1,721,001 research outputs found
Cassava as an Important Staple Food and Its Application in the Food Industry -- A Review
No full textCassava, Manihot esculenta, is cultivated in tropical areas around the world as a staple food source that feeds millions. Cassava tubers are rich in starch. Cassava starch, modified or native, is an important ingredient in the food and pharmaceutical industries. For example, the starch can be hydrolyzed to produce glucose or dextrin. Cassava is a gluten-free carbohydrate source that can be used as a fat replacer in meat analogs. Its modified forms can be used to encapsulate active ingredients, and it can be made into edible or biodegradable food packaging materials. However, in many cassava-growing developing countries, cassava farmers who depend on cassava as a staple food source do not have enough resources to convert this starch vegetable into value-added products to improve their economic returns and their lives. In addition, many of them are suffering from diseases brought on by consuming cassava products without enough processing, as cassava tubers are high in cyanide, which is toxic to the human body. Therefore, it is important to bring the issues to the attention of both academics and the food industry. This review discusses topics such as optimizing cassava growing, detoxification of the tubers, sustainable wastewater processing, tapioca starch modifications, tapioca starch as a staple food and the related epidemiology problems, and applications of tapioca starch and its derivatives in the food and pharmaceutical industries. In conclusion, cassava is a rich carbohydrate source once detoxified properly and can be used as a staple food with some supplementation of protein and other essential nutrients. The production waste needs to be processed before being released into the environment; ideally used to generate additional value. Cassava can be easily processed into cassava starch. The starch can be used directly as a food ingredient for the preparation of a variety of food products. The starch can also be modified, chemically or physically, into different forms with their special properties
Fortified Foods with Vitamin D and Zinc
No full textHidden hunger, also known as micronutrient deficiencies, remains an important global public health issue despite improvements in overall food security. Among essential micronutrients, vitamin D and zinc have important roles in immune regulation, skeletal development, and metabolic functions. But deficiencies in these nutrients are prevalent particularly among vulnerable groups such as children, pregnant women, and the elderly. This review examines the physiological functions, deficiency epidemiology, health consequences, dietary sources, and the necessity of food fortification with vitamin D and zinc. Furthermore, it discusses the synergistic effects of vitamin D and zinc, and technological methods and challenges for fortifing foods with both vitamin D and zinc. Future research should focus on developing new encapsulation technologies, optimizing nutrient delivery systems, and undertaking long-term clinical trials to validate the health benefits of new co-fortified foods
Contribution Based Author Categorization to Calculate Author Performance Index
Get PDFDespite the widely used author contribution criteria, unethical authorship practices such as guest, ghost, and honorary authorship remains largely unsolved. We have identified six major reasons by analyzing 78 published papers addressing unethical authorship practice. Those are lack of: (i) awareness about and (ii) compliance with authorship criteria, (iii) universal definition and scope for determining authorship, (iv) common mechanisms for positioning an author in the list, (v) quantitative measures of intellectual contribution; and (vi) pressure to publish. As a possible measure to control unethical practice, we have evaluated the possibility to adopt an author categorization scheme – proposed according to the common understanding of how first-, co-, principal-, or corresponding- author is perceived. Based on an online opinion survey, the proposed scheme was supported by ~80% of the respondents (n=370). The impact of the proposed categorization was then evaluated using a novel mathematical tool to measure “Author Performance Index (API)” that can be higher for those who might have authored more papers as primary and/or principal authors than those as coauthors. Hence, if adopted, the proposed author categorization scheme together with the API would provide a better way to evaluate the credit of an individual as a primary and principal author
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
The need to quantify authors’ relative intellectual contributions in a multi-author paper
No full textMeasuring the contribution of each author of a multi-author paper has been a long standing concern. As a possible solution to this, we propose a list of intellectual activities and logistic support activities that might be involved in the production of a research paper. We then develop a quantitative approach to estimate an author's relative intellectual contribution to a published work. An author's relative intellectual contribution is calculated as the percent contribution of an author to each intellectual activity involved in the production of the paper multiplied by a weighing factor for each intellectual activity. The relative intellectual contribution calculated in this way can be used to determine the position of an author in the author list of a paper. Second, a corrected citation index for each author, called the T-index, can be calculated by multiplying the relative intellectual contribution by the total citations received by a paper. The proposed approach can be used to measure the impact of an author of a multi-authored paper in a more accurate way than either giving each author full credit or dividing credit equally. Our proposal not only resolves the long standing concern for the fair distribution of each author's credit depending on his/her contribution, but it will also, hopefully, discourage addition of non-contributing authors to a paper
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