1,721,016 research outputs found
Students’ performance and faculty efficiency. Assessing the role of gender through a metafrontier
No full textPurposeThis paper provides novel evidence on the role of gender in the performance of university students, which is particularly relevant to the debate on the performance of female students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.Design/methodology/approachOur approach relies on the metafrontier approach proposed by Huang et al. (2014), which measures students' efficiency within a given faculty and the impact of the faculty's technology on students' efficiency. We use a sample of 53,159 first-year students in 8 faculties from a large university in southern Italy from 2002-2003 to 2010-2011.FindingsStudents' efficiency is relatively low, reflecting an essential role of unobserved heterogeneity. The different technologies of somewhat similar faculties have minimal impact on efficiency. There is a performance gap against women in five faculties, which on average is strongest for the faculties in the pure and applied science area. This gap increases with the proportion of female students and decreases with female lecturers.Practical implicationsThe metafrontier has the benefit of providing relevant policy information on the drivers of student success by relying on data that universities routinely generate and preserve.Originality/valueThe stochastic metafrontier approach allows us to separate the group-specific frontiers from the metafrontier, yielding a decomposition of the efficiency scores of various faculties into technical efficiency scores and technological gaps
Disentangling Faculty Efficiency from Students’ Effort
No full textIn this chapter, we provide an empirical methodology that allows to monitor the performance of university students through data that are routinely produced and stored by universities. This approach disentangle the portion of the students’ academic achievement controlled by the institutions’ activities from the portion directly influenced by the students’ own effort, offering novel insights on the performance of universities and potentially supplementing the information from the standard league tables. Our procedure is applied to a sample of 37,459 first-year students from a large Italian university based in the South of Italy from academic year 2004-2005 to academic year 2010-2011. The evidence suggests that the efficiency with which faculties delivers their activities matters to female students and to students from low income households. Pre-enrolment information such as the high-school grade and type are good proxies of the student’s own effort
Domestic R&D Spillovers and Absorptive Capacity: Some Evidence for US, Europe and Japan
Get PDFAbsorptive capacity is one of the most influential concepts in the management and innovation literature. First introduced by Cohen and Levinthal (1989), it is typically defined as a set of organisational routines and processes that allow firms to assimilate, transform and exploit external knowledge. An aspect that has been ignored by the literature on absorptive capacity is the nature of the knowledge being absorbed. This paper suggests that the learning strategies underpinning absorptive capacity adapt to the type of external knowledge they are more likely to get exposure to and as a result, not all the firms appear to benefit from the same type of external knowledge for the same level of absorptive capacity. To this purpose, we explore how firm-level absorptive capacity mediates the relationship between rent and pure R&D spillovers on the one hand and firm-level turnover on the other in three economic areas (Europe, Japan and US). The empirical analysis uses a dataset (sourced from the EU R&D investment scoreboards) made of 879 worldwide R&D-intensive manufacturing firms. Given the panel data structure of the sample, econometric techniques that deal with unobserved heterogeneity as well as weak exogeneity are employed. The empirical results suggest for the same level of absorptive capacity, firms in economic areas that are closer to the world technology frontier tend to benefit more from pure (knowledge) spillovers than from rent spillovers. Vice versa, firms located in areas that are not on the technology frontier appear to benefit mostly from rent spillovers that travel along the supply chain. These results suggest that absorptive capacity changes with the type of knowledge they may get exposed to
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
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe 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
No full textWe 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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