1,720,986 research outputs found
Investing in epidemiological surveillance for recovering health systems in war-torn countries
No full textI protocolli e gli integratori nutrizionali per la riabilitazione del bambino severamente malnutrito in paesi a risorse limitate
No full textInfectious diseases seeker (Ids): An innovative tool for prompt identification of infectious diseases during outbreaks
No full textBackground: Several technologies for rapid molecular identification of pathogens are currently available; jointly with monitoring tools (i.e., web-based surveillance tools, infectious diseases modelers, and epidemic intelligence methods), they represent important components for timely outbreak detection and identification of the involved pathogen. The application of these approaches is usually feasible and effective when performed by healthcare professionals with specific expertise and skills and when data and resources are easily accessible. Contrariwise, in the field situation where healthcare workers or first responders from heterogeneous competences can be asked to investigate an outbreak of unknown origin, a simple and suitable tool for rapid agent identification and appropriate outbreak management is highly needed. Most especially when time is limited, available data are incomplete, and accessible infrastructure and resources are inadequate. The use of a prompt, user-friendly, and accessible tool able to rapidly recognize an infectious disease outbreak and with high sensitivity and precision may be a game-changer to support emergency response and public health investigations. Methods: This paper presents the work performed to implement and test an innovative tool for prompt identification of infectious diseases during outbreaks, called Infectious Diseases Seeker (IDS). IDS is a standalone software that runs on the most common operative systems. It has been built by integrating a database containing an interim set of 60 different disease causative agents and COVID-19 data and is able to work in an off-line mode without requiring a network connection. Results: IDS has been applied in a real and complex scenario in terms of concomitant infectious diseases (yellow fever, COVID-19, and Lassa fever), as can be in the second part of 2020 in Nigeria. The outcomes have allowed inferring that yellow fever (YF), and not Lassa fever, was affecting the area under investigation. Conclusions: Our result suggests that a tool like IDS could be valuable for the quick and easy identification and discrimination of infectious disease outbreaks even when concurrent outbreaks occur, like for the case study of YF and COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria
COMBINING REGIONAL REGRESSION APPROACHES WITH GEOSTATISTICAL TECHNIQUES FOR PREDICTING FLOOD QUANTILES IN UNGAUGED BASINS
No full textThe study explores the application of two different spatial interpolation techniques, Generalized Least Squares (GLS) and Top-kriging, aiming to enhance the prediction performances by blending these two powerful methods. GLS is one of the most common approaches used in United States (US) for predicting flood quantiles in ungauged basins, Top-kriging predicts streamflow statistics along river networks (e.g. flood quantiles) taking both the catchment area and nested nature of catchments into account. We first applied GLS in cross-validation, through a comprehensive leave-one-out procedure, to predict flood quantiles over a wide region in the southeast of US by simulating the ungauged conditions at each and every site, then we used Top-kriging to model GLS residuals. The results reveal that combining GLS with Top-kriging increases the prediction capability of GLS. Blending the techniques increases the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency from 0.67-0.76 to 0.75-0.91, depending on the frequency of the quantile; moreover blending GLS with Top-kriging reduces the prediction errors in the majority of the study catchments relative to using GLS alone
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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