A Comprehensive Comparison of Educational Growth within Four Different Developing Countries between 1990 and 2012

Educational growth is a fundamental infrastructure factor required to achieve sustainable development. Therefore, evaluation and measurement of educational growth is essential for establishing a development road map. Because of this, there are many organizations and databases that work to capture academic trends and provide the general view of institute achievements. Web of Science and Scopus are the two most popular and scientific. In this paper, we define the important effective factors in educational growth and discuss them; we then compare these defined factors across four different developing countries: Brazil, Iran, Malaysia, and Turkey. As well as the comparisons, this paper uses the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient method to analyze the factors and the strong or weak relationship between the factors are discussed.  Keywords: Educational growth; Developing countries; Publication; Impact factor; Web of Science; Scopus

Economic Growth and Internet Usage Impact on Publication Productivity among ASEAN’s and World’s Best Universities

Measuring the number of papers which are published each year, publication productivity is the factor which shows the reputation of universities and countries. However, the effect of growing economy and using internet on the publication productivity in Asian countries has not been discovered yet. The present research is going to figure out the publication productivity among the elite universities in Asian countries and also ten top universities around the world in the last twenty years (from 1993 to 2012). Furthermore, the current research is aimed to study the relationship among publication, gross domestic product (GDP) and internet usage. It is worth to mention that the publication of the top Ten Malaysian Universities was regarded for the similar period of time. To get the exact numbers of documents like papers, conference articles, review papers and letters which are published by the universities in the last twenty years, the writer of the same paper used the Science Direct database. Moreover, the data for GDP and the number of internet usage was collected through the World Bank database (World Data Bank).To compare all kinds of publications,one-way ANOVA was used and to investigate the impact of economic growth and internet usage on publication productivity, multiple regression analysis was applied.The results showed that the rate of publication growth was 1.9, 20.9, and 65.5 in top universities in the world, ASEAN countries and Malaysia, respectively.The results also showed that there was a positive and significant correlation between GDP and the number of internet users with the number of publications in ASEAN and Malaysian universities. Internet usage had much more influence in comparison with the GDP in predicting the number of publications among these groups except for top ten Malaysian universities from 2003 to 2012. In summary, publication trends in top ten Malaysian and ASEAN universities are promising. However, policy makers and science managers should spend much more percentage of their GDP on Internet facilities and research studies that their outputs lead to more rapid economic growth and internet usage

A Crisis in “Open Access”: Should Communication Scholarly Outputs Take 77 Years to Become Open Access?

This study diachronically investigates the trend of the “open access” in the Web of Science (WoS) category of “communication.” To evaluate the trend, data were collected from 184 categories of WoS from 1980 to 2017. A total of 87,997,893 documents were obtained, of which 95,304 (0.10%) were in the category of “communication.” In average, 4.24% of the documents in all 184 categories were open access. While in communication, it was 3.29%, which ranked communication 116 out of 184. An Open Access Index (OAI) was developed to predict the trend of open access in communication. Based on the OAI, communication needs 77 years to fully reach open access, which undeniably can be considered as “crisis in scientific publishing” in this field. Given this stunning information, it is the time for a global call for “open access” by communication scholars across the world. Future research should investigate whether the current business models of publications in communication scholarships are encouraging open access or pose unnecessary restrictions on knowledge development

Effectiveness and tolerability of Perindopril plus Amlodipine single pill combination in Nigeria: The 13 City Hypertension Study

Background: There is no large-scale study that has shown the efficacy of single pill combination (SPC) antihypertensive medications in black African population. We therefore evaluated the blood pressure (BP) lowering efficacy and the tolerability of Perindopril plus Amlodipine SPC in black African patients. Methods: It was a multi-centre, prospective, observational programme among hypertensive patients using different doses of Perindopril and Amlodipine. Primary endpoint was assessed as the change in mean sitting systolic and diastolic BPs from baseline to 3 months. Results: 937 patients (55.7% female) were analysed, and the mean age was 56.4 ± 12.7 years. Systolic and diastolic BPs were significantly reduced by 17.3/ 9.4mmHg, 21.1/10.8mmHg mmHg and 24.6/12.7mmHg at 4, 8 and 12 weeks respectively compared to baseline value (p<0.0001). Dry cough was seen in 0.64% and angioedema 0.1% of the patients. Conclusions: Perindopril plus Amlodipine SPC provided clinically meaningful BP reductions and is well tolerated in a black African population. SAHeart 2022;19:6-1

The evolving SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Africa: Insights from rapidly expanding genomic surveillance

INTRODUCTION Investment in Africa over the past year with regard to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) sequencing has led to a massive increase in the number of sequences, which, to date, exceeds 100,000 sequences generated to track the pandemic on the continent. These sequences have profoundly affected how public health officials in Africa have navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. RATIONALE We demonstrate how the first 100,000 SARS-CoV-2 sequences from Africa have helped monitor the epidemic on the continent, how genomic surveillance expanded over the course of the pandemic, and how we adapted our sequencing methods to deal with an evolving virus. Finally, we also examine how viral lineages have spread across the continent in a phylogeographic framework to gain insights into the underlying temporal and spatial transmission dynamics for several variants of concern (VOCs). RESULTS Our results indicate that the number of countries in Africa that can sequence the virus within their own borders is growing and that this is coupled with a shorter turnaround time from the time of sampling to sequence submission. Ongoing evolution necessitated the continual updating of primer sets, and, as a result, eight primer sets were designed in tandem with viral evolution and used to ensure effective sequencing of the virus. The pandemic unfolded through multiple waves of infection that were each driven by distinct genetic lineages, with B.1-like ancestral strains associated with the first pandemic wave of infections in 2020. Successive waves on the continent were fueled by different VOCs, with Alpha and Beta cocirculating in distinct spatial patterns during the second wave and Delta and Omicron affecting the whole continent during the third and fourth waves, respectively. Phylogeographic reconstruction points toward distinct differences in viral importation and exportation patterns associated with the Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants and subvariants, when considering both Africa versus the rest of the world and viral dissemination within the continent. Our epidemiological and phylogenetic inferences therefore underscore the heterogeneous nature of the pandemic on the continent and highlight key insights and challenges, for instance, recognizing the limitations of low testing proportions. We also highlight the early warning capacity that genomic surveillance in Africa has had for the rest of the world with the detection of new lineages and variants, the most recent being the characterization of various Omicron subvariants. CONCLUSION Sustained investment for diagnostics and genomic surveillance in Africa is needed as the virus continues to evolve. This is important not only to help combat SARS-CoV-2 on the continent but also because it can be used as a platform to help address the many emerging and reemerging infectious disease threats in Africa. In particular, capacity building for local sequencing within countries or within the continent should be prioritized because this is generally associated with shorter turnaround times, providing the most benefit to local public health authorities tasked with pandemic response and mitigation and allowing for the fastest reaction to localized outbreaks. These investments are crucial for pandemic preparedness and response and will serve the health of the continent well into the 21st century