1,721,083 research outputs found
Are Real World Data the smart way of doing Health Analytics?
Full text linkReal world data (RWD) and real world evidence (RWE) are playing an increasing role in health care. Despite their use may strongly improve healthcare research as well as health related decision making, management and planning, many barriers remain to their use in clinical practice. The aim of this paper is to discuss some issues related to RWD aiming at proposing a new paradigm of healthcare research based on RW
Longitudinal Latent Overall Toxicity (LOTox) profiles in osteosarcoma: a new taxonomy based on latent Markov models
Full text linkDue to the presence of multiple types of adverse events with different levels of severity, the analysis of longitudinal toxicity data is a difficult task in cancer studies. In this work, a novel approach based on latent Markov models and compositional data techniques is proposed. The latent status of interest is the Latent Overall Toxicity (LOTox) condition of each patient. The main objectives consist in identifying different latent states of overall toxicity burden and investigating the evolution of individual toxicity risk during cancer treatment. This methodology is applied to osteosarcoma treatment data to provide novel techniques that may support medical decisions in childhood cancer therapy
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
Hospital effect on 3-years-survival in patients undergone to lung tumor surgery: a real-world study.
No full textContext
It is debated in literature the association between surgical volume and clinical outcomes in cancer patients.
Objectives
Aim of our study was to investigate the factors associated with death for any cause among patients undergone to lung cancer surgery. In particular, to assess whether and how much i) patients’ characteristics and ii) the hospital where the patient is admitted and its volume of activity, affect the risk of 3-year death.
Methods
Data were retrieved from the administrative databases of Lombardy Region (Italy). Residents of Lombardy Region, older than 18 years, with at least one hospital admission for lung resection during 2009 were identified. 802 patients were included in the final cohort and followed up to 3 years (December 31, 2012). Death for any cause after 3 years and the time to death were the outcomes of interest. Generalized linear mixed effects models and frailty Cox survival models were fitted in order to quantify the effect of selected factors on the outcome.
Results
After adjusted for the patient’s characteristics, the analysis showed a remarkable impact of hospital on the risk of death. The survival probabilities of a patient with “average” characteristics (i.e., man, 65 years, not polymormid) undergone to a complete pneumonectomy but in a hospital characterized by a “positive” random effect has a higher probability of survival (80%) compared to a patient who underwent an ordinary complex surgery in a hospital characterized by a “negative” random effect (73%).
Furthermore, patients admitted to hospital with more than 10 surgeries per year have a lower probability of death (-29%) with respect to those admitted to hospital with less than 10 surgical operations per year.
Conclusions
Although the 3-year mortality after lung cancer surgery is mainly affected by individuals factors, the hospital where the patient was admitted accounts for a significant proportion of outcome variability. Among the hospital characteristics, the surgical volume played a central role
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
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