1,721,186 research outputs found
How should we Screen for Breast Cancer?
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Breast cancer is a killer. Screening for it is commonly seen as a life-saver, and moves to reduce screening programmes are understandably greeted with outrage. But, as Howard Wainer explains, evidence is a great help in deciding such issues.</jats:p
The Great Migration: A Graphics Novel
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RJ Andrews and Howard Wainer imagine a collaboration between W. E. B. Du Bois and C. J. Minard, charting the relocation of African-Americans from the southern United States in the century after emancipation</jats:p
Assessing Long-Term Risk with Short-Term Data
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Keep on taking the tablets – but for how long? New drugs can be tested for only a short time, but Vioxx and Avandia proved dangerous over the long term, and patients may take such drugs for years. So how can we establish the safety of long-term use? Howard Wainer finds that makers of light bulbs and door hinges can guide us.</jats:p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Frame-of-reference bias in subjective welfare regressions
Get PDFPast research has found that subjective questions about an individuals'economic status do not correspond closely to measures of economic welfare based on household income or consumption. Survey respondents undoubtedly hold diverse ideas about what it means to be"poor"or"rich."Further, this heterogeneity may be correlated with other characteristics, including welfare, leading to frame-of-reference bias. To test for this bias, vignettes were added to a nationally representative survey of Tajikistan, in which survey respondents rank the economic status of the theoretical vignette households, as well as their own. The vignette rankings are used to reveal the respondent's own scale. The findings indicate that respondents hold diverse scales in assessing their welfare, but that there is little bias in either the economic gradient of subjective welfare or most other coefficients on covariates of interest. These results provide a firmer foundation for standard survey methods and regression specifications for subjective welfare data.Rural Poverty Reduction,Housing&Human Habitats,Economic Theory&Research,Poverty Lines,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe 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
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