1,721,030 research outputs found
Mindbodyspirit Architecture: Creating birth space
No full textCo-authored with Lepori, B and Hastie C. Examines the research evidence for the impact of the physical and emotional environment on the physiology of women in labour and birth. Proposes new principles for the design of birth spaces and sets a new research agenda
Some methodological reflections on the comparability of universities at European level
No full textThe main objective of this paper is to discuss strengths and weaknesses of the availability and use of quantitative data to characterize Higher Education Systems in Europe.
We present the work done within the AQUAMETH PSR Project (Advanced Quantitative Methods for Evaluate the performance of Public Sector Research), under the PRIME Network of Excellence, to show that a comparison within and between national university systems is possible and even informative under a set of conditions to be fully aware of
Indicators for the analysis of Higher Education Systems: some methodological reflections
No full textUntil now, what most researchers in HE have done is to choose between
aggregate data at national system level provided by statistical offices, or
detailed case-study data collected for single individual higher education
institutions (HEIs).
An important innovation of the Aquameth project has been the collection
of meso-level data – that is, data at the level of whole HEIs – on a part of the
European university system (six countries) in a systematic way, by applying
broad common definitions of data categories across countries and collecting
information already available at national level.
Nevertheless, the Aquameth database which per se represents a very
important result of the project has to be handled with care. It cannot be used
in a ‘data mining’ way, but its exploitation needs a profound understanding of the meaning of the contained data and of their limitations, due both to
conceptual problems and to the data collection procedures. This chapter
deals with these kinds of issues with two major aims: to serve as a guide for
those interested in further exploiting the database and to point out some
major improvements in data which are urgently needed
Indicators on individual Higher Education Institutions. Addressing data problems and comparability issues
No full textHigher education institutions (HEI) are crucial to the development of the European Research Area. However, unlike in US, the availability of quantitative indicators for individual HEI at the European level is severely limited by several methodological issues, data availability problems and national institutional constraints. The paper discusses strategies for collecting and validating data from different national sources; the limitations of the available data for different categories of indicators and, finally, the influence of the heterogeneity of the national higher education systems on the comparability at the European level.
Based on the experience of two recently completed projects, the paper shows that, despite these problems, it is possible to collect relatively coherent data on European higher education institutions and to develop a set of consequential indicators. Further, it provides advice on how to exploit them for comparative purposes in a sensible way.
It concludes by indicating areas where major improvements are urgently needed, and, advocates for an European Science and Technology Indicators Platform to maintain and develop, in a long-term perspective, these data sets
Participations to European Framework Programs of Higher Education Institutions and their association with Organizational Characteristics
No full text
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
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