1,720,995 research outputs found
Prioritization of students’ needs for education service design and development by embedding AHP and fuzzy set theory: A case study
No full textStudent satisfaction represents a strategic factor for many universities towards increasing competition concerning students recruitment. Thus, nowadays many universities take into account typical customer-oriented industry’s approaches for the education service design and development. In such a condition, prioritization of students’ needs represents a crucial step to appropriately adopt these approaches. This paper proposes an effective way to evaluate importance of students’ needs based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, in which linguistic variables are parameterized by means of triangular fuzzy numbers, to deal with uncertainty, subjectivity and vagueness. Finally, a case study concerning the degree program in Management Engineering at the University of Palermo (Italy) is performed with detailed considerations on the most responding service aspects on students’ need
A fuzzy framework to evaluate service quality in the healthcare industry: An empirical case of public hospital service evaluation in Sicily
No full textA novel fuzzy evaluation framework is applied in this study to evaluate service quality in the public healthcare sector. In particular, the proposed framework is based on the ServQual disconfirmation paradigm and incorporates the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method to elicit reliable estimations of service quality expectations. Moreover, degrees of uncertainty, subjectivity and vagueness on the part of stakeholders are addressed via linguistic evaluation scales parameterized by triangular fuzzy numbers. With reference to nine relevant public hospitals in the Sicilian Region (Italy), a detailed case study evaluating four core service criteria and 15 fundamental service items is conducted so as to discern dissatisfying aspects regarding the public healthcare service in the Region. Dissatisfaction reasons with the provided service are identified in the analysis as well, further demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach
DINESERV along with fuzzy hierarchical TOPSIS to support the best practices observation and service quality improvement in the restaurant context
No full textThe present work proposes a new Multi-Criteria-Decision-Analysis (MCDA)-based approach integrating the DINESERV model along with the hierarchical TOPSIS method as measurement tool for evaluating quality in the restaurant services context. More in detail, on the basis of the DINESERV theoretical framework of the restaurant service quality, hierarchical TOPSIS is applied to compare quality of restaurant services. Actually, due to the prioritization process of hierarchical TOPSIS, investigated services providers are consistently and effectively assessed against criteria and sub-criteria of DINESERV, so allowing the identification of both best practices and weaknesses of delivered services to be addressed. Moreover, the approach also comprises features of the fuzzy set theory to handle the possible vagueness, subjectivity and uncertainty of involved experts in the evaluation process. The developed case study allows to practitioners and researchers to better understand from a practical perspective the proposed approach. In particular, it is considered with reference to the three major restaurants of the University of Palermo, showing the applicability of the approach and that obtained results can constitute a significant driver in pursuing focused service quality improvements in the investigated contex
Service quality benchmarking via a novel approach based on fuzzy ELECTRE III and IPA: an empirical case involving the Italian public healthcare context
No full textA novel fuzzy-based approach which combines ELECTRE III along with the Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) is proposed in the present work to comparatively evaluate the service quality in the public healthcare context. Specifically, ELECTRE III is firstly considered to compare the service performance of examined hospitals in a noncompensatory manner. Afterwards, IPA is employed to support the service quality management to point out improvement needs and their priorities. The proposed approach also incorporates features of the Fuzzy Set Theory so as to address the possible uncertainty, subjectivity and vagueness of involved experts in evaluating the service quality. The model is applied to five major Sicilian public hospitals, and strengths and criticalities of the delivered service are finally highlighted and discussed. Although several approaches combining multi-criteria methods have already been proposed in the literature to evaluate the service performance in the healthcare field, to the best of the authors’ knowledge the present work represents the first attempt at comparing service performance of alternatives in a noncompensatory manner in the investigated context
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
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