1,720,969 research outputs found
Action to protect the independence and integrity of global health research.
Get PDFStoreng KT, Abimbola S, Balabanova D, et al. Action to protect the independence and integrity of global health research. BMJ GLOBAL HEALTH. 2019;4(3): e001746
Safe motherhood: the making of a global health initiative
Get PDFLaunched in 1987, the Safe Motherhood Initiative has brought together UN agencies, donors, NGOs and academics to galvanise a political, financial and public health response to women’s pregnancy-related death and ill health in low income countries. This thesis presents an historical ethnography of the ‘making’ of this policy community over the past twenty years, as one of many so-called global health initiatives that populate the global health field. Compared with its competitors, the Safe Motherhood Initiative is often depicted as weak and in need of urgent revival. Drawing on in-depth interviews with over seventy actors within the field, participant observation and document review, I explore how safe motherhood practitioners have come to understand the problems that are credited for the field’s stymied status, and how their ‘diagnoses’ and situational analyses have informed their subsequent practices.
My findings demonstrate that the Initiative has continually had to reposition itself in response to broader ideological, institutional and epistemological struggles. An impulse for self-preservation within a competitive global health field favouring disease-specific approaches has been in tension with safe motherhood practitioners’ fundamental conviction that comprehensive, socially-based policy change is needed to reduce maternal mortality. In order to pursue their common policy objectives and to secure their survival as an expert
group, safe motherhood practitioners have sought to enhance the credibility of their policy proposals, establish new institutions and funding mechanisms, elaborate advocacy campaigns and pursue more sophisticated research to demarcate their practices as scientific, rather than ideologically driven. However, the benefits of such ‘self-management’ practices remain to be established. In conclusion, I challenge the widespread, if implicit, assumption that the success of a single advocacy issue, as measured through the rise of a global health initiative
and growing political commitment to the specific issue, will necessarily lead to health improvement
L'enchainement de la violence familiale et conjugale. Les grossesses hors mariage et ruptures du lien social au Burkina Faso
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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
Politics and practices of global health: critical ethnographies of health systems in context
No full textAppropriate 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
'How to know what you need to do': a cross-country comparison of maternal health guidelines in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Tanzania.
Get PDFBACKGROUND: Initiatives to raise the quality of care provided to mothers need to be given priority in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). The promotion of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) is a common strategy, but their implementation is often challenging, limiting their potential impact. Through a cross-country perspective, this study explored CPGs for maternal health in Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Tanzania. The objectives were to compare factors related to CPG use including their content compared with World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, their format, and their development processes. Perceptions of their availability and use in practice were also explored. The overall purpose was to further the understanding of how to increase CPGs' potential to improve quality of care for mothers in SSA. METHODS: The study was a multiple case study design consisting of cross-country comparisons using document review and key informant interviews. A conceptual framework to aid analysis and discussion of results was developed, including selected domains related to guidelines' implementability and use by health workers in practice in terms of usability, applicability, and adaptability. RESULTS: The study revealed few significant differences in content between the national guidelines for maternal health and WHO recommendations. There were, however, marked variations in the format of CPGs between the three countries. Apart from the Ghanaian and one of the Tanzanian CPGs, the levels of both usability and applicability were assessed as low or medium. In all three countries, the use of CPGs by health workers in practice was perceived to be limited. CONCLUSION: Our cross-country study suggests that it is not poor quality of content or lack of evidence base that constitute the major barrier for CPGs to positively impact on quality improvement in maternal care in SSA. It rather emphasises the need to prioritise the format of guidelines to increase their usability and applicability and to consider these attributes together with implementation strategies as integral to their development processes
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
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