Collaboration in Iranian Scientific Publications

This study looks at international collaboration in Iranian scientific publications through the ISI Science Citation Index® (SCI) for the years 1995-1999, inclusive. These results are compared to and contrasted with the earlier findings for the periods covering 1985-1994 (Osareh & Wilson 2000). The results of Iran's increasing productivity over a 15-year period are presented. Iran doubled its output in the first two five-year periods and increased 2.8-fold from the second to the third five-year period. The rise in Iran's scientific publication output is due mainly to factors such as the ending of the war, better economic conditions, recent changes in the Iranian government's policy, basic changes in the political environment brought about by the Reformers, expansion of the Iranian presses for national publications, and the recent return of a large number of students trained overseas through government scholarships. External changes also account for the increased productivity, e.g., the acceptance of three Iranian source journals by the SCI, increased access to international databases through the Internet and better electronic communication facilities for international collaboration. One of the most important and significant factors that caused this dramatic rise seems to be the government's research policies in the last few years. Since 1999, the Iran Science, Research and Technology Ministry, has encouraged researchers to publish their non-Farsi language articles in highly ranked international scientific journals, for example, by giving prizes to researchers who publish their articles in ISI-ranked journals

A Scoping Review of the Quality and the Design of Evaluations of Mobile Health, Telehealth, Smart Pump and Monitoring Technologies Performed in a Pharmacy-Related Setting.

Background: There is currently a need for high quality evaluations of new mobile health, telehealth, smart pump and monitoring technologies undertaken in a pharmacy-related setting. We aim to evaluate the use of these monitoring technologies performed in this setting. Methods: A systematic searching of English articles that examined the quality and the design of technologies conducted in pharmacy-related facilities was performed using the following databases: MEDLINE and Cumulative index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) to identify original studies examining the quality and the design of technologies and published in peer-reviewed journals. Extraction of articles and quality assessment of included articles were performed independently by two authors. Quality scores over 75% are classed as being acceptable using a "relatively conservative" quality benchmark. Scores over 55% are included using a "relatively liberal" cut-off point. Results: Screening resulted in the selection of 40 formal evaluations. A substantial number of studies (32, 80.00%) were performed in the United States, quantitative in approach (33, 82.50%) and retrospective cohort (24, 60.00%) in study design. The most common pharmacy-related settings were: 22 primary care (55.00%); 10 hospital pharmacy (25.00%); 7 community pharmacy (17.50%); one primary care and hospital pharmacy (2.50%). The majority of the evaluations (33, 82.50%) reported clinical outcomes, six (15.00%) measured clinical and economic outcomes, and one (2.50%) economic only. Twelve (30.00%) quantitative studies and no qualitative study met objective criteria for "relatively conservative" quality. Using a lower "relatively liberal" benchmark, 27 quantitative (81.82%) and four qualitative (57.41%) studies met the lower quality criterion. Conclusion: Worldwide, few evaluations of mobile health, telehealth, smart pump and monitoring technologies in pharmacy-related setting have been published.Their quality is often below the standard necessary for inclusion in a systematic review mainly due to inadequate study design

Patterns of Iran’s Research Collaboration in the field of Pharmacology and Pharmacy: A Bibliometric Study

Purpose: This research aims to analyze and visualize the structure of Iranian scholarly networks in the field of “pharmacology and pharmacy”. This study includes an overview of co-authorship, efficiency and ranking of the researches, visualizing the co-authorship network, changes in the main core of the publications and macro and micro-level metrics such as social influence. Methods: This research utilizes social network analysis (SNA). The preliminary data of this research includes all the Iran’s documents in Web of Science in “Pharmacology and Pharmacy” during the period of 2005 to 2016. After the preprocessing of 6204 records and creating relational matrix, a combination of bibliometric software (including UCINET, NetDraw, HistCite and VOSviewer) were used to analyze and uncover network features. Results: Results indicated that most papers are multi-authored. Four-authored articles are the main common authorship pattern. Some measures such as author frequency, multi-authored papers, and single-authored papers in each time interval are ascending. Moreover, “density” reduction of the scientific collaborations indicates that fragmentation level has increased based on the “clustering coefficient” in each period. Besides, Iranian researchers of the field has the most collaboration with the scholars of England (%2.85), U.S.A. (2.61%) and Canada (1.76%), respectively. Conclusions: Fragile structure and low closeness of the network imply low maturity of Iran’s research in the field of “pharmacology and pharmacy”. Also, test of the correlation coefficients indicates that with increasing “degree centrality” and “betweenness centrality”, the “number of articles” increases as well. However, there is no correlation between “closeness centrality” and “number of articles”

Development of a platform to align education and practice: bridging academia and the profession in Portugal

Limited fitness for practice may result from a mismatch between education and practice. Aiming to meet the common interests of academics and practitioners, the Portuguese Pharmaceutical Society (PPS) developed the Education and Practice Platform (EPP). The EPP includes one representative from each pharmacy faculty, and all Councils of Speciality Boards of Practice. Brainstorming with involved parties enabled sharing of interests, concerns and identifying a common path. Aims, mission, vision and values were set. The EPP's mission is to: act as an enabler to foster the quality and adequacy of education through sharing best practices, ultimately leading to facilitate professional integration, and to foster quality development in teaching practices with recognition for autonomy in freedom to teach and to learn. Its vision is an alignment of education and practice with the PPS' statutes to ensure validation of the competences defined for each practice area, and compliance with international guidance. Key performance indicators (KPIs) were set. Activities developed include the creation of a national forum to discuss education and practice, development of workshops on teaching methods and pharmacy internships, enhanced representation in international events and response to global and national requests. Ongoing work focuses on the creation of a common training framework in hospital and community pharmacy practice adapted to Portugal. The EPP is a worldwide case study, encouraging the development of discussion contributing to an open climate of sharing best practices, indirectly leading to foster a better alignment between education and practice. Many of these results are so far intangible in scientific terms but worth describing.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Biopiracy <i>versus </i>one-world medicine – from colonial relicts to global collaborative concepts

Background: Practices of biopiracy to use genetic resources and indigenous knowledge by Western companies without benefit-sharing of those, who generated the traditional knowledge, can be understood as form of neocolonialism.Hypothesis: : The One-World Medicine concept attempts to merge the best of traditional medicine from developing countries and conventional Western medicine for the sake of patients around the globe.Study design: Based on literature searches in several databases, a concept paper has been written. Legislative initiatives of the United Nations culminated in the Nagoya protocol aim to protect traditional knowledge and regulate benefit-sharing with indigenous communities. The European community adopted the Nagoya protocol, and the corresponding regulations will be implemented into national legislation among the member states. Despite pleasing progress, infrastructural problems of the health care systems in developing countries still remain. Current approaches to secure primary health care offer only fragmentary solutions at best. Conventional medicine from industrialized countries cannot be afforded by the impoverished population in the Third World. Confronted with exploding costs, even health systems in Western countries are endangered to burst. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is popular among the general public in industrialized countries, although the efficacy is not sufficiently proven according to the standards of evidence-based medicine. CAM is often available without prescription as over-the-counter products with non-calculated risks concerning erroneous self-medication and safety/toxicity issues. The concept of integrative medicine attempts to combine holistic CAM approaches with evidence-based principles of conventional medicine.Conclusion: To realize the concept of One-World Medicine, a number of standards have to be set to assure safety, efficacy and applicability of traditional medicine, e.g. sustainable production and quality control of herbal products, performance of placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized clinical trials, phytovigilance, as well as education of health professionals and patients

Does the Subject Content of the Pharmacy Degree Course Influence the Community Pharmacist’s Views on Competencies for Practice?

Do community pharmacists coming from different educational backgrounds rank the importance of competences for practice differently—or is the way in which they see their profession more influenced by practice than university education? A survey was carried out on 68 competences for pharmacy practice in seven countries with different pharmacy education systems in terms of the relative importance of the subject areas chemical and medicinal sciences. Community pharmacists were asked to rank the competences in terms of relative importance for practice; competences were divided into personal and patient-care competences. The ranking was very similar in the seven countries suggesting that evaluation of competences for practice is based more on professional experience than on prior university education. There were some differences for instance in research-related competences and these may be influenced, by education.Peer reviewe