1,721,133 research outputs found
An Epidemiological and Geographic Analysis of Healthcare Provider Choice in Urban Bo, Sierra Leone
Full text linkThis work was embargoed by the author and will not be publicly available until May 2020.The built environment plays a critical role in people's ability to access healthcare services. The goal of this study was to explore the factors that affect women's selection of acute (short-term) and inpatient (long-term) healthcare providers in an urban area of a low-income country. Geographic and epidemiologic methods were used to analyze data collected from more than two thousand women from across the city of Bo, Sierra Leone, in West Africa, in 2010 and 2011. The insights gained from this analysis, along with a comprehensive examination of the literature on maternal and child healthcare access, were applied to a consideration of the policy implications for Bo and to a broader analysis of the factors influencing healthcare provider selection. A dynamic healthcare marketplace exists in urban Bo. The participating women identified 26 pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals as the facilities they prefer when seeking acute care. Nine of these facilities provide inpatient services and are preferred by mothers when in need of overnight care for themselves or their children. Although residences in Bo are on average only about 0.3 km from a healthcare facility providing outpatient services and 0.9 km from an inpatient facility, women travel on average 3.0 km to access care for themselves or their children. Bypassing of facilities near to the home is very common, and the majority of women bypass private (usually nonprofit) facilities so that care can be received from the city's only large government hospital, which is located in the central part of the city. The strong preference for the government referral hospital is likely related to this hospital offering the most advanced diagnostic and therapeutic options within Bo city limits and to a national policy implemented in April 2010 that made most maternal and child health care free at government healthcare facilities. These observations and others identified from a systematic review and synthesis of the literature inspired a new framework for categorizing the factors that affect healthcare provider selection: the EPIC model. The four components of the EPIC model include (1) Environmental factors such as travel distance and road availability, (2) Provider factors such as staffing and equipment availability, (3) Individual factors such as sociodemographic characteristics, and (4) Cost factors such as the price of healthcare services. In Bo, individuals and families must consider the built environment, represented by the E in the EPIC model, as part of the decision about healthcare provider selection because private transportation has to be purchased out-of-pocket when traveling beyond easy walking distance for care. Improving access to healthcare services in Bo will require expanding the diagnostic and treatment services available in the city, especially for chronic disease management, and ensuring that road networks and a public transportation system are available to facilitate access to these services
Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Related to Antimicrobial Resistance among Undergraduate Students at a Large Public University in 2020
Full text linkOne of the major contributors to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is human misuse of antibiotics. The goal of this research project was to understand knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) related to antibiotic use and AMR among undergraduate students at a large public university. A total of 527 undergraduate students at George Mason University completed an online KAP survey about AMR, holistic health, and climate change in January and February 2020. The participants were reasonably representative of the university's undergraduate student population. While 92% of the participants knew that antibiotics could be used to cure bacterial infections and 82% knew that resistant pathogens can be contagious, 47% incorrectly thought that antibiotics can cure viral infections, 42% believed that AMR was a problem only for people who take antibiotics often, and 38% believed that antibiotics weaken the immune system. Students with more knowledge about antibiotics and AMR were less likely to participate in the types of behaviors that generate AMR, such as taking antibiotics that were not prescribed to them, sharing their antibiotics with other people, and stopping antibiotics before the full course has been completed. The percentage of students who reported being worried about AMR (57%) was significantly lower than the percentage who were worried about climate changes (88%, p<0.001). Increasing knowledge about AMR among college students may contribute to raising their concern about AMR and encouraging them to adopt behaviors that help prevent AMR
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
- …
