1,720,972 research outputs found
Social lives and afterlives of a malaria vaccine trial: partnerships in practice
Full text linkThis thesis focuses on the development of a malaria vaccine as an avenue
to explore global health partnerships. In the last twenty years, public-private
partnerships have become a prominent organizational form in global health.
Hundreds of large transnational collaborations and countless smaller collaborations
between the public, private and non-profit sectors have been established.
Partnerships have been supported by the large increase of donor funding for
research and control of infectious diseases in impoverished countries and many aim
to develop or provide vaccines, medicines or interventions. Analysts generally
agree that partnerships are saving many lives and revolutionizing drug and vaccine
development for infectious diseases. However, while partnership is a notion that
connotes equity and mutuality, often global health partnerships operate in contexts
that involve vast disparities in power and resources and there is little known about
the impacts of partnerships on the places where they operate. This raises the
questions: How do global health partnerships operate in practice? What are their
impacts in the places where they operate?
Addressing these questions, this thesis examines a partnership established
to develop the most advanced malaria vaccine, named RTS,S. Based on 17
months of ethnographic research in Tanzania and interviews with representatives of
partnering organizations in Belgium and the United States, I trace the development
of the RTS,S vaccine from laboratories to its clinical trials across Africa. I explore
the social relationships formed between private companies, philanthropic institutions
and non-profit organizations in the North, and research institutions and communities
in north-eastern Tanzania, where a malaria vaccine clinical trial was conducted.
Analyzing the impacts of the malaria vaccine partnership, I focus on community
development, construction of infrastructure, the building of human capacity,
provision of health care and extraction of data. The focus on partnerships is
intended to improve understanding about this ever-increasing social, political and
economic formation in global health, and contributes to discussions and debates
about how partnerships operate and their role in international development, global
health governance and transnational medical research
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
Local Biologies and the Chemical Infrastructures of Global Health
No full textChemicals are key material features of the infrastructure of global health. While the models for disease control deployed in global health projects tend to treat chemicals as stable objects, I ask what might happen if we saw them instead as unstable things, implicated in fluid interactions. A view of health as constituted of things rather than objects has three advantages. First, it pushes theories of biopower in global health beyond attention to the bureaucratic regimes of life-management. Second, it shows how health-seeking practices belie neat spatial scales. Third, chemicals reveal the aesthetic nature of health.Biologies locales et infrastructures chimiques de la santé mondiale. Les produits chimiques jouent un rôle matériel clé dans l'infrastructure de la santé mondiale. Tandis que les modèles de contrôle des maladies utilisés dans les projets de santé mondiale ont tendance à traiter les produits chimiques comme objets stables, je souhaite examiner ce qui pourrait se produire lorsqu'on les envisage comme des choses instables, impliqués dans des interactions fluides. Il existe trois avantages à utiliser un concept de santé comme composée de choses plutôt que d'objets. En premier lieu, ce point de vue déplace les théories du biopouvoir dans la santé mondiale au-delà de l'attention pour les régimes bureaucratiques de la gestion de la vie. En second lieu, cela démontre comment les pratiques de recours au soin démentent des échelles spatiales simplistes. Troisièmement, les produits chimiques révèlent la nature esthétique de la santé
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
Local Biologies and the Chemical Infrastructures of Global Health
No full textChemicals are key material features of the infrastructure of global health. While the models for disease control deployed in global health projects tend to treat chemicals as stable objects, I ask what might happen if we saw them instead as unstable things, implicated in fluid interactions. A view of health as constituted of things rather than objects has three advantages. First, it pushes theories of biopower in global health beyond attention to the bureaucratic regimes of life-management. Second, it shows how health-seeking practices belie neat spatial scales. Third, chemicals reveal the aesthetic nature of health.Biologies locales et infrastructures chimiques de la santé mondiale. Les produits chimiques jouent un rôle matériel clé dans l'infrastructure de la santé mondiale. Tandis que les modèles de contrôle des maladies utilisés dans les projets de santé mondiale ont tendance à traiter les produits chimiques comme objets stables, je souhaite examiner ce qui pourrait se produire lorsqu'on les envisage comme des choses instables, impliqués dans des interactions fluides. Il existe trois avantages à utiliser un concept de santé comme composée de choses plutôt que d'objets. En premier lieu, ce point de vue déplace les théories du biopouvoir dans la santé mondiale au-delà de l'attention pour les régimes bureaucratiques de la gestion de la vie. En second lieu, cela démontre comment les pratiques de recours au soin démentent des échelles spatiales simplistes. Troisièmement, les produits chimiques révèlent la nature esthétique de la santé
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
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