1,721,053 research outputs found
Policy evaluation and international organizations
No full textOwing to their nature as information brokers with a comparative perspective, IOs offer a natural venue to better understand which policy interventions work and how. In recent years specific procedures and ad hoc units to advance the practice and culture of evaluation in IOs have rapidly grown. The chapter conceives IOs as autonomous policy actors that employ evaluation as a strategic governing tool and takes stock of existing literature to analyze how they do so. IOs strive to shield the politically sensitive evaluation process from undue political influences by establishing autonomous units. They build policy evaluation capacity by decentralizing the evaluation practices in the countries, typically in the guise of a local partnership with national institutions and professionals. They establish global evaluation networks that operate as epistemic communities. IOs also set evaluation criteria, they benchmark countries and other stakeholders against those criteria and disseminate the results. Such purportedly neutral techniques are de facto charged with policy purposes and represent crucial instruments of governance
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
Uncertainty and Cleavages at stake: Do the Belgian Constitutions of 1831 and 1993 stabilize Political Power?
Full text linkIn our modern states, constitutions underlie the political power and its institutional settings. Two different texts lay the foundation of the constitutional history of Belgium: the constitution of 1831 and that of 1993. Each arose during a period of historical change. In 1831, in the shadow of the decolonization from the Netherlands, the constitution created a unitary state. In 1993, in a context of Europeanization of politics, the constitution declared a federal state. Over the years, the Belgian polity has undergone dramatic changes. What is puzzling about Belgium is that the constitution-making process has consistently remained in a state of uncertainty. According to Brennan and Buchanan (1985) uncertainty makes agreement more probable; this helps in a divided society such a Belgium
Is the Swiss Constitution really constitutional? Testing the "veil of ignorance" hypothesis over time
No full textThis volume is a very interesting research project that includes the most careful work on constitutional power and limits to authority of which I am aware. In general, the contributors find that constitutional negotiations normally took place in settings where uncertainty was considerable. They also find that the more detailed the characterization of power relationships, the more liberal and durable the democracy tends to be. Roger D. Congleton This book addresses the issue of the impact of uncertainty in constitutional design. To what extent do constitution drafters and adopters make their decisions behind a veil of ignorance? More fundamentally, can we infer from constitutional texts the degree of uncertainty faced by constitution drafters and adopters? After an introduction (chapter 1), the book proceeds in two parts. The first part (chapters 2 to 4) introduces to the intellectual filiation of the project and to its theoretical and methodological foundations. The second part (chapters 5 to 13) presents nine case studies built on the same structure: historical account of the making of the Constitution, results of the content analysis of the constitutional text, and discussion of specific issues raised in the analysis. Chapter 14 concludes
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
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