1,720,983 research outputs found
'...They Were Routed': Cohesion and disintegration in ancient battle
No full textThe most significant test to cohesion that any military unit can experience is combat. It is an environment where the social and vertical bonds that tie soldiers together are subject to intense physical and psychological stresses. The ancients recognised the value of social bonds in combat. It was sometimes stated that men facing death in combat ‘will gladly die in good company’, or that men fought best where ‘brother stands in rank beside brother, friend beside friend, lover beside lover’. This chapter begins by outlining the predisposing factors that might affect a unit prior to the engagement and reflects on how they work to make rout, flight and the loss of cohesion on the battlefield more likely. The psychological and physical pressures leading up to battle, then, could often have an important role in undermining cohesion during combat
Unit cohesion in the multi-ethnic armies of Carthage
No full textThe place of mercenaries in pre-modern armies is not typically looked upon as a positive. Authors from the ancient world onward criticized the use of mercenary troops. One of the typical criticisms we hear of is that they cannot be relied upon because they have no permanent investment in the community for which they fight. In the context of the ancient Mediterranean world, we must also address the issue of mercenaries often being from a different ethnic group with considerable cultural differences between them and their allies. Despite these concerns, amongst others, mercenaries were constantly relied on in times of war. This is especially true, or so we are led to believe, of the armies of Carthage. Perhaps the earliest armies of the Tyrian colony were comprised only of citizens, but by the fourth century considerable compliments of mercenaries from around the Western Mediterranean were helping to fight their wars. The armies which fought against Syracuse and her allies under Dionysius, for example, were largely mercenary from what we hear in our sources. Famously, at the close of the First Punic War against Rome, the mercenaries in service of Carthage rebelled from the great city and fought a fairly successful war against their one time employers. In the Second Punic War, their armies, including considerable mercenary contingents, almost brought Rome to her knees. Throughout the known history of Carthage's wars, however, their mercenaries had a mixed history of courage under fire. On at least one occasion the problem was breaking ranks early to begin looting. This paper will examine the integrity in battle of mercenary units in service of Carthage and will discuss the issues of ethnicity and army cohesion
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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