns in Rome
Full text linkDemography, as defined by its etymology (from Greek demos, meaning ‘people, district’, and graphy, meaning ‘writing, describing’), is a science carrying out research on the population and investigating its changes through time. It is a dynamic science in constant transformation, mainly studying birth, death and migration trends and their effects on the population considered. Demography is a multidisciplinary science, since it usually relies on theories from diverse fields such as sociology, statistics and economics to analyse and explain populations-related phenomena. Along demography, epidemiology (from Greek epi, meaning 'upon, among', demos, meaning 'people, district', and logos, meaning 'study, word, discourse') is a discipline dealing with populations’ health status, which focuses on the causes, development and consequences of health diseases among the population itself.
The link between demography and epidemiology has always been complex, since both disciplines work on populations-related phenomena and their fields of research often overlap, even if relevant studies are carried out following diverse approaches and different (but parallel) research methods. It is precisely their multidisciplinary nature and the correlated topics they investigate that support through time a process of interconnection between the two. Both demography and epidemiology study the populations’ health conditions, a topic related to a number of other issues such as the causes of death and the onset of diseases. In particular, both disciplines study mothers and children’s health status before, during and after pregnancy, investigating the causes of low birth weight, infant mortality and maternal mortality during pregnancy.
In the last decades, an increasing trend of children’s ponderal excess status in Italy and all over the world has opened the floor for new studies and related debates. In fact, it is well known that overweight/obesity since one’s childhood is a determinant of one’s health conditions, influencing their quality of life and their survival at all ages. A number of psychological, physical and social problems can be the consequences of an important ponderal excess, that call upon researchers to look for its causes not only in children’s “daily habits and lifestyles”, but also in parents’ socio-demographic factors and the environment where children grow up. As a matter of fact, this thesis explores the shared interest of demography and epidemiology to offer a better analysis of the main causes of overweight/obesity during infancy
The impact of the bonus at birth on reproductive behaviour in a lowest-low fertility context: Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Italy) from 1989 2005
Full text linkAs of 1 January 2000 the government of the north-eastern Italian region of FriuliVenezia Giulia (FVG) introduced a substantial bonus at birth. The birth bonus was differentiated by marital status (only married women were eligible), citizenship (only Italians were eligible), and birth order (the bonus grew for the second and especially the third birth). Moreover, the income threshold below which one got the bonus was fairly high. As of 1 January 2004 a new government substantially reduced the bonus amount as well as the upper income limit. We evaluate if the bonuses handed out in FVG during those four years (2000-03) had a significant impact on fertility and abortion choices, verifying whether fertility changed in a different way for women more affected by the new legislation. We also test if the impact of monetary measures was higher for less educated women, because in Italy the relationship between income and education is very strong, and the bonus was practically the same irrespective of income level, hence its relative impact should be stronger in a poorer family. We use two different methods: First, we compare the trends of births and abortion ratios, separately for women affected and not affected by the monetary measures, looking at the differential changes. Second, using log-linear models, we measure if the interactions among time, parity, marital status, citizenship and education are statistically significant in the direction that follows our expectations. Our results show that for low educated (and hence also less rich) women with one or (especially) two and more children, birth trends did change after 1999, whereas the trends for childless women living in FVG and for low-educated women living in other Italian regions did not change.
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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