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    On the resilience of the gravitational variational principle under renormalization

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    A well-defined variational principle for gravitational actions typically requires to cancel boundary terms produced by the variation of the bulk action with a suitable set of boundary counterterms. This can be achieved by carefully balancing the coefficients multiplying the bulk operators with those multiplying the boundary ones. A typical example of this construction is the Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary action that needs to be added to the Einstein-Hilbert one in order to have a well-defined metric variation for General Relativity with Dirichlet boundary conditions. Quantum fluctuations of matter fields lead to a renormalization of these coefficients which may or may not preserve this balance. Indeed, already at the level of General Relativity, the resilience of the matching between bulk and boundary constants is far from obvious and it is anyway incomplete given that matter generically induces quadratic curvature operators. We investigate here the resilience of the matching of higher-order couplings upon renormalization by a non-minimally coupled scalar field and show that a problem is present. Even though we do not completely solve the latter, we show that it can be greatly ameliorated by a wise splitting between dynamical and topological contributions. Doing so, we find that the bulk-boundary matching is preserved up to a universal term (present for any Weyl invariant matter field content), whose nature and possible cancellation we shall discuss in the end

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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
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