JournalTOCs

Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics
Number of Followers: 4

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Online) 2504-0537
Published by Frontiers Media

[96 journals]

The long COVID research literature
- Authors: Alan L. Porter, Mark Markley, Nils Newman
  Abstract: While the COVID-19 pandemic morphs into less malignant forms, the virus has spawned a series of poorly understood, post-infection symptoms with staggering ramifications, i. e., long COVID (LC). This bibliometric study profiles the rapidly growing LC research domain [5,243 articles from PubMed and Web of Science (WoS)] to make its knowledge content more accessible. The article addresses What' Where' Who' and When' questions. A 13-topic Concept Grid presents bottom-up topic clusters. We break out those topics with other data fields, including disciplinary concentrations, topical details, and information on research “players” (countries, institutions, and authors) engaging in those topics. We provide access to results via a Dashboard website. We find a strongly growing, multidisciplinary LC research domain. That domain appears tightly connected based on shared research knowledge. However, we also observe notable concentrations of research activity in different disciplines. Data trends over 3 years of LC research suggest heightened attention to psychological and neurodegenerative symptoms, fatigue, and pulmonary involvement.
  PubDate: 2023-03-24T00:00:00Z
The research foundation for COVID-19 vaccine development
- Authors: Komi S. Messan, Pawel P. Sulima, Dolan Ghosh, Jonathan Nye
  Abstract: The development of effective vaccines in
  PubDate: 2023-03-24T00:00:00Z
Editorial: Use of behavioral metrics and measures in government
- Authors: Richard Aragon, Priscilla W. Clark
  PubDate: 2023-03-22T00:00:00Z
Expired patents: An opportunity for higher education institutions
- Authors: Mhlambululi Mafu
  Abstract: Patent protection typically lasts about 20 years from the filing date and is in exchange for sufficiently disclosing the invention. The disclosure aims to enrich technical knowledge globally, promote creativity and technological innovation and contribute to sustainable socio-economic development. After this protection period, the patent expires, and in principle, any person may begin practicing the specific subject matter previously protected by the patent. Since the invention originally met all the patentability requirements, it was disclosed sufficiently to stimulate further innovation by others through a thorough understanding of existing developments in the patent literature. Thus, in addition to scholarly research articles, this makes patents potentially valuable sources of technical information in research and academia, unlocking new technology opportunities. We use the exploratory research method to study a potentially genuine and vital research stream that uncovers the overlooked yet valuable scientific and technical information sources that higher education institutions could utilize to complement academic research articles. This work establishes a necessary research agenda that critically challenges researchers to tap into the immediately available and promising technology opportunities presented by patents in the public domain. Using case studies to gain in-depth, multi-faceted explorations about the impact of these patents, we find that technologies contained in expired patents, abandoned patents, and technologies not protected by IPRs, resulting in improved research quality and increased collaboration with industry, if adequately exploited and integrated with other technologies. Moreover, this could lead to increased academic patenting and commercialization with support from the university's Technology Transfer Office.
  PubDate: 2023-03-17T00:00:00Z
Bibliometric analysis of studies of the Arctic and Antarctic polynya
- Authors: Tianyu Zhang, Haiyi Ren, Mohammed Shokr, Fengming Hui, Xiao Cheng
  Abstract: Based on the polar polynya-related 1,677 publications derived from the Web of Science from 1980 to 2021, this study analyses the scientific performance of polar polynya research with respect to publication outputs, scientific categories, journals, productive countries and partnerships, co-cited references, bibliographic documents and the thermal trends of keywords. The number of publications and citations on polar polynya has increased 17.28 and 11.22% annually since the 1990s, respectively, and those numbers for Antarctic polynya have surpassed that of the Arctic polynya since 2014. Oceanography, geosciences multidisciplinary, and environmental sciences were the top 3 scientific categories in the Arctic and Antarctic polynya research field. Nevertheless, ecology and meteorology are gaining ground in the Arctic and the Antarctic recently. The Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans accommodated most publications for both polar regions, followed by Deep-Sea Research Part II-Topical Studies in Oceanography and Polar Biology. The Continental Shelf Research and Ocean Modeling were favored journals in Arctic and Antarctic polynya research, respectively. The USA dominated the polar polynya study field with 31.74%/43.60% publications on the Arctic/Antarctic polynya research, followed by Canada (40.23%/4.32%) and Germany (17.21%/11.22%). Besides, Australia occupied the second most popular position in the Antarctic polynya research. The keywords analysis concluded that the polynya topics that generated the most interest were altered from model to climate change in the Arctic and ocean water and glacier in the Antarctic over time. This study gives a summary of the polar polynya scientific field through bibliometric analysis which may provide reference for future research.
  PubDate: 2023-03-16T00:00:00Z
Building a responsible innovation toolkit as project legacy
- Authors: Bernd Carsten Stahl, Lise Bitsch
  Abstract: This article explores whether and in what way it is possible to employ toolkits for responsible research and innovation (RRI toolkits) as mechanisms for ensuring the legacy of RRI in research projects. Based on a review of the concept of responsible research and innovation as well as existing toolkits in the area, the article offers an account of the development of an RRI toolkit in the context of the EU- funded Human Brain Project. This toolkit is designed to integrate insights and practices of responsible research and innovation developed over a 10 year period into the project legacy, the EBRAINS research infrastructure. The article suggests that toolkits have the potential to contribute to ensuring a long- lasting legacy of work undertaken in responsible research and innovation, but that this potential requires further support from institutions and the broader research environment to become realized.
  PubDate: 2023-03-13T00:00:00Z
Fables of scarcity in IP
- Authors: Zahr K. Said
  Abstract: In this chapter, I use methods drawn from literary analysis to bear on artificial scarcity and explore how literary and legal storytelling engages in scarcity mongering. I find three particular narrative strategies calculated to compel a conclusion in favor of propertization: the spectacle of need, the diversionary tactic, and the rallying cry. First, I unpack the spectacle of need and its diversionary aspects through several literary accounts of scarcity and starvation. I juxtapose Franz Kafka's “A Hunger Artist,” a story explicitly centered on a wasting body, with J.M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K. Second, to explore how scarcity fables offer diversionary tactics that redirect attention away from actual scarcity, I consider NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. NFTs reflect the arbitrary value scarcity can produce, especially when artificially generated. Yet NFTs offer a spectacle of need that distracts from actual scarcity, riding a wave of expansionist property logic that suggests that more ownership is the answer. Third, to consider the scarcity fable's propertarian rallying cry, I offer an extended close reading of a copyright dispute, Leonard v. Stemtech, involving a pair of microscopic stem cell photographs deemed so scarce they were valued at 100 times their past licensing history. Leonard illustrates how a scarcity fable may look in the context of intellectual property (“IP”). The nature of this chapter is necessarily conceptual and speculative, designed to raise questions rather than attempting conclusively to answer them. Through juxtaposition of literary accounts and one legal case study, fables of scarcity emerge as a genre whose very appearance in certain contexts ought to give scholars and policymakers pause. In copyright litigation, in which expansionist property narratives may be especially harmful to the public domain and subsequent creators, scarcity fables may be made to provide apparent support for potentially dangerous changes. Identifying scarcity fables as such when they appear in copyright cases could trigger review of the asserted scarcity and a more searching inquiry into whether the proposed solution could worsen actual scarcity.
  PubDate: 2023-03-07T00:00:00Z
R&D investments and employment decisions as a function of enterprise size
and regional population density before and during COVID-19
- Authors: Jarle Aarstad, Stig-Erik Jakobsen, Olav Andreas Kvitastein
  Abstract: Norwegian data show that from 2018 to 2020, enterprises in densely populated regions increased R&D investments relative to those in sparsely populated regions, but not from 2016 to 2018. Therefore, COVID-19 likely induced the shift. The findings imply that densely populated regions have become more R&D-intensive, while sparsely populated regions have become less R&D-intensive during the pandemic. Small enterprises increased both R&D investments and employment from 2018 to 2020 relative to large enterprises and the analyses control for regression toward the mean effects. The findings were similar to those observed in the period from 2016 to 2018, which rules out COVID-19 as an explanation. Instead, the waves of data indicate a long-term trend where small enterprises increased R&D investments and employment.
  PubDate: 2023-02-23T00:00:00Z
How do researchers perceive problems in research collaboration'
Results from a large-scale study of German scientists
- Authors: Carina Weinmann, Malte Hückstädt, Florian Meißner, Gerhard Vowe
  Abstract: In recent years, collaboration has become the norm in scientific knowledge production. Like other forms of collaboration, research collaborations (RCs) face specific problems that can jeopardize success. Against this background, the present study sought to gain a deeper understanding of the relevance of different collaboration problems and the interconnections among these problems. Building on previous insights into the most current problems, we addressed four major issues: (1) researchers' perceived relative relevance of collaboration problems in their projects (in terms of their occurrence), (2) differences in these perceptions based on the type of RC (e.g., number of subprojects and collaboration mode) and (3) on the characteristics of researchers, and (4) the co-occurrence of collaboration problems. Based on a representative survey of leading participants of RCs funded by the German Research Foundation (n = 5,326), we found that researchers experienced collaboration problems (e.g., fairness and communication problem) only to a small degree, and there were almost no differences regarding their perceived relevance. Furthermore, there were almost no significant differences concerning the perceived relevance of these problems depending on the type of RC or the individual researchers. However, the findings did reveal specific patterns of co-occurrence (e.g., relationship and difference problem). The results suggest that previous research may have overstated the relevance of collaboration problems in RCs. Instead, it seems that at least in Germany, collaborative research works better than one might assume.
  PubDate: 2023-02-23T00:00:00Z
Factors that affect scientific publication in Africa—A gender
perspective
- Authors: Catherine Beaudry, Heidi Prozesky, Carl St-Pierre, Seyed Reza Mirnezami
  Abstract: A large body of literature on gender differences in scientific publication output has clearly established that women scientists publish less that men do. Yet, no single explanation or group of explanations satisfactorily accounts for this difference, which has been called the “productivity puzzle”. To provide a more refined portrait of the scientific publication output of women in relation to that of their male peers, we conducted a web-based survey in 2016 of individual researchers across all African countries, except Libya. The resulting 6,875 valid questionnaires submitted by respondents in the STEM, Health Science and SSH fields were analyzed using multivariate regressions on the self-reported number of articles published in the preceding 3 years. Controlling for a variety of variables including career stage, workload, mobility, research field, and collaboration, we measured the direct and moderating effect of gender on scientific production of African researchers. Our results show that, while women's scientific publication output is positively affected by collaboration and age (impediments to women's scientific output decrease later in their careers), it is negatively impacted by care-work and household chores, limited mobility, and teaching hours. Women are as prolific when they devote the same hours to other academic tasks and raise the same amount of research funding as their male colleagues. Our results lead us to argue that the standard academic career model, relying on continuous publications and regular promotions, assumes a masculine life cycle that reinforces the general perception that women with discontinuous careers are less productive than their male colleagues, and systematically disadvantages women. We conclude that the solution resides beyond women's empowerment, i.e., in the broader institutions of education and the family, which have an important role to play in fostering men's equal contribution to household chores and care-work.
  PubDate: 2023-02-20T00:00:00Z
Decentralized governance and artificial intelligence policy with
blockchain-based voting in federated
learning|Introduction|Methods|Results|Discussion
- Authors: C. Alisdair Lee, K. M. Chow, H. Anthony Chan, Daniel Pak-Kong Lun
  Abstract: IntroductionFruit losses in the supply chain owing to improper handling and a lack of proper control are common in the industry. As losses are caused by the inefficiency of the export method, selecting the appropriate export method is a possible solution. Several organizations employ only a single strategy, which is mainly based on a first-in-first-out approach. Such a policy is easy to manage but inefficient. Given that the batch of fruits may become overripe during transportation, frontline operators do not have the authority or immediate support to change the fruit dispatching strategy. Thus, this study aims to develop a dynamic strategy simulator to determine the sequence of delivery based on forecasting information projected from probabilistic data to reduce the amount of fruit loss.MethodsThe proposed method to accomplish asynchronous federated learning (FL) is based on blockchain technology and a serially interacting smart contract. In this method, each party in the chain updates its model parameters and uses a voting system to reach a consensus. This study employs blockchain technology with smart contracts to serially enable asynchronous FL, with each party in the chain updating its parameter model. A smart contract combines a global model with a voting system to reach a common consensus. Its artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things engine further strengthen the support for implementing the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) forecasting model. Based on AI technology, a system was constructed using FL in a decentralized governance AI policy on a blockchain network platform.ResultsWith mangoes being selected as the category of fruit in the study, the system improves the cost-effectiveness of the fruit (mango) supply chain. In the proposed approach, the simulation outcomes show fewer mangoes lost (0.035%) and operational costs reduced.DiscussionThe proposed method shows improved cost-effectiveness in the fruit supply chain through the use of AI technology and blockchain. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, an Indonesian mango supply chain business case study has been selected. The results of the Indonesian mango supply chain case study indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in reducing fruit loss and operational costs.
  PubDate: 2023-02-16T00:00:00Z
Editorial: Next-generation innovation policies: Promoting systemic
socio-economic transformative change
- Authors: Marina Ranga, So Young Kim
  PubDate: 2023-02-13T00:00:00Z
A study on the content of integrity policies and research integrity
management in Chinese universities|Background|Methods|Results
- Authors: Yuan Cao, Yuwei Jiang, Yong Zhao
  Abstract: BackgroundThis study outlines a comprehensive analysis of the primary characteristics of managing research integrity (RI) in domestic colleges and universities in China. RI education in China consists primarily of soft advocacy, with no hard requirements or continuous and systematic support. Together with other stakeholders, such as funders and publishers, higher education institutions (e.g., colleges and universities) are one of the vital actors that have a lot of influence on RI promotion and implementation among researchers. However, the literature on the regulation of RI policies in China's universities is limited.MethodsWe investigate the top 50 colleges and universities in the 2021 Best Chinese Universities Ranking. Their guidance and policy documents on RI were collected via their official websites. By integrating the use of scientometrics analysis, including descriptive statistical analysis, inductive content analysis, and quantitative analysis, we examine whether and how these higher education institutions respond to national policies in a timely manner, especially in terms of their frequency of updates, topic clustering analysis, terms clustering analysis, content aggregation. To further understand the composition mechanism and the main working systems of university RI management organizations, we conducted in-depth research on the organizational functions, meeting system, staff composition mechanism, and scientific research misconduct acceptance and investigation mechanisms.ResultsThe regulations on the treatment of RI in China's universities have, in response to the government's call to establish their own management policies and working mechanisms, maintained a zero-tolerance stance on research misconduct. The sampled universities listed the definition and principles of misconduct practices, investigation procedures, and sanctions of research misconduct in their own policy documents. Some of them listed inappropriate research practices All 50 sampled universities have formed relevant organizations responsible for RI management, they all provide the detailed regulations of the committees. Yet, there is still a need to further define Questionable Research Practice, foster higher standards for integrity in research and, establish and improve an efficient, authoritative, well-restrained and supervision working mechanism for organizations responsible for RI treatment.
  PubDate: 2023-02-10T00:00:00Z
The political economy of the African pharmaceutical sector's “industrial
underdevelopment” lock-in: The importance of understanding the impact of
persistent colonial extractive institutions
- Authors: Geoffrey Banda
  Abstract: Improved African pharmaceutical manufacturing has been on global and local agendas since the 1970s, yet the industry has been locked-in into low technologies for decades. What caused the technological and industrial stagnation for such a critical sector for local and global health security' What are the political economy roots of such long-running industrial underdevelopment lock-in' What do colonial extractive economic and political institutions and their setup and mixes have to do with the sector' This study considers how extractive economic and political institutions' architectures and infrastructures shaped the African pharmaceutical industry's underdevelopment. We argue that extractive economic and political institutions shaped contemporary institutions in former colonial countries, and these institutions persist for a long time. The pivotal argument of innovation systems is that technological change-driven innovation is important for building superior economic performance and competitiveness, and institutions are a vital component of the system. However, institutions are not value-neutral; they carry the political and economic objectives and aspirations of the agents who design them. Innovation systems theory needs to incorporate the analysis of extractive economic and political institutions and the role they played in locking-in the African pharmaceutical industries into underdevelopment.
  PubDate: 2023-02-09T00:00:00Z
Identity and research ethos in Indigenous-to-Indigenous planning research
- Authors: Michelle Thompson-Fawcett
  Abstract: As a member of an Indigenous community myself, my research is necessarily undertaken through an emancipatory Indigenist methodological approach. Indigenous methodologies seek to deconstruct Western paradigms of investigation and understandings that perpetuate the invalidation of Indigeneity, and instead attempt to constitute paradigms centred on Indigenous worldviews. However, Indigenous researchers often work with communities that are not their own. In my case, I have collaborated in a small amount of research with Indigenous groups outside of my own country. But, the majority of my research has been with New Zealand Māori communities other than my own. Key for me, has been the development of personal strategies aimed at keeping me culturally safe in my research with other Indigenous communities, while being secure in my own Indigenous identity. I seek to be culturally respectful in the space of others - safeguarding local Indigenous research sovereignty.
  PubDate: 2023-02-09T00:00:00Z
Editorial: Scarcity, regulation, and the abundance society
- Authors: Deven R. Desai, Mark A. Lemley
  PubDate: 2023-01-25T00:00:00Z
Are female scientists underrepresented in self-retractions for honest
error'
- Authors: Mariana D. Ribeiro, Jesus Mena-Chalco, Karina de Albuquerque Rocha, Marlise Pedrotti, Patrick Menezes, Sonia M. R. Vasconcelos
  Abstract: Retractions are among the effective measures to strengthen the self-correction of science and the quality of the literature. When it comes to self-retractions for honest errors, exposing one's own failures is not a trivial matter for researchers. However, self-correcting data, results and/or conclusions has increasingly been perceived as a good research practice, although rewarding such practice challenges traditional models of research assessment. In this context, it is timely to investigate who have self-retracted for honest error in terms of country, field, and gender. We show results on these three factors, focusing on gender, as data are scarce on the representation of female scientists in efforts to set the research record straight. We collected 3,822 retraction records, including research articles, review papers, meta-analyses, and letters under the category “error” from the Retraction Watch Database for the 2010–2021 period. We screened the dataset collected for research articles (2,906) and then excluded retractions by publishers, editors, or third parties, and those mentioning any investigation issues. We analyzed the content of each retraction manually to include only those indicating that they were requested by authors and attributed solely to unintended mistakes. We categorized the records according to country, field, and gender, after selecting research articles with a sole corresponding author. Gender was predicted using Genderize, at a 90% probability threshold for the final sample (n = 281). Our results show that female scientists account for 25% of self-retractions for honest error, with the highest share for women affiliated with US institutions.
  PubDate: 2023-01-20T00:00:00Z
Editorial: Emerging areas in literature-based discovery
- Authors: Yakub Sebastian, Neil R. Smalheiser
  PubDate: 2023-01-19T00:00:00Z
Editorial: The Impact of Countries' Economy and Wealth on their Research
Activities
- Authors: Stanley I. R. Okoduwa, Giuseppe Calignano, Manuel J. Cobo
  PubDate: 2023-01-12T00:00:00Z
DGTR: Dynamic graph transformer for rumor detection
- Authors: Siqi Wei, Bin Wu, Aoxue Xiang, Yangfu Zhu, Chenguang Song
  Abstract: Social media rumors have the capacity to harm the public perception and the social progress. The news propagation pattern is a key clue for detecting rumors. Existing propagation-based rumor detection methods represent propagation patterns as a static graph structure. They simply consider the structure information of news distribution in social networks and disregard the temporal information. The dynamic graph is an effective modeling tool for both the structural and temporal information involved in the process of news dissemination. Existing dynamic graph representation learning approaches struggle to capture the long-range dependence of the structure and temporal sequence as well as the rich semantic association between full graph features and individual parts. We build a transformer-based dynamic graph representation learning approach for rumor identification DGTR to address the aforementioned challenges. We design a position embedding format for the graph data such that the original transformer model can be utilized for learning dynamic graph representations. The model can describe the structural long-range reliance between the dynamic graph nodes and the temporal long-range dependence between the temporal snapshots by employing a self-attention mechanism. In addition, the CLS token in transformer may model the rich semantic relationships between the complete graph and each subpart. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model when compared to the state of the art.
  PubDate: 2023-01-11T00:00:00Z