1,720,955 research outputs found
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
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
James Short and John Harrison: personal genius and public knowledge
The instrument maker James Short, whose output was exclusively reflecting telescopes, was a sustained and consistent supporter of the clock and watch maker John Harrison. Short’s specialism placed his work in a tradition that derived from Newton’s Opticks, where the natural philosopher or mathematician might engage in the mechanical process of making mirrors, and a number of prominent astronomers followed this example in the eighteenth century. However, it proved difficult, if not impossible, to capture and communicate in words the manual skills they had acquired. Harrison’s biography has similarities with Short’s but, although he was well received and encouraged in London, unlike Short his mechanical practice did not place him at the centre of the astronomers’ agenda. Harrison became a small part of the growing public interest in experimental demonstration and display, and his timekeepers became objects of exhibition and resort. Lacking formal training, he himself came to be seen as a naive or intuitive mechanic, possessed of an individual and natural ‘genius’ for his work – an idea likely to be favoured by Short and his circle, and appropriate to Short’s intellectual roots in Edinburgh. The problem of capturing and communicating Harrison’s skill became acute once he was a serious candidate for a longitude award and was the burden of the specially appointed ‘Commissioners for the Discovery of Mr Harrison’s Watch’, whose members included Short. Now the problem was one of transforming individual genius into a generally useful practice. It was a question that touched on the reputation of Short in the area of his own genius and it was familiar also to the astronomers, men who had engaged with making mirrors, had struggled to systematise and record their methods, and who now, as Commissioners, had to judge whether and how Harrison’s very individual achievements might be shared
The Science Museum and the Leonardo da Vinci Quincentenary Exhibition of 1952
A large and successful exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of Leonardo da Vinci was held at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, London, in 1952. It was an important event for the public appreciation of Leonardo’s genius. The proposal for the exhibition had come from the Science Museum, whose staff arranged a ‘scientific section’ of the exhibition, providing and displaying photographs and models. The story of these early models is particularly interesting in the light of the subsequent expansion in the use of mechanical models and animations to interpret and present Leonardo’s work. Questions that surrounded their introduction are accentuated by the ubiquity of models today. Some of the 1952 models will be displayed at the Science Museum in 2016, alongside an exhibition of a large group of ‘historical models’ first displayed in Milan in 1953. The occasion should provoke some thoughtful consideration of the current influence of this tool for research and display
Variations on the Author
“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
Review: Perfect Mechanics: Instrument Makers at the Royal Society of London in the Eighteenth Century, by Richard Sorrenson
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We 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
We 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
We 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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