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    Prevalence of Y microdeletions in azoospermic and severe oligozoospermic men in Southern Italy: application of a rapid capillary electrophoresis method.

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    Male infertility is correlated with several genetic and non-genetic conditions. Microdeletions of Y chromosome are one of the most frequent genetic defects associated with male infertility. Evaluating this in infertile patients is important to assess an etiological diagnosis and possible prognosis of infertility, as well as to address clinical decision during treatment of infertility by intracytoplasmatic sperm injection, where the probability of success depends on the type and the number of deleted regions (azoospermia factor regions). To improve genetic counseling, it is useful to characterize Yq regions by a rapid and accurate method. In the current study, we evaluated the diagnostic efficiency and the time required of an in-house automated capillary electrophoresis method for Y microdeletions screening and applied it to estimate the prevalence of Y microdeletions in 100 infertile males affected by azoospermia or severe oligozoospermia (sperm count <5x10(6)/ml) and in 100 fertile male controls. In south Italian infertile men, the overall frequency of Y microdeletions was 9% (12.7% in azoospermic and 4.5% in severe oligozoospermic men). In conclusion, we think that the abovementioned procedure is suitable for the routine characterization of Y microdeletions

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    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
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