1,721,050 research outputs found
Dino Buzzati’s 50th death anniversary: an appraisal of medicine and infectivology’s influence on his literary production
No full textBackground and aim: This paper, in the 50th anniversary of the author’s death, examines the overall impact and influence of medicine, in particular of infectious diseases, on the literary production of Italian writer and novelist Dino Buzzati (1906-1972). Methods: Analysis of literary sources and historical study. Results and conclusions: Buzzati’s literary world is great fun for the reader, being both intriguing and anxiety forming at the same time. One finishes reading his books only to discover the one truth which overturns everything that seemed to be true. In particular, in his short stories, which stem mostly from episodes taken from everyday life, the plot suddenly comes to life. The atmosphere becomes surreal, and in a moment the incredible happens. Behind the apparent lightness of the fairytale narrative there lies hidden the important issues addressed by the author. He uses the hospital as a metaphor for a categorised life, in which we are at risk of no longer being masters of ourselves, in which we suffer a continuous steady drip that makes us head downwards day after day, floor after floor. We will come back up, but not today, tomorrow perhaps, or at the latest, the day after tomorrow. Corte on the second floor hopes, and screams to give strength to his hope, that he will soon return to the top, towards the seventh floor. (www.actabiomedica.it)
SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) and the Teaching of Ignaz Semmelweis and Florence Nightingale: a Lesson of Public Health from History, after the “Introduction of Handwashing” (1847)
Full text linkIgnác Fülöp Semmelweis (1818-1865) and Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) were two important personalities in the history of medicine and public health. They dealt with the problem of handwashing. Semmelweis is also known as the “father of hand hygiene”; just in 1847 he discovered the etiology and prophylaxis of puerperal sepsis and imposed a new rule mandating handwashing with chlorine for doctors. He also tried to persuade European scientific community of the advantages of handwashing. During the Crimean War, in Scutary (Italy), Florence Nightingale strengthened handwashing and other hygiene practices in the war hospital where she worked and her handwashing practices reached a reductions in infections. But unfortunately the hygiene practices promoted by Semmelweis and Nightingale were not widely adopted. In general handwashing promotion stood still for over a century. During current pandemic SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) one of the most important way to prevent the spread of the virus is still to wash the hands frequently
One hundred years after the death of the writer and novelist Giovanni Verga (1922) and his relationship with public health: a glimpse of the past in the era of the SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic
Full text linkBackground. In 1922 the famous Italian novelist Giovanni Verga died in Catania (Italy). In Verga’s manuscripts there are many suggestions to the world of medicine, in particular the diseases described the poor society of southern Italy at that time. One of the most common diseases described by Verga was the cholera. Methods. The authors searched and examined literature texts and features linked to public health. These are topical issues in the current period with the Covid pandemic. In Verga’s manuscripts we can found the topic of hygiene, epidemiology, infectious diseases. There are many ideas related to medicine: all diseases described the poor society and difficult social settings at that time. One of the most common diseases described by Verga was the cholera but also malaria and tuberculosis.Results: It was estimated that 69,000 people died of cholera in Sicily, 24,000 of them in Palermo. The public health situation in Italy was hard. One of the most meaningful features of the existence of cholera in Verga\u27s manuscripts is the recognition of ignorance of people, who trust on popular stories and approach to medicine’s language.Conclusion: Verga describes a culturally and economically humble society, in the Sicily with a great difference between social class. He portrays a difficult picture of the public health situation in the II half of the XIX century and he traced the people\u27s daily life. The authors think that it’s important nowadays that the centenary of Verga’s death is the opportunity to read his works, also from a medical historical point of view
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
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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