1,721,012 research outputs found
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
Clarity and Clarification: Grable Federal Questions in the Eyes of Their Beholders
Full text linkJurists and commentators have repeated for centuries the refrain that jurisdictional rules should be clear. Behind this mantra is the idea that clearly designed jurisdictional rules should enable trial courts to more easily apply the law and therefore allow litigants to more accurately predict how trial courts will rule. The mantra’s ultimate goal is efficiency—that trial courts not labor too long on jurisdiction and most importantly, that litigants can accurately predict the correct forum and choose to spend their money litigating the merits of their claim, rather than where it will be heard. Jurisdictional clarity largely is devoted to sharpening litigants’ vision of the proper jurisdiction. But clarity is not costless. Bright-line jurisdictional rules have the potential to remand the desirable cases with the undesirable ones. In federal-question jurisdiction rules, for example, clarity is somewhat overvalued in theory and unachieved in practice. In theory, the constitutional and statutory bases for federal-question jurisdiction prescribe simply and broadly that jurisdiction exists over “all” actions “arising under” federal law. There exist compelling reasons to have federal courts adjudicate essential federal questions, even if those questions happen to arise through state-law claims. Therefore, many theoretically “clear” rules, like Justice Holmes’s proposal that only federal claims “arise under” federal law, would improperly trim the intent of “arising under” jurisdiction and contravene the supposed benefits of the federal forum. In theory, then, important substance and systemic benefits may be unnecessarily sacrificed on the altar of clarity. In practice, the word “clarity” seems to work much like the word “classy”—if you have to say it, it probably is not true, at least for federal- question jurisdiction. The Supreme Court’s 2005 opinion in Grable & Sons Metal Products, Inc. v. Darue Engineering & Manufacturing stands as a recent example. In Grable, the unanimous Court endeavored to synthesize the numerous doctrines governing jurisdiction over state-law claims raising federal questions (or “embedded” federal questions), and to resolve a circuit split over whether a federal private right of action must accompany the alleged embedded federal questions. The Court decided that jurisdiction did not, in fact, require an underlying federal right of action, but that a right of action was relevant to determinations of “substantiality” and federalism. Grable thus represents the rejection of a bright-line jurisdictional rule in favor of a nuanced, discretionary one, making clear that the jurisdictional waters should remain murky. Grable’s rejection of a bright-line jurisdictional rule raises broader questions about clarity’s role on federal-question jurisdiction doctrine and whether clarity in theory translates into practice. How have district courts reacted to the Supreme Court’s clarification of doctrine and choice of a flexible rule? Has the clarification offered litigants a clearer picture for predicting jurisdiction? This Article takes an initial step toward answering those questions by first arguing that the clarity debate should focus on how jurisdictional rules appear in the eyes of their beholders and by then examining what Grable federal-question jurisdiction looks like from that perspective—as applied in federal court precedents. Part II questions the rationales for jurisdictional clarity and traces the gradual distillation of rules for removal jurisdiction over embedded federal-questions, detailing how Grable purported to “clarify” the proper interpretation of Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc. v. Thompson and state a unified jurisdictional rule. Using Grable as an example, the Article then turns in Part II to an empirical study on the implementation of Grable’s new “clarified” rule. The study captures a snapshot of how federal district and appellate courts have reacted to Grable’s attempted clarification and choice of a nuanced rule over a bright-line one. Part III presents that study examining a sample of decisions before and after Grable. The study identifies a mass of district court precedent “submerged” on court dockets and uses those submerged precedents to trace trends in the rates of remand and reversal in the years before and after the Supreme Court announced Grable. Part IV builds on these theoretical discussions and empirical observations to describe obstacles currently diverting clarification and to suggest some modest steps that litigants, scholars, courts, and Congress might take to improve the availability of clarifying precedents, and thereby enhance predictability
Big Waiver Under Statutory Sabotage
Full text linkThe Affordable Care Act’s State Innovation waiver allows federal agencies to suspend the most controversial parts of the statute for states to pursue alternative paths, while keeping the federal funding provided by the statute. This “big waiver” provision has the potential to enable states to pursue transformative health reforms, while preserving the affordability and universal coverage aims of the federal statute. Big waivers like this one carry theoretical promise, which largely depends on the strength of the federal statute’s baseline infrastructure. This Essay considers early implementation of the State Innovation waiver as a test for big waiver theory – and for cooperative federalism in health reform.
The fragmentation of the Affordable Care Act through litigation, legislation, and executive challenge has complicated both the State Innovation waiver’s intended implementation, and the theoretical promises of big waiver. Most recently, the administering agency’s new guidance stretches the ACA’s already-sizeable waiver beyond its statutory guardrails, even changing its aspirational title from “State Innovation” to “State Relief and Empowerment.” The embrace of the ACA’s big waiver by an administration hostile to the enduring statute suggests that the threats of big waiver swallowing its housing statute are real, and that the waiver may be wielded not as an instrument of innovation, but one of further fragmentation
Agency Imprimatur & Health Reform Preemption
Full text linkAt this moment, there exists nearly unanimous agreement that the American health care system requires reform, but also vehement disagreements over what form regulation should take and who should be in charge of regulating—state or federal authorities. Preemption doctrine typically referees disputes between federal and state regulatory efforts, but it also exacerbates them. There exists nearly as unanimous opinion that preemption doctrine in health law is a mess. This Article identifies an inventive structure that may help defuse some preemption problems in health reform.
The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) individual and employer mandates, health insurance exchanges, and insurance coverage standards established preemptive federal baselines for health insurance regulation. Yet the ACA also permits states to apply for a waiver of all these baseline provisions, if they promise to enact state legislation with equivalent protections. Through this waiver provision—the “section 1332” or “state innovation” wavier—the federal agencies may sanction state variations if the agencies find suitable evidence that the variations will further the goals of the federal baselines.
The ACA’s combination of express preemption and guided waiver raises a novel confluence of “big waiver” theory and preemption doctrine. This Article posits that this confluence offers an “agency imprimatur” model that has great potential for managing health law federalism issues by circumventing conflict. At its best, the agency imprimatur model offers advantages over preemption in expertise, transparency, and communicative federalism. These potential advantages, however, hinge on the presence of meaningful waiver standards that preserve the statutory priorities and require reliance on agencies’ substantive expertise. The section 1332 wavier is not without its pitfalls, but the recently proposed mega-waivers would erode all of these potential gains
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
Submerged Precedent
Full text linkNumerous studies have pointed to the skewed picture of trial courts\u27 workload, management, and disposition of cases that exists from examining Westlaw and Lexis opinions alone, akin to navigating the iceberg from its tip.4 But submerged precedent pushes docketology in an uncharted direction by identifying a mass of reasoned opinions-putative precedent and not mere evidence of decision-making-that exist only on dockets. Submerged precedent thus raises the specter that docket-based research may be necessary in some areas to ascertain an accurate picture of the law itself not just trial courts\u27 administration of it.
The existence of a submerged body of reasoned law carries the potential to destabilize our system of precedent and undermine the system\u27s animating pnnciples of fairness, efficiency, and legitimacy by obscuring decisional law. To investigate whether these threats to the precedential system from submergence have materialized, this article presents an analysis of a sample of opinions: remand decisions from two district courts over seven years, all adjudicating federal-question removals of state-law claims. The study found that 30 percent of all reasoned opinions are submerged on dockets (and 44 percent of all decisions contain no reasoning at all). Looking purely at outcome measures (whether to grant or deny remand), the existence of submerged precedent distorts the picture of remand rates. In this sample, for example, reasoned opinions concerned with Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) federal questions remanded the case 63.67 percent of the time. Looking only in Westlaw, the remand rate drops to 46.67 percent, while 100 percent of the submerged cases were remanded.
Beyond just outcome measures, submerging reasoned opinions from public view carries the potential to skew the substantive law and permit inequitable adjudication. Although the small sample gathered here raises far more questions than it has the power to answer, several factors appear relevant to submergence: structure of legal tests, managerial discretion, party sophistication, and insulation from appeal.
Given these observations, there may be an ideal role for submerged precedent to play. As technology democratizes access to court opinions and eliminates traditional justifications for selective publication in bound volumes, these reflections on the balance between submergence and availability acquire even greater urgency. The E-Government Act of 2002 mandated online public access to federal courts\u27 written opinions, 5 catalyzing the federal courts to digitize their dockets and build the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database for public access.6 BloombergLaw has added a more facile docket search interface for a fee, and the United States Government Printing Office has just branched out into free online access to court opinions through an FDSys pilot project. Yet the march toward unfettered public access to court decisions thus far has sidestepped thoughtful consideration of the interplay between technology, access, and precedent theory, while tacitly permitting submergence of reasoned opinions.
This article responds to this unique moment in the evolution of precedent and the recently-rekindled national debates over precedential values. The analysis proceeds in three parts. Part I surveys the existing empirical evidence about decision-making in district courts and describes the methods for collecting this data set. Part I then establishes the defining features of the submerged precedent identified in this data and compares the sample of district court decisions in Westlaw to those available only on dockets. By this comparison, the study reveals possible forces behind submergence and the potential for inequity and skew in the substantive law these opinions apply.
Part II illustrates submerged precedent\u27s implications for precedent theory and for district courts\u27 role in shaping law. Part II first anchors submerged precedent in precedent doctrine, explaining how submerged precedent\u27s defining features reflect the doctrine\u27s broader systemic goals of efficiency, predictability, and legitimacy. Part II then theorizes the threats that submergence may pose to those goals and highlights the unique institutional roles that district court opinions play.
Proceeding from Part I\u27s empirical observations and Part II\u27s theoretical foundations, Part III outlines submerged precedent\u27s ideal role. In considering the optimal level of submergence, Part III considers technology\u27s democratizing influence on the future composition of-and interface with-a civil justice system based in precedent. Ultimately, this project concludes that submerged precedent\u27s existence should inform procedural and practical choices affecting the body of decisional law available to the public that it is intended to serve, suggesting that submerged precedent\u27s debut here should presage its demise
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