1,721,081 research outputs found
Political, social and technical risks in the last stages of disease eradication campaigns.
No full textEradication of a disease is one of the greatest gifts any generation can give to subsequent ones, but most attempts have failed. The biggest challenges occur in the final stages of eradication and elimination campaigns. These include falling public support as a disease becomes less common; the emergence of groups who do not support eradication; spiralling costs; and the evolution of drug, vaccine or insecticide resistance. Mass campaigns become less effective as the disease fragments and modelling becomes less reliable. Optimism bias is the biggest risk to any eradication campaign and the long endgame must be planned for from the beginning
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
The debate over combination drug policy for malaria: it may not just be the patients' temperatures which need to be brought down.
No full textMilroy Lecture: eradication of disease: hype, hope and reality.
No full textThe possibility for one generation to eradicate a disease is very motivating. It is also very difficult. The many failed eradication attempts outnumber the one current success (smallpox), although two eradication campaigns for polio and Guinea worm are tantalisingly close to their goals. The early stages of a well-planned eradication campaign generally go well; it is the last stage where technical, biological, social and political problems occur. This paper considers the opportunities and pitfalls in planning for eradication of a disease
The contribution of biological, mathematical, clinical, engineering and social sciences to combatting the West African Ebola epidemic.
No full textThe tragic West African Ebola epidemic claimed many lives, but would have been worse still if scientific insights from many disciplines had not been integrated to create a strong technical response. Epidemiology and modelling triggered the international response and guided where response efforts were directed; virology, engineering and clinical science helped reduce deaths and transmission in and from hospitals and treatment centres; social sciences were key to reducing deaths from funerals and in the community; diagnostic and operational research made the response more efficient; immunology and vaccine research contributed to the final stages of the epidemic and will help prevent future epidemics. These varied scientific contributions had to be integrated into a combined narrative, communicated to policymakers to inform decisions, and used by courageous local and international responders in the field in real time. Not every area of science was optimal, and in particular, clinical trials of simple interventions such as fluid management were slow to be adopted and sharing of data was initially poor. This Ebola epidemic demonstrated how science can respond to a major emergency, but also has lessons for better responses in future infectious emergencies.This article is part of the themed issue 'The 2013-2016 West African Ebola epidemic: data, decision-making and disease control'
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
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