1,721,025 research outputs found
How do doctors make decisions about information disclosure?: A moral diagnosis
No full textAlongside diagnosis and treatment, information disclosure is a fundamental legal duty owed by the doctor to the patient during the medical relationship. The duty is based on a longstanding moral responsibility to make decisions in the best therapeutic interests of the patient; by providing them information before, during, and after treatment. Failure to ensure adequate information disclosure is not in the patient’s best interests; as it fails to respect the dignity of patients to be informed and denies them the opportunity to make autonomous choices; as the basis of their treatment decisions. Failure to disclose essential information may ultimately lead to patient harm. These failures have been only too well evidenced in several high-profile scandals which have shaken trust in the moral and technical expertise of the medical profession and have led to political and academic calls for stronger ethical and legal regulation, including in relation to medical decision-making about information disclosure. Academic lawyers and bioethicists have long argued that the sociological nature of the Bolam standard has facilitated a culture of deference, within the courts, towards medical paternalism. Since the turn of the century the academic zeitgeist has very much focused on debating the form and structure of normative rules and ethical standards for decision-making around information disclosure. Normativity has been characterised as the solution to future unethical decision-making. The normative rules and standards proposed have prioritised reducing medical discretion, by repurposing information disclosure towards facilitating models of substantive autonomous choice, and in doing so recasting the doctor as a service provider, within a consumer-type medical relationship. This has manifested in the law of negligence through the creation of various patient rights (and corresponding duties), to provide information disclosure to ensure an informed consent to treatment. However, the emphasis on facilitating rights and patient autonomy has often been done without robust empirical reflection, on the impact, rules, and standards of information disclosure on medical decision-making in practice. As such, these rules have failed to alter practices towards the envisaged ethical optimum. This thesis aims to fill that analytical gap by examining the empirical data; to explain how doctors made, and continue to make, medical decisions (from 1957 to present) about information disclosure and how the various ethical models of the medical relationship, contained within ethical and legal rules, have manifested in practice.The thesis argues that the lack of empiricism has caused lawyers and ethicists to ignore the axiomatic internal moral norms and processes which have guided and structured medical decision-making within the therapeutic medical relationship, since time immemorial. These moral norms operate in medical decision-making through a process of circumstantial-moral reflection - which allowed doctors to facilitate patient information needs by combining learned knowledge, moral norms and patient circumstances, to come to a synoptic decision about materiality and communication, with the teleological aim of acting in the patient’s best interests. Legal and ethical normativity has had the effect of restricting the tailored approach to decision-making, by requiring the inclusion of extraneous facts, and that artificial weight be placed on values and principles (such as autonomy), which may be irrelevant to the actual patient. As ethical guidance has become more substantive, fear of litigation has created a formulism and rigidity in decision-making about disclosure: a process termed demoralisation. The philosophical basis of the rules has also tended to conflate the teleological ends of different types of medical relationships within the law and ethics. This has sometimes confused doctors as to the purpose and process of information disclosure, placing values and principles in conflict with the underlying moral norms of the medical profession. Models of autonomy have also been conflated, within standards of care and ethical rules; requiring doctors to utilise conflicting methods of decision-making to identify material information to ensure an informed consent. The confusion and conflict as to the purpose and process of disclosure has led to a form of moral fracture within the medical profession.The lack of certainty about the ethical underpinning of rules after Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11, has now created uncertainty about the appropriate legal interpretation of the standard of care. This uncertainty has, in turn, led to a process of blinkered moralism: where the judiciary arbitrarily pick and choose the characteristics, values and criteria necessary to ensure an informed consent, when deciding liability. The unknowability of the correct form of decision-making, coupled with the fear of liability, has encouraged doctors to adopt practices of exhaustive disclosure. Exhaustive disclosure leads to patients being bombarded with information and requiring a mandatory autonomous choice. This type of defensive practice fails to either provide patients with the information they need (denying them an informed choice) or respect their choices about their preferred role within the medical relationship (causing them a dignitary harm). The thesis concludes by suggesting that the remedy to defensive practices is, first, a recognition of the essential moral and circumstantial nature of decision-making and, second, a return to a sociological standard of judicial evaluation - which examines the internal logic of a decision, and whether the decision meets the societal standards expected of the medical profession. This thesis therefore suggests the adoption of a revised form of the Bolam standard (Bolam 2.0). This standard would avoid the problems of normativity, facilitate the moral method of medical decision-making, and allow doctors to make decisions which are conducive to the therapeutic information needs of the actual patient. <br/
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe 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
No full text“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
No full textWe 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
No full textWe 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
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
Author Under Sail The Imagination of Jack London, 1893-1902
No full textIn Author Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in London's work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and agents. In this first volume of a two-volume biography, Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London's "Story of a Typhoon" to The People of the Abyss. The Jack London who emerges in the pages of Author Under Sail is a writer whose partnership with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American literary history. London pioneered many author models during the heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the representation of the seen and unseen. London created an impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of other American writers of the time. Author Under Sail is a literary tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer, creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light on the maverick side of machine-age literature.Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Spirit Truth -- 2. From Absorption to Theatricality and Back Again -- 3. "I Will Build a New Present" -- 4. Sons as Authors -- 5. Fathers as Publishers -- 6. The Daughter as Author -- 7. Lovers as Authors -- 8. At Sea with the Family -- 9. Yellow News, Yellow Stories -- 10. The Return Home -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About Jay WilliamsIn Author Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in London's work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and agents. In this first volume of a two-volume biography, Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London's "Story of a Typhoon" to The People of the Abyss. The Jack London who emerges in the pages of Author Under Sail is a writer whose partnership with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American literary history. London pioneered many author models during the heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the representation of the seen and unseen. London created an impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of other American writers of the time. Author Under Sail is a literary tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer, creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light on the maverick side of machine-age literature.Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries
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