1,721,084 research outputs found
THE ALLURE OF NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FOOD COLORS: THE POINT OF VIEW OF ANIMALS AND PLANTS
No full textFood colors are classified as natural if they are extracted from vegetal, microbial, animal or mineral sources and as artificial if they are produced in a laboratory. They are added to food and drink but also to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals to make the products more attractive. The use of these additives, especially artificial ones, has risen more than 5-fold in the last 60 years, with a consequent increase in the waste waters resulting from industrial and urban effluents. Concern for human health and the aquatic environment is consequently increasing but the toxicity of food colorings on flora and fauna remains poorly studied. In this framework, we tested the effects of two commercially available food colors, the natural cochineal red (E120) and the artificial Ponceau red (E124), on three model organisms, Cucumis sativus, Artemia salina and Danio rerio, that occupy diverse positions in the trophic pyramid. The organisms were exposed to the same concentration suggested for preparing food (650 mg per 500 mL milk or cream); the health of the organisms and the alterations induced were investigated. The data collected indicate that both colorings are toxic and that E124 causes damage to all three model organisms while E120 is apparently safer for Danio but induces alterations in Cucumis and Artemia. The overall results clearly demonstrate that our habit of artificially coloring the world around us is very unsafe for the aquatic flora and fauna and that natural is not necessarily better than artificial
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
From mechanoecology to sensory physiology to olfactory navigation : the Editors’ and Readers’ Choice Awards 2025
No full textIn celebration of the excellence of articles published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A, Editors’ and Readers’ Choice Awards are annually conferred to the top papers in the categories Original Research Paper and Review/Review-History Article. The recipients of the 2025 Editors’ Choice Awards were selected based on votes cast by the Editorial Board on articles published in 2024. In the category Original Research Paper, this distinction goes to ‘Tonotopic Ca2+ dynamics and sound processing in auditory interneurons of the bush-cricket Mecopoda elongata’ by Timothy Bayley and Berthold Hedwig (J Comp Physiol A 210:353–369, 2024). In the category Review/Review-History Article, this distinction goes to ‘Mechanoecology: biomechanical aspects of insect-plant interactions’ by Gianandrea Salerno, Manuela Rebora, Elena Gorb, and Stanislav Gorb (J Comp Physiol A 210:249–265, 2024). The winners of the 2025 Readers’ Choice Awards were determined by the number of online accesses of articles published in 2023. In the category Original Research Paper, the winner is ‘Coleoptera claws and trichome interlocking’ by Gianandrea Salerno, Manuela Rebora, Silvana Piersanti, Valerio Saitta, Elena Gorb, and Stanislav Gorb (J Comp Physiol A 209:299–312, 2023). In the category Review/Review-History Article, the winner is ‘Olfactory navigation in arthropods’ by Theresa J. Steele, Aaron J. Lanz, and Katherine I. Nagel (J Comp Physiol A 209:467–488, 2023), which already won the Editors’ Choice Award in 2024
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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