1,720,979 research outputs found
Democracy, capacity, and coercion in pandemic response – COVID-19 in comparative political perspective
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic has challenged governments around the world. It also has challenged conventional wisdom and empirical understandings in the comparative politics and policy of health. Three major questions present themselves: First, some of the countries considered to be most prepared-having the greatest capacity for outbreak response-have failed to respond effectively to the pandemic. How should our understanding of capacity shift in light of COVID-19, and how can we incorporate political capacity into thinking about pandemic preparedness? Second, several of the mechanisms through which democracy has been shown to be beneficial for health have not traveled well to explain the performance of governments in this pandemic. Is there an authoritarian advantage in disease response? Third, after decades in which coercive public health measures have increasingly been considered counterproductive, COVID-19 has inspired widespread embrace of rigid lockdowns, isolation, and quarantine enforced by police. Will these measures prove effective in the long run and reshape public health thinking? This article explores some of these questions with emerging examples, even amid the pandemic, when it is too soon to draw conclusions
Playing politics: the World Health Organization’s response to COVID-19
Get PDFThe challenges of the World Health Organization (WHO) begin, perhaps, with its name—framed as one organization, spanning the globe, and tasked with securing, as defined by article 1 of its constitution, “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health” (WHO, 1946). Yet the gap between the expectations of WHO and how global political actors have shaped its structure and its capacities is vast—never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is necessary to look at WHO from at least two perspectives: (1) its role as a scientific, technical, and humanitarian organization and (2) as an international organization and venue for international political negotiation, diplomacy, and policy-making. These two different, at times conflicting, missions leave WHO in a precarious position and have opened it to criticism over the years (Siddiqi, 1995). Some argue that WHO’s importance stems primarily from its political and agenda-setting functions, whereas others argue the technical information-gathering, standard-setting, and cooperation-related activities are paramount and that the agency’s political nature detracts from these activities (Clift, 2014; Jamison et al., 1998; Retreat, 1996; Ruger & Yach, 2009). There have even been calls over the years to split these functions (Hoffman & Røttingen, 2014)
Understanding and comparing HIV-related law & policy environments: cross-national data and accountability for the global AIDS response
Get PDFLaw and policy differences help explain why, as HIV-related science has advanced swiftly, some countries have realised remarkable progress on AIDS while others see expanding epidemics. We describe the structure and findings of a new dataset and research platform, the HIV Policy Lab, which fills an important knowledge gap by measuring the HIV-related policy environment across 33 indicators and 194 countries over time, with online access and visualisation. Cross-national indicators can be critical tools in international governance—building social power to monitor state behaviour with the potential to change policy and improve domestic accountability. This new and evolving effort collects data about policy through review of legal documents, official government reports and systematic review of secondary sources. Alignment between national policy environments and global norms is demonstrated through comparison with international public health guidance and agreements. We demonstrate substantial variation in the content of law and policies between countries, regions and policy areas. Given progress in basic and implementation science, it would be tempting to believe most countries have adopted policies aligned with global norms, with a few outliers. Data show this is not the case. Globally, alignment is higher on clinical and treatment policies than on prevention, testing and structural policies. Policy-makers, researchers, civil society, finance agencies and others can use these data to better understand the policy environment within and across countries and support reform. Longitudinal analysis enables evaluation of the impact of laws and policies on HIV outcomes and research about the political drivers of policy choice
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
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
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
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