1,720,992 research outputs found
Pesticide risk evaluation and management in the field : the experience of Southern Europena Countries
No full textOccupational health and safety in agriculture : situation and priorities at the beginning of the third millennium
No full textAgriculture is a human activity, which includes a number of different tasks and occupies a huge number of people worldwide. Estimates of World Bank for 2003 suggest that 51% of globalpopulation lives in rural areas. ILO estimates that 1.3 billion of workers are engaged in agriculture, and they represent almost a half of the total number of economically active subjects (2,838,897,404). In developed countries, agriculture workers are only a small fraction of the whole work force (up to 9% according to ILO data), while in developing countries, especially in Asia, agriculture workers represent up to the 60% of the total work force. Most agriculture workers reside in Asia, in the Pacific (74%) and in Africa (16%). ILO estimates suggest that half of fatal occupational injuries in the world are attributable to agriculture. This means that around 170,000 agriculture workers die every year as a consequence of occupational injuries. Using the same estimate, half of the fatal accidents could be linked to agricultural activities (more than 130 million). Comparing this estimate with the 6.328.217 people injured in war in 2002 or with the 20-50 million injured victims of road accidents, one has a much clearer picture about the importance of preventing agricultural injuries. In a complicated situation such as occupational health and safety problems in agriculture, it is not so easy to select priorities clearly. But "legalization" of agriculture workers could be a key to solving all the other problems. Actual data on fatal and non-fatal occupational injuries in agriculture show that occupational health and safety issues are among the top priorities for that disciplin
The Importance of Open Data in Toxicological Research and Publishing
No full textEvery year thousands of toxicological studies are performed around the World. These studies are most commonly funded by Governmental, Non-Governmental agencies, Universities, Faculties, and in the last 50 years even more so by funds provided by research funding schemes such as the Horizon 2020 and the Framework Programmes in the European Union, or the National Institutes of Health in the United States. As part of these studies, thousands of experiments and field studies are done, collecting millions of tables of data ranging from genotypes and cell-culture reactions to chemical agents, to epidemiological data on populations from different towns and countries. In addition, governmental agencies and private companies measure a vast amount of parameters regarding the environment. Recently, a very specific risk has come to attention of research funders: the results of a specific research project are published in a peer review journal, thus satisfying the basic requirements of the project call, and the raw data which was collected remains buried (or lost) in the hard-disk of participating researchers. To resolve this situation, many institutions have adopted the „Open Data“ policy, which should allow the data collected by these institutions or projects funded by them to be freely available to use and re-use by others. This philosophy was also adopted by many journals which now allow the authors of published articles to store even the raw data in their online repositories. This new trend, which might soon become a rule in the scientific publishing world, considering there are journals specifically designed to store datasets and study protocols, increases the use of already collected data, facilitates data re-use and new discoveries, but also helps authors achieve a higher impact and recognition than by just publishing their work
Environmental Lead Exposure in Children: a Problem of Developing Countries?
No full textEnvironmental exposure to lead, although not an important cause of mortality, represents one of the main causes of morbidity among children and adolescents. In general, rural communities are expected to have significantly lower blood lead levels (BLLs) than urban communities. However, this is not the case in populations living in the vicinity of lead mines and smelting facilities, where higher BLLs may occur, particularly among young children. Around 50% of Global lead production can be traced back to car battery recycling.
The aim of this study was to quantify blood lead levels (BLLs) of children living near a car battery smelting facility in Serbia, compare the levels with developed and developing countries’ standards, and identify the main determinants of lead exposure in this population. BLLs were quantified in 75 children from Zajača, a village where a car battery smelting factory is located, and 52 children from Paskovac, village 5 kilometers away from Zajača. The median BLL for both groups were 12 μg/dl, 7.60 μg/dl in children from Paskovac, and 17.5 μg/dl in children from Zajača. Even 87% of children from Zajača had the BLL above 10 μg/dl, which is comparable to urban schoolchildren in South Africa and Bangladesh. Although a European country, a candidate country for the European Union, BLLs of Serbian children were comparable to that of children living in developing countries and higher than those expected in children living near lead smelting facilities in developed countries
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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