1,720,956 research outputs found
The autism diagnostic encounter in action: Using video reflexive ethnography to explore the assessment of autism in the clinical trial
Get PDFDespite the increasing visibility of autism, this disorder has resisted a consistent and stable diagnostic definition, treatment approaches, and biomedical and genetic attempts to make sense of how it manifests within the body. That this confusion remains despite the enormous biosocial productivity of the category indicates that there is likely a unique set of circumstances, an “epistemic murk” (Eyal et al 2014), in which autism exists, and perhaps thrives. Given there is limited understanding of how clinicians diagnose ASD in practice, especially within the diagnostic encounter of the clinical trial, this thesis focuses on the contention and “epistemic murk” that surrounds autism as the object of the clinical trial and the paradoxical attempts by medicine and the psy-sciences to codify, standardise and quantify this heterogeneous disorder. Using a video-reflexive ethnographic (VRE) approach, I observed and videoed 22 diagnostic sessions with parents and children over two years as part of a randomised double blind placebo-controlled drug trial in a children’s hospital in New South Wales, Australia. Edited clips from these videos were later played back to the clinician in reflexive one-on-one feedback sessions with the researcher, allowing the collaborative analysis of complex diagnostic data. This video data provides a rich, negotiated, embodied and socially nuanced picture of the autism diagnostic encounter in action within the clinical trial. In this context, autism is no longer perceived solely as a set of observable behaviours, but rather a disorder that is firmly located within the brain and its processes. ASD medication, the disorder itself, and the individual ASD brain cannot be properly conceptualised without each other, with each element feeding into a classificatory loop. This data also demonstrates how participants must constantly negotiate between the inherently qualitative nature of the diagnosis in practice and the standardised agenda of the clinical trial, which views disorder as a quantitative deviation from a statistical norm. The thesis argues that during the diagnosis, the clinician must filter, categorise and quantify this complex, inter-subjective, experiential knowledge to fit with what counts as measurable evidence. However, it is behind the scenes that the real labour of the clinical trial occurs. This labour generates data through participants’ value-orientation, their experiences, stories, and corporeal translation of knowledge. This diagnostic work is above all complex, value-laden and qualitative
Sorting Out Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence-Based Medicine and the Complexities of the Clinical Encounter
Get PDFClinical decisions regarding the diagnosis and treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are commonly based upon heterogeneous evidence and ‘expert opinion’. To date, research examining how paediatricians are using (or not using) evidence-based medicine (EBM) to diagnose and treat patients with an ASD has been absent within the literature across all disciplines. To understand how Australian paediatricians are using EBM to conceptualise, diagnose, and treat patients with an ASD, this study interviewed nine paediatricians in private practice using a face-to-face, semi-structured approach. Participants were asked questions about diagnosis and treatment of ASDs, and general questions about their attitudes towards EBM. Analysis of the interviews revealed four key factors affecting the clinical encounter with the ASD patient: the role of experience in the clinical encounter, the tacit and experiential nature of diagnosing and treating ASDs, skilful and creative interaction between the paediatrician and the diagnostic tools (tool “tinkering”), and the influence of political and social forces. This study contributes to sociological understandings of EBM and how it is used by paediatricians to diagnose and treat ASDs. It also demonstrates that this process involves constant negotiation between clinical experience, the evidence, intersubjective evaluation, and social forces
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
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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