Examining Scientific Writing Styles from the Perspective of Linguistic Complexity

Publishing articles in high-impact English journals is difficult for scholars around the world, especially for non-native English-speaking scholars (NNESs), most of whom struggle with proficiency in English. In order to uncover the differences in English scientific writing between native English-speaking scholars (NESs) and NNESs, we collected a large-scale data set containing more than 150,000 full-text articles published in PLoS between 2006 and 2015. We divided these articles into three groups according to the ethnic backgrounds of the first and corresponding authors, obtained by Ethnea, and examined the scientific writing styles in English from a two-fold perspective of linguistic complexity: (1) syntactic complexity, including measurements of sentence length and sentence complexity; and (2) lexical complexity, including measurements of lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. The observations suggest marginal differences between groups in syntactical and lexical complexity.Comment: 6 figure

The production and diffusion of policy knowledge

"The published works of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) represent the most immediate and tangible measure of the new policy-related knowledge attributable to the institute, its staff, and research partners. This study provides a quantitative assessment of the number, nature, form, and use of IFPRI's published products since 1979 and compares and contrasts that with the publication performance of several similar agencies, including the economics and social sciences programs of the Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (CIMMYT) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) respectively, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), the Bangladesh Institute for Development Studies (BIDS), and the now defunct Stanford University Food Research Institute (SFRI). Overall, IFPRI's circulated output is extensive, published not only in a broad portfolio of leading scholarly journals, but also in a wide range of books, technical reports, and extension documents. The amount of published output has tended to increase throughout IFPRI's history, and it continues to do so. Going beyond counting and classifying IFPRI's published record, we report the results of a bibliometric assessment of IFPRI and the comparison institutes for the period 1981–96 using the publication and citation performance details recorded in the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index data bases. Citations to published literature are not indicative of an impact on policy or the economy generally but on further research and analysis. An analysis of coauthorship patterns provides an indication of impact too (more directly through the conduct of joint research), as well as indications of the way the research is carried out. Our analysis reveals the role IFPRI plays as a knowledge intermediary between the scholarly community and policy clienteles, but that a high proportion of its research collaborations leading to formal publications (and especially publications in the leading journals covered in ISI's data bases) involve researchers in advanced agencies. This partly reflects the limited capacity to perform food policy research in many developing countries — itself a reflection of local priorities for education and limited, long-term international support to increase scientific capacity in developing countries — and also underscores the role IFPRI could, and arguably should, play in redressing this state of affairs." Authors' AbstractInternational Food Policy Research Institute History ,Research institutes Evaluation ,Communication in learning and scholarship ,Bibliometrics ,Information science Statistical methods ,Knowledge management ,International Food Policy Research Institute Communications systems Evaluation ,Food policy Research ,

Personal Learning with Social Media:Reputation, Privacy and Identity Perspectives

Social media platforms are increasingly used in recent years to support learning activities, especially for the construction of activity- and learner-centric personal learning environments (PLEs). This thesis investigates the solutions to four essential design requirements for social media based PLEs: support for help seeking, privacy protection, identity management and activity monitoring, as well as context awareness. Three main components of the thesis, reputation, privacy, and identity, are built upon these four design requirements. We investigate the three components through the following research questions. How do we help learners to find suitable experts or peers who they can learn from or collaborate with in a particular learning context? How can we design a proper privacy mechanism to make sure the information shared by learners is only disclosed to the intended audience in a given context? What identity scheme should be used to preserve the privacy of learners while also providing personalized learning experience, especially for teenage learners? To tackle the design requirement of support for help seeking, we address the reputation dimension in the context of personal learning for doctoral studies, where doctoral students need to find influential experts or peers in a particular domain. We propose an approach to detect a domain-specific community in academic social media platforms. Based on that, we investigate the influence of scholars taking both their academic and social impact into account. We propose a measure called R-Index that aggregates the readership of a scholar's publications to assess her academic impact. Furthermore, we add the social dimension into the influence measure by adopting network centrality metrics in a domain-specific community. Our results show that academic influence and social influence measures do not strongly correlate with each other, which implies that, adding the social dimension could enhance the traditional impact metrics that only take academic influence into account. Moreover, we tackle the privacy dimension of designing a PLE in the context of higher education. To protect against unauthorized access to learners' data, we propose a privacy control approach that allows learners to specify the audience, action, and artifact for their sharing behavior. Then we introduce the notion of privacy protocol with which learners can define fine-grained sharing rules. To provide a usable application of the privacy protocol in social media based PLEs, we exploit the space concept that provides an easy way for users to define the privacy protocols within a particular context. The proposed approach is evaluated through two user studies. The results reveal that learners confirm the usefulness and usability of the privacy enhanced sharing scheme based on spaces. In the last part of the thesis, we study the identity dimension in the context of STEM education at secondary and high schools. To support personalization while also preserving learners' privacy, we propose a classroom-like pseudonymity scheme that allows tracking of learners' activities while keeping their real identities undisclosed. In addition, we present a data storage mechanism called Vault that allows apps to store and exchange data within the scope of a Web-based inquiry learning space

Educational Considerations, vol. 37(1) Full Issue

Educational Considerations, vol. 37(1)-Fall 2009-Full issu

Social and Affective Neuroscience of Everyday Human Interaction

This Open Access book presents the current state of the art knowledge on social and affective neuroscience based on empirical findings. This volume is divided into several sections first guiding the reader through important theoretical topics within affective neuroscience, social neuroscience and moral emotions, and clinical neuroscience. Each chapter addresses everyday social interactions and various aspects of social interactions from a different angle taking the reader on a diverse journey. The last section of the book is of methodological nature. Basic information is presented for the reader to learn about common methodologies used in neuroscience alongside advanced input to deepen the understanding and usability of these methods in social and affective neuroscience for more experienced readers

Reputation assessment in collaborative environments.

The popularity of open collaboration platforms is strongly related to the popularity of Internet: the growing of the latter (in technology and users) is a spring to the former. With the advent of Web 2.0, not only the Internet users became from passive receiver of published content to active producer of content, but also active reviewers and editors of content. With the increase of popularity of these platforms, some new interesting problems arise related on how to choose the best one, how to choose the collaborators and how evaluate the quality of the final work. This evolution has brought much benefit to the Internet community, especially related to the availability of free content, but also gave rise to the problem of how much this content, or these people, may be trusted. The purpose of this thesis is to present different reputation systems suitable for collaborative environments; to show that we must use very different techniques to obtain the best from the data we are dealing with and, eventually, to compare reputations systems and recommender systems and show that, under some strict circumstances, they become similar enough and we can just make minor adjustment to one to obtain the other

Annual Report of the University, 1983-1984, Volumes 1-4

The 1983-84 athletic year could best be characterized as the second vintage year for the women. This was UNM\u27s second complete season under the auspices of the NCAA, and the High Country Athletic Conference, although it was the first year that the Conference had a full time commissioner at the helm. For a second year, the HCAC awarded the High Point Trophy to the school whose teams finished the highest in the eight recognized Conference sports. Again New Mexico was edged out by Brigham Young University for the honors by 4 1/2 points. The women\u27s golf team captured the Conference title, and no other team finished lower than fourth place. Altogether UNM had thirty-eight women athletes selected to be members of their respective All-Conference Teams. Two others were named to their All-Conference Second Team, and three athletes received Honorable Mention

Social and Affective Neuroscience of Everyday Human Interaction

This Open Access book presents the current state of the art knowledge on social and affective neuroscience based on empirical findings. This volume is divided into several sections first guiding the reader through important theoretical topics within affective neuroscience, social neuroscience and moral emotions, and clinical neuroscience. Each chapter addresses everyday social interactions and various aspects of social interactions from a different angle taking the reader on a diverse journey. The last section of the book is of methodological nature. Basic information is presented for the reader to learn about common methodologies used in neuroscience alongside advanced input to deepen the understanding and usability of these methods in social and affective neuroscience for more experienced readers