1,721,011 research outputs found
Washing away Ebola : environmental stress, rumor, and ethnomedical response in a deadly epidemic
Get PDFSummary
Emerging infectious diseases are a critical issue in contemporary global environmental health. The 2014/15 Ebola epidemic in West Africa has become the large most widespread outbreak of the disease to date, Among its various impacts, the epidemic triggered a proliferation of emergent ethnomedical cultural responses. With the appearance of cases in Nigeria, information about these practices quickly spread through social media and other communication channels into neighboring Cameroon as people attempted to assuage their uncertainty and significant fear of the disease. We assess this process of information-sharing about ethnomedical practices like salt-water baths and drinking as an Ebola preventive in light of theories on the spread of rumors. Rumors are mechanisms groups use to help order their experience of reality during times of environmental uncertainty and growing confusion; however, rumors can also impact public attitudes and behaviors in ways that expose individuals to greater risk. Based on data collected from 90 interviews with participants in two cities in Cameroon, we demonstrate that information on the prophylactic use of salt-water baths and drinking spread quickly and widely. This case affirms that people do not remain passive during times of an environmental emergency and that work in environmental health must pay heed to processes of rumor formation, spread, and impact.
Keywords:
Ebola; social stress;rumor; epidemics; ethnomedicin
Baer (Hans A.) Singer (Merrill) African-American Religion in the Twentieth Century-Varieties of Protest and Accommodation
No full textChenu Bruno. Baer (Hans A.) Singer (Merrill) African-American Religion in the Twentieth Century-Varieties of Protest and Accommodation. In: Archives de sciences sociales des religions, n°84, 1993. p. 312
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
- …
