1,721,190 research outputs found
Perspectives on the Multidisciplinary role of Bioanalysis: an Interview with Prof. Marcello Locatelli
No full textAnalytical tools and chemometrics in drug development process: A review
No full textDrug development is a time-consuming and costly process. Recently, the need of very sensitive and selective assays for the complete characterization of New Chemical Entities (NCE) has become very stringent. From Analytical Chemists, a partial answer to this problem was the development and validation of new methods that permit an improvement in terms of productivity (-high-throughput"), sensitivity and selectivity, especially using very recent hyphenated analytical assays, such as HPLC-MS/MS, GC-MS/MS or further complex couplings, that can provide more complete information in a single analysis. All data obtained by these novel techniques require a very deep and multifaceted analysis, in order to check the principal and fundamentals variables and to reject the others. In this scenario, chemometrics provide scientists with useful tools to interpret the large amounts of data generated by these complex analytical assays and allows for quality control, classification procedures, modelling studies. Discrimination between different molecules available as novel drugs and molecules having no interesting biological activities is easy by means of multivariate analysis. In this chapter we report recent advantages in analytical method hyphenation and chemometric approach applied to drug development
Toxic metals in herbal medicines. A review.
No full textThe present review proposes an exhaustive focus on what are the metals of interest, and what is the state of the art about analytical methodologies suitable to detect these toxic metals in herbal medicines. This review would also be a stimulus to solicit International Organizations to fill the gap of the lack of strict and comprehensive laws regulating the maximum allowable concentrations for an increasing number of contaminants in these matrices, especially considering their enormous consumption.
Herbal medicines are more and more worldwide used. This fact certainly presents serious problems for the potential human health risks. This is due to the fact that the laws in force generally do not provide for strict quality controls of herbal medicines to certify the concentration of compounds and elements that may be hazardous for human health, and sometimes very severe or even lethal. Heavy metals have a decidedly substantial part of the contaminants in herbal medicines
Trace level voltammetric determination of heavy metals and total mercury in tea matrices (Camellia sinensis)
No full textAn analytical procedure regarding the voltammetric determination of mercury(II), copper(II), lead(II), cadmium(II) and zinc(II) by square wave anodic stripping voltammetry (SWASV) in matrices involved in food chain is proposed. In particular, tea leaves were analyzed as real samples. The digestion of each matrix was carried out using a concentrated HCl-HNO3-H2SO4 acidic attack mixture; 0.01molL-1 EDTA-Na2+0.15molL-1 NaCl+0.5molL-1 HCl was employed as the supporting electrolyte. The voltammetric measurements were carried out using a conventional three electrode cell, employing, as working electrodes, a gold electrode (GE) and a stationary hanging mercury drop electrode (HMDE). The analytical procedure has been verified on the standard reference materials Spinach Leaves NIST-SRM 1570a, Tomato Leaves NIST-SRM 1573a and Apple Leaves NIST-SRM 1515. For all the elements, the precision as repeatability, expressed as relative standard deviation (sr) was of the order of 3-5%, while the trueness, expressed as relative error (e) was of the order of 3-7%. Once set up on the standard reference materials, the analytical procedure was applied to commercial tea leaves samples.A critical comparison with spectroscopic measurements is also discussed
Analytica—A Journal of Analytical Chemistry and Chemical Analysis
Full text linkBack in 1894, Wilhelm Ostwald defined analytical chemistry as “the art of recognizing different substances and determining their constituents”, which “occupies a prominent position among the applications of science, since the questions it allows us to answer arise wherever chemical processes are used for scientific or technical purposes”. In 1993, the Working Party of Analytical Chemistry (WPAC), held in Edinburgh, UK, stated that analytical chemistry “is that scientific discipline that develops and applies methods, tools and strategies to obtain information on the composition and nature in space and time”.
Nowadays, these definitions remain very modern and, above all, they are reflected in an uncountable number of application sectors, ranging from biology, geology, environmental sciences, agricultural chemistry, physics, engineering, medicine, and materials science, to social sciences and, of course, in chemistry itself. Often, this discipline is relegated into a corner and considered merely a support for other subjects; this, however, is without realizing that without it and, above all, without its principles, theories, and tools, nothing could make any applicative or rational sense
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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