1,721,175 research outputs found

    Fighting the COVID pandemic: National policy choices in non-pharmaceutical interventions

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    The COVID-19 pandemic pushed countries to adopt various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Due to the features of the pandemic, which spread over time and space, governments could decide whether or not to follow policy choices made by leaders of countries affected by the virus before them. In this study, we aim to empirically model the adoption of NPIs during the first wave of COVID-19 in the 14 European countries with more than 10 million inhabitants, in order to detect whether a policy diffusion mechanism occurred. By means of a multivariate approach based on Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis, we manage to derive three clusters representing different behaviour models to which the different European countries belong in the different periods of the first wave: pre-pandemic, summer relaxation and deep-lockdown scenarios. These results bring a two-fold contribution: on the one hand, they may help us to understand differences and similarities among European countries during the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak and guide future quantitative or qualitative studies; on the other, our findings suggest that with minor exceptions (such as Sweden and Poland), different countries adopted very similar policy strategies, which are likely to be due more to the unfolding of the pandemic than to specific governmental strategies

    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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