Factors associated with self-care activities among adults in the United Kingdom: a systematic review

Background: The Government has promoted self-care. Our aim was to review evidence about who uses self-tests and other self-care activities (over-the-counter medicine, private sector,complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), home blood pressure monitors). Methods: During April 2007, relevant bibliographic databases (Medline, Embase, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts, PsycINFO,British Nursing Index, Allied and Complementary Medicine Database, Sociological Abstracts, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, Arthritis and Complementary Medicine Database, Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Pain Database) were searched, and potentially relevant studies were reviewed against eligibility criteria. Studies were included if they were published during the last 15 years and identified factors, reasons or characteristics associated with a relevant activity among UK adults. Two independent reviewers used proformas to assess the quality of eligible studies. Results: 206 potentially relevant papers were identified, 157 were excluded, and 49 papers related to 46 studies were included: 37 studies were, or used data from questionnaire surveys, 36 had quality scores of five or more out of 10, and 27 were about CAM. Available evidence suggests that users of CAM and over-the-counter medicine are female, middle-aged, affluent and/or educated with some measure of poor health, and that people who use the private sector are affluent and/or educated. Conclusion: People who engage in these activities are likely to be affluent. Targeted promotion may, therefore, be needed to ensure that use is equitable. People who use some activities also appear to have poorer measures of health than non-users or people attending conventional services. It is, therefore, also important to ensure that self-care is not used as a second choice for people who have not had their needs met by conventional service

Special issue on DISC 2010

This special issue of Distributed Computing is based on papers that originally appeared as extended abstracts in the Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC2010), held in Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 13–15, 2010. The papers for the Special Issue were chosen by the Program Committee from the 32 regular papers presented at the Symposium, based on their quality and representation of the spectrum of topics encompassed by the Symposium. In addition to being reviewed, in preliminary form, by the Program Committee, the full papers submitted for the Special Issue were refereed according to the standard practices of Distributed Computing (due to time constrains, some papers could not appear in this volume). We thank the Members of the Editorial Board for their work in editing this issue, and the referees and the authors of these papers for their respective contributions

Symposium on Marine Diversity and Biogeography in the Tropics. Pacific Science Congress, May-June 1991, Honolulu

Seven persons were asked to discuss the diversity and biogeography of various groups of marine organisms from as wide a geographic span as possible in the warm Pacific. The organisms covered were marine algae, marine mollusks, and fishes; unfortunately, J. E. N. Veron of Australia, who was expected to speak on corals, was unable to attend. We present here three abstracts and three full-length papers. No symposium on marine diversity has ever been presented to the Congress, although each member country in the Congress is impacted by one or more oceans or seas. Of the major groups of marine organisms, probably the least studied (and least understood) are the marine algae. The three papers are on algae and show different perspectives although the subject matter is systematics and ecology. In "Geographic patterns of diversity in benthic marine algae," Paul Silva defines diversity and shows that although land plant diversity is greater in the tropics, marine algae show more diversity in the warm-temperate boundaries. In "Marine phytogeography of the Juan Fernandez Archipelago: A new assessment," Bernabe Santelices shows that the relatively high diversity with 32% endemism found in the Juan Fernandez Islands is largely due to the physical barrier of the cold northward-flowing Peru or Humboldt Current. Celia Smith in "Diversity in intertidal habitats: An assessment of the marine algae of select high islands in the Hawaiian Archipelago" revealed many data that furnished the bases for far-reaching comparisons: age-related basalt substrates and limestone benches on an island about 35,000 yr old yielded a flora with greater diversity than similar transects on a younger basalt island, contributing to the conclusion that similar diversity patterns appear to depend on substrate similarity as well as current patterns around islands. The three abstracts cover algae from French Polynesia, fishes, and marine mollusks. The papers that stem from these abstracts have been or are being published elsewhere

Finding similar research papers using language models

The task of assessing the similarity of research papers is of interest in a variety of application contexts. It is a challenging task, however, as the full text of the papers is often not available, and similarity needs to be determined based on the papers' abstract, and some additional features such as authors, keywords, and journal. Our work explores the possibility of adapting language modeling techniques to this end. The basic strategy we pursue is to augment the information contained in the abstract by interpolating the corresponding language model with language models for the authors, keywords and journal of the paper. This strategy is then extended by finding topics and additionally interpolating with the resulting topic models. These topics are found using an adaptation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), in which the keywords that were provided by the authors are used to guide the process

Do peers see more in a paper than its authors?

Recent years have shown a gradual shift in the content of biomedical publications that is freely accessible, from titles and abstracts to full text. This has enabled new forms of automatic text analysis and has given rise to some interesting questions: How informative is the abstract compared to the full-text? What important information in the full-text is not present in the abstract? What should a good summary contain that is not already in the abstract? Do authors and peers see an article differently? We answer these questions by comparing the information content of the abstract to that in citances-sentences containing citations to that article. We contrast the important points of an article as judged by its authors versus as seen by peers. Focusing on the area of molecular interactions, we perform manual and automatic analysis, and we find that the set of all citances to a target article not only covers most information (entities, functions, experimental methods, and other biological concepts) found in its abstract, but also contains 20% more concepts. We further present a detailed summary of the differences across information types, and we examine the effects other citations and time have on the content of citances

Special Libraries, December 1961

Volume 52, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1961/1009/thumbnail.jp

Analysis of conference abstract-to-publication rate in UK orthopaedic research

Presentation of research at orthopaedic conferences is an important component for surgical evidence-based practice. However, there remains uncertainty as to how many conference abstracts proceed to achieve full-text publication for wider dissemination. This study aimed to determine the abstract-to-publication rate (APR) of research presented in the largest hip and knee orthopaedic meetings in the UK, and to identify predictive factors which influence the APR.All published abstracts (N=744) from the 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2010 British Hip Society (BHS) and the 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 British Association for Surgery of the Knee (BASK) annual conference meetings were examined by four researchers independently. To determine whether abstracts had been published in full-text form, Google Scholar, Medline and EMBASE evidence databases were used to verify full-text publication (FTP) status. Variables including: sample size, statistical significance, grade of the first author, research affiliated institution and research design were extracted and analysed to identify whether these were associated with FTP.176 out of 744 abstracts achieved FTP status (APR: 23.7%). Factors associated with FTP status included statistically significant results (p0.05).APR of the assessed BHS and BASK annual conference presentations are low in comparison to other scientific meetings. Encouragement should be provided to clinicians and academics to submit their work for publication to address this short-fall, thereby enhancing the potential for full-text research publications to inform evidence-based orthopaedics