Struggling scientists: Please cite our papers!

We scientists, whether struggling or not, need colleagues to cite our papers, and increasingly so; we also need to carry out worthwhile research. I present a strategy that simultaneously enhances citations and research quality, but is simple and straightforward. Yet it is rarely adopted, perhaps because it requires integration of a particular approach with necessary tools, aided through feedback, and the tools can be difficult to implement. The approach has four goals: high significance, high influence, excellent presentation and sustained effort. Achievement of these goals is more likely if the tools are used and helpful feedback obtained

Parasitology and pathology of marine organisms of the world ocean

The Symposium in which the communications, as they were called during the meeting, comprising this volume were presented was held at the Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. in Leningrad during 13 to 16 October 1981. Conducted as part of the cooperative program of the U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. Working Group on Biological Productivity and Biochemistry of the World Ocean, the Leningrad meeting was sponsored by the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (the Zoological Institute) and the Ministry of Fisheries of the U.S.S.R. (The Scientific Council on Fish Diseases of the Ichthyological Commission). It was an extremely interesting and successful Symposium, offering all participants the opportunity to describe the results of their studies and reviews during the course of the formal presentations and direct interchange between scientists during breaks in the program and the organized and casual social activities. The facilities provided by the Zoological Institute were quite adequate and the assistance offered by its Director, O. A. Scarlato and his staff in organization,logistics, and translation was excellent. Several of our Soviet colleagues presided over the proceedings, as did I. All were businesslike and efficient, yet graceful and accommodating. To O. N. Bauer Jell the brunt of programmatic detail and follow-up. He bore his burdens well and, with Director Scarlato and his staff, including A. V. Gussev and others of the professional and technical staffs of the Zoological Institute, helped make our stay pleasant and the Symposium productive. These organizations and individuals deserve much credit and praise as well as the thanks of their American and British colleagues. (PDF file contains 141 pages.

Education scholars from Eastern Europe in the digital environment: A comparative study of selected universities from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Serbia

One of the most common methods for creating a presence in the scientific virtual space is the e-profile as a “digital representation” of a researcher. The aim of this study was to compare the e-visibility of academics, to examine the correlation between researchers’ visibility and their productivity, as well as to identify the main predictors of the e-visibility of the academics affiliated with selected universities/institutes in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia. Five platforms most often used for the digital representation were selected for the study: Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar Citation, ResearchGate and Academia.edu. The research included qualitative and quantitative analysis of collected data available on relevant websites. The results showed that academics from Eastern Europe do have e-profiles on scholarly platforms. However, differences were evident, especially concerning the WoS and Scopus databases. A positive correlation was confirmed between visibility and productivity, indicating that scholars with more e-profiles and publications, especially in a foreign language were the most effective and were cited most often. Linear regression analysis showed that the most important predictors for the scholarly visibility were publications in English language posted in e-profiles, and papers indexed in the prestigious bibliographic databases WoS and Scopus

A Geography of Marine Farming Rights in New Zealand: Some Rubbings of Patterns on the Face of the Sea

Sustainable development of global marine resources has been the focus of various United Nations' agencies and coastal nations since World War II. As capture fisheries resources have come under pressure and perhaps reached their sustainable limit concern has been expressed over the ability to continue to meet the protein needs of expanding populations. One potentially significant contributor to addressing the food needs of the world is marine farming (mariculture). The expansion of marine farming in developing countries has been well-addressed in the literature, but marine farming in developed countries has received less attention. The traditional biophysical requirements of marine farming (sheltered clean water of appropriate depth) have led to conflicts with other users of the coastal environment. In the developed countries in particular, suitable sites are contested places of consumption (recreation, tourism) as well as production (capture fisheries). Moreover, the adjacent terrestrial land and water uses can significantly affect acceptability of marine farming. The avoidance of conflicts and the achievement of sustainable development in such settings are largely dependent on the systems of governance. In developed countries, these are often articulated through planning regimes and associated 'rights'. The global terrestrial planning response in the first two thirds of the 20th Century was dominated by a modernist approach to planning. In the later stages, a post-modern challenge coincided with the rise of neo-liberalism in many developed countries. Planning in New Zealand has shown a similar pattern. The extent to which modern, postmodern and neo-liberal approaches might have been manifest in the marine environment, especially with regard to marine farming, has received little attention. In most developed countries there has been an institutional separation between terrestrial and marine administrative agencies that has resulted in conflict between these agencies and between the regimes they work within and help create. Integrated Coastal Management emerged as a response to this situation and had become the dominant planning regime for coastal resources by the last decade of the 20th Century. It was largely uncritically promoted and accepted, especially by United Nations and coastal state government agencies. These themes provide the broad theoretical and practical context for this thesis. Since the 1970s, there has been a revolutionary break in New Zealand's resource management from a centralized command and control style of modernist planning to a neo-liberal, planning regime characterised by elements of modernism and postmodernism. Concurrently it has revamped, but failed to integrate, coastal and fisheries management and planning. Ironically, each of the resulting primary marine resource management statutes (the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) and the Fisheries Act 1983/1996 (FA83/96)) is considered to implement a world-leading model. Marine farming lies at the interface between the regimes created by these and preceding Acts and the nature of the regimes is explored in relation to marine farming. The development of the regimes and the rationale for them is set out with the aid of Scott's (1989, 2000b) axial model of the characteristics of a property right. The thesis groups the development of the New Zealand planning regimes for marine farming into four era: pre-modern (1866-1964), proto-modern (1964-1971), modern (1971-1991), and transitional (1991-2001). The evolution of the industry is shown largely to follow a generalized model of the industry in developed countries. This suggests that the nature of the property rights available for marine farming in New Zealand is not of great significance in the general development of the industry. The planning regime, however, significantly affects the spatial pattern of development of the industry. An analysis of provisions for marine farms in various plans suggests quite different planning 'styles' and approaches have been adopted in different parts of the country at different times. A Geographic Information System of all individual marine farms in New Zealand is developed to the stage where it can be combined with other data to investigate the spatial patterns that have evolved in New Zealand. A typology of patterns of farm arrangement in relation to other farms is apparent from the resultant mapped information. These patterns are shown to represent the outcomes of a combination of competing rights and the responses of and to the contemporaneous planning regimes. The consequences of adopting different styles of planning are apparent. This macro-level research is extended to the micro-level by an exploration of variables affecting the individual farmer's locational decisions. A national postal questionnaire survey of marine farm owners yielded 148 usable responses (32% response rate). Inferential statistical analytical tools were used to test the significance of relationships between particular variables. Multivariate analyses were used to cluster the respondents and the variables and to search for latent factors. These analyses supported field interview findings with regard to the importance of particular variables, especially planning regimes in directing the location and nature of marine farming. The results enabled development of a descriptive model for exploring and comparing the quality of different means of acquiring marine space for marine farming. The analyses also confirmed that significant changes were occurring within the structure of the industry. Analysis of the field interviews, maps, policy documents, Environment Court decisions and other secondary material shows the major capture fishing companies are increasingly dominating the industry. There was a notable presence of a category of 'entrepreneur site developers' exploiting the neo-liberal nature of the planning regimes of the 1990s to open up new areas for marine farming on scales unprecedented in the rest of the world. The consequent race for space has met with stiff resistance from the capture fishing industry, but more especially from the recreational sector. This has led to significant transaction costs. The Government response, a partial moratorium on marine farm development in November 2001, is shown to emulate the modernist command and control style of planning of twenty years earlier and to signal a failure of neo-liberal ideology to meet the needs of the industry and the public at large

Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication

Scientometrics have become an essential element in the practice and evaluation of science and research, including both the evaluation of individuals and national assessment exercises. Yet, researchers and practitioners in this field have lacked clear theories to guide their work. As early as 1981, then doctoral student Blaise Cronin published "The need for a theory of citing" —a call to arms for the fledgling scientometric community to produce foundational theories upon which the work of the field could be based. More than three decades later, the time has come to reach out the field again and ask how they have responded to this call. This book compiles the foundational theories that guide informetrics and scholarly communication research. It is a much needed compilation by leading scholars in the field that gathers together the theories that guide our understanding of authorship, citing, and impact

R.J. Rummel: An Assessment of His Many Contributions

genocide; democracy; libertarianism; peace; Cold Wa

Insights into the Genetic Architecture Underlying Plasma Lipids and Related Phenotypes from Genome-wide Human Genetic Variation.

Complex traits are multifactorial, often with risk contributions from numerous common and rare genetic mutations. The considerable challenges in understanding complex human phenotypes have prompted genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which generally compare large samples of unrelated individuals to test the relationship between genetic markers or nearby linked alleles and modulation of a trait or disease risk. Heritable levels of plasma lipids can influence heart disease risk, highlighting lipid-associated genetic variants as effective therapeutic targets. In collaboration with the Global Lipids Genetics Consortium, I present a follow-up study of approximately 100,000 individuals genotyped on a custom Metabochip array in the largest meta-analysis for lipids to-date. I report 62 novel genetic loci associated with lipids and present downstream bioinformatics analyses to support the role of these loci in lipid regulation. Many of the GWAS-identified lipid loci are non-protein-coding, suggesting a role in transcriptional regulation. This regulatory role can involve altering the DNA sequence at which proteins bind, ultimately affecting gene expression levels in particular cell types. I developed an open source tool called GREGOR (Genomic Regulatory Elements and Gwas Overlap AlgoRithm) to evaluate enrichment of GWAS variants in tissue-specific regulatory features defined by experimental approaches such as chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by high-throughput DNA sequencing (ChIP-seq). I report strong evidence for enrichment in DNase hypersensitive sites of biologically relevant tissues for 5 phenotypes including lipids, coronary artery disease, blood pressure, body mass index, and type 2 diabetes. In addition, I evaluate regulatory feature overlap of linked variants at a set of individual lipid-associated loci to predict the functionality of particular variants, and present experimental results to support my computational predictions. Lastly, I perform discovery and genotyping of structural variation (SV) from low-pass whole genome sequence data of 2,202 Norwegian cases with early-onset myocardial infarction (MI) and matched controls. I use complementary and established SV detection algorithms to call deletions, duplications, and inversions, and perform association analyses with MI disease risk and lipid levels. I observe a deletion in strong linkage disequilibrium with a known MI-associated single variant at the WDR12 locus, suggesting its plausibility as a functional variant at that locus.PhDBioinformaticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120821/1/schellen_1.pd