1,720,962 research outputs found
Digital government transformation: A structural equation modelling analysis of driving and impeding factors
Digital technologies are transforming the public sector by affecting applications, processes, culture, structure, and civil servants’ responsibilities and tasks. Yet, there is a void in research about driving and impeding factors influencing digital government transformation (DGT). The article contributes to the current debate on DGT by quantitatively assessing the transformation and its driving and impeding factors. The analyses were performed by collecting and analyzing through structural equation modeling 491 answers to a survey to Italian administrations. Results show that DGT is influenced by a combination of different factors, including the sense of urgency, the need for change, and the creation of a collaborative environment, suggesting that more effort is required for including public managers in the current debate on DGT. Organizational barriers and lack of support are impeding factors. Finally and counter-intuitively, resistance to change was not found to impede the transformation
Blockchain Applications Within the Public Sector: Evidence from an International Census
The attention around blockchain in the public sphere is constantly increasing together with the expectations around its potentialities. Existing studies are mainly focused on technical elements or on a conceptual level of analysis. However, blockchain applications are starting to appear and be adopted by public organizations. Hence is now time for scholars to make a step forward, i.e moving from a theoretical level to a practical one, observing, studying, and analysing concrete existing solutions. This exploratory study aims at supporting scholars in doing this step. With a systematic analysis of secondary sources, it maps the current ecosystem of blockchain applications within the public sector, to identify the state-of-the-art worldwide and the main trends and features that characterize blockchain implementation
Mandatory provisioning of digital public services as a feasible service delivery strategy: Evidence from Italian local governments
Several governments are actively encouraging their administrations to deliver public services exclusively through digital channels. This strategy consists of putting in place a series of complex and specific actions that bring into play numerous actors, to ensure that users are willing to accept digital channels and that weaker users are not disadvantaged. Although this strategy is being increasingly adopted in various countries, scholars have scarcely begun to explore its logic. This research explores how to define a service delivery strategy that forces users to adopt digital channels. Four in-depth case studies have been conducted on Italian local governments that started delivering their non-educational school services through digital channels alone. We found that a mandatory service delivery strategy is feasible when the starting point is to understand the users' characteristics, skills and behaviours and, as a consequence, whether they perceive the service as complex and/or ambiguous. With this in mind, public organisations can select the proper mix of channels for each category of users and combine their change in approach with behavioural-type interventions, i.e. by creating the right conditions to modify the users' behaviour
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The 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
“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
We 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
We 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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