1,721,871 research outputs found
Antimalarial activity of synthetic analogues of distamycin.
No full textMalaria, one of the most serious diseases transmitted by arthropods, is largely present in tropical and even temperate zones in endemic or epidemic form. More than 40% of the world's population lives in areas at risk for exposure, and the World Health Organization reports that approximately 300 million people are affected by the infection (mostly caused by the species Plasmodium falciparum), with 1-2 million deaths per year. These data, and the fact that malaria is becoming increasingly refractory to treatment through resistance of the parasite to antimalarial agents currently in use, e.g., chloroquine, emphasize the need to develop new drugs. The well-known antiparasitic activity of oligopyrrolamidine natural products, such as distamycin and netropsin, suggested the antimalarial evaluation of related compounds obtained by new chemical modifications. Besides possessing antiviral and antitumoural properties, distamycin exhibits interesting in vitro activity against P. falciparum. Unfortunately, the high toxicity associated with this product precludes its development as a drug. However, some synthetic analogues of distamycin proved to be highly active against chloroquine-sensitive and -resistant strains of P. falciparum, besides showing low toxicity in vitro
Sustainable Development Goals and Current Sustainability Actions at Politecnico di Torino
No full textAdopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015, the agenda of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represents a new coherent way of thinking about how issues as diverse as poverty, education and climate change fit together; it embeds economic, social and environmental targets in an holistic way. Implicit in such SDG logic is that each goal relies on another, although there are no clear ways to measure this intersection. International negotiations are obviously one trial table of these trade-offs. Universities, with their broad responsibility in the creation and dissemination of knowledge and their exceptional position within society, have a crucial role to play in the achievement of the SDGs and in understanding the complexity underling them, since they can help to demonstrate the university impact on society, shape an SDG-related education, build new partnerships, access new funding streams, and redefine the strategic plan of a university. This paper explores the way Politecnico di Torino maps its actions through the lens of a mission-based university, where SDGs can restructure and update the whole knowledge transfer approach to students and among staff. However, this transition is still difficult since departments and administrative unites operate in silos and the leaderâ€TMs agenda does not allow a real flexible and adaptable model to feed in. Researchers and administrators also lack tools to identify which interactions are the most important to tackle, and evidence to show how particular interventions and policies help or hinder progress towards the goals. Given the size of the task of achieving the SDGs, this mapping exercise provides interesting stimula for the academic sector to accelerate insights on the SDGs complementarity and prioritization
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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