1,720,998 research outputs found
Variability of efficacy measures in Alzheimer's disease
No full textThe efficacy of medical interventions is their capacity of inducing positive modifications of the natural history of diseases. The natural history of dementia is marked by specific events related to the cognitive and functional decline, but their occurrence is poorly predictable in individual patients being highly variable from patient to patient. For this reason it is difficult that the modest efficacy of available interventions for dementia, or their entity measured by clinical scales, may be perceived in clinical practice or in observational studies. Moreover in randomized clinical studies, the effect of this variability, in analogy to misclassification of exposition and/or disease in case control or cohort epidemiological studies, is that of an underestimation of the true efficacy of interventions
Rivastigmine in Alzheimer's disease: Cognitive function and quality of life
No full textAlzheimer's disease (AD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder characterized by a progressive loss of cognitive and functional abilities associated with various behavioral disturbances. Its impact on public health and society as a whole is devastating. Slowing of the cognitive impairment, and improvements in disease duration, self-sufficiency and behavioral disturbances represent the best outcomes of pharmacologic therapy. Cholinesterase inhibitors (ChE-I) have been shown to be effective in treating the cognitive, behavioral, and functional deficits of AD. Rivastigmine is a dual inhibitor of both acetylcholine esterase (AChE) and butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE), enzymes involved in the hydrolysis of acetylcholine. Although this drug has been shown to be beneficial in patients with AD, its benefits are limited and their long-term effectiveness has not been well demonstrated
Comparison on sealer penetration into dentinal tubules using self-adjusting file cleaning- shaping-irrigation system and conventional endodontic needle irrigation
No full text
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
- …
