1,720,962 research outputs found
Far lavorare la scienza. Le Regioni come agenti di ricerca agricola
No full textRegione Emilia-Romagna, Associazione "Alessandro Bartola
How do public institutions select competitive agricultural R&D projects? The case of an Italian region
No full textLocal entrepreneurs’ involvement in strategy building for waste valorisation within an agro-food technological district: a SWOT-SOR approach
No full textCan contract farming support sustainable intensification in agri-food value chains?
Full text linkSustainable intensification aims to minimize the negative impacts of the current agricultural system while maintaining productivity and economic outputs. This study demonstrates that contract farming is a potential mechanism to support many, but not all, farmers in adopting sustainable intensification practices. A discrete choice experiment on a hypothetical value chain contract introducing three sustainable intensification practices, namely extended crop rotation, reducing agrochemicals and planting flower strips, was conducted with a sample of 314 north-Italian wheat farmers. The results show that permanently eliminating glyphosate from the plot under contract is strongly resisted by farmers, while farmers have less strong preferences between introducing legumes or oilseeds in rotation, and between temporary or permanent flower strips. Findings also indicate that farmers who are more educated, are not members of cooperatives and who generally prefer more flexible sales arrangements are unlikely to be triggered to adopt sustainable intensification practices through contract farming. Overall, this study indicates that while voluntary contract arrangements can be a potential tool to increase uptake of sustainable intensification practices, they will likely need to be complemented with more public policy intervention in order to bring sustainable intensification practices to scale
Smart farming technologies adoption: Which factors play a role in the digital transition?
Full text linkSmart Farming Technologies (SFT) are smart devices part of a cyber-physical system able to improve farm management. Compared to other digital technologies' functionalities, SFT generate a multitude of data that once combined can be used not only on-farm but across the entire supply chain. Although recent studies highlighted how the lack of users’ resources and competences might hinder the diffusion of digital agriculture technologies overall, few studies so far focused specifically on SFT. Moreover, the extant literature interprets the adoption decision mostly as “one-off binary” process, and limited attention is given to individual aspects of users and farms. Therefore, this study investigates the adoption of SFT analyzing various aspects of its complex nature; on the one hand, the analysis considers the multi-step nature of the adoption decision process: first, intention formation and then, actual adoption decision. On the other hand, the SFT adoption process is interpreted as being determined by several typologies of determinants beyond the most studied ones, with a particular focus on the role that organizational conditions and the supply chain governance structure play in influencing farmers' adoption of SFT. An empirical analysis is run on a sample of 474 responses, collected through an on-line survey. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and a Zero-Inflated Poisson Regression (ZIP) were used to investigate respectively the intention to use and the actual adoption of SFT. Results show that farmers' intention to use mainly relies on technologies' performance expectancy, technologies' complexity and social influence exerted on farmers, while organizational supporting conditions do not play a significant effect. Nonetheless, when the actual adoption decision is observed, the likelihood that non-adopters intend to adopt SFT in their farms increases when formal integration along the supply chain is high and with the dimension of the farm (in terms of both land size and sales). When the adopters are analyzed instead, the decision to adopt is positively affected only by the individual intention to use and by farmers' specialization in the arable sector. Findings reveal what factors need to be considered to guarantee a fairer and more inclusive agricultural digitalization, such as the role of social influence exerted by some figures around farmers and the still weak facilitating organizational conditions
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
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