Ranking of library and information science researchers: Comparison of data sources for correlating citation data, and expert judgments

This paper studies the correlations between peer review and citation indicators when evaluating research quality in library and information science (LIS). Forty-two LIS experts provided judgments on a 5-point scale of the quality of research published by 101 scholars; the median rankings resulting from these judgments were then correlated with h-, g- and H-index values computed using three different sources of citation data: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Google Scholar (GS). The two variants of the basic h-index correlated more strongly with peer judgment than did the h-index itself; citation data from Scopus was more strongly correlated with the expert judgments than was data from GS, which in turn was more strongly correlated than data from WoS; correlations from a carefully cleaned version of GS data were little different from those obtained using swiftly gathered GS data; the indices from the citation databases resulted in broadly similar rankings of the LIS academics; GS disadvantaged researchers in bibliometrics compared to the other two citation database while WoS disadvantaged researchers in the more technical aspects of information retrieval; and experts from the UK and other European countries rated UK academics with higher scores than did experts from the USA. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Measurement of end-expiratory lung volume in intubated children without interruption of mechanical ventilation

Purpose: Monitoring end-expiratory lung volume (EELV) is a valuable tool to optimize respiratory settings that could be of particular importance in mechanically ventilated pediatric patients. We evaluated the feasibility and precision of an intensive care unit (ICU) ventilator with an in-built nitrogen washout/wash

Reproducibility of different screening classifications in ultrasonography of the newborn hip

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Ultrasonography of the hip has gained wide acceptance as a primary method for diagnosis, screening and treatment monitoring of developmental hip dysplasia in infants. The aim of the study was to examine the degree of concordance of two objective classifications of hip morphology and subjective parameters by three investigators with different levels of experience.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In 207 consecutive newborns (101 boys; 106 girls) the following parameters were assessed: bony roof angle (α-angle) and cartilage roof angle (β-angle) according to Graf's basic standard method, "femoral head coverage" (FHC) as described by Terjesen, shape of the bony roof and position of the cartilaginous roof. Both hips were measured twice by each investigator with a 7.5 MHz linear transducer (SONOLINE G60S^®ultrasound system, SIEMENS, Erlangen, Germany).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Mean kappa-coefficients for the subjective parameters shape of the bony roof (0.97) and position of the cartilaginous roof (1.0) demonstrated high intra-observer reproducibility. Best results were achieved for α-angle, followed by β-angle and finally FHC. With respect to limits of agreement, inter-observer reproducibility was calculated less precisely.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Higher measurement differences were evaluated more in objective scorings. Those variations were observed by every investigator irrespective of level of experience.</p

The reductive glycine pathway allows autotrophic growth of Desulfovibrio desulfuricans

Supplementary informationis available for this paper athttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18906-7Six CO2 fixation pathways are known to operate in photoautotrophic and chemoautotrophic microorganisms. Here, we describe chemolithoautotrophic growth of the sulphate-reducing bacterium Desulfovibrio desulfuricans (strain G11) with hydrogen and sulphate as energy substrates. Genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic analyses reveal that D. desulfuricans assimilates CO2 via the reductive glycine pathway, a seventh CO2 fixation pathway. In this pathway, CO2 is first reduced to formate, which is reduced and condensed with a second CO2 to generate glycine. Glycine is further reduced in D. desulfuricans by glycine reductase to acetyl-P, and then to acetyl-CoA, which is condensed with another CO2 to form pyruvate. Ammonia is involved in the operation of the pathway, which is reflected in the dependence of the autotrophic growth rate on the ammonia concentration. Our study demonstrates microbial autotrophic growth fully supported by this highly ATP-efficient CO2 fixation pathway.We acknowledge Änne-Michaelis and William Newell for assistance with the LC-MS forthe metabolomics experiments and Daniel Amador-Noguez for access to the LC-MS usedfor13C intracellular metabolomic analysis. We thank Ines Cardoso Pereira and John vander Oost for critically reading the manuscript. This research was funded by the Neth-erlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) through SIAM Gravitation Grant024.002.002 and the Innovation Program Microbiology (WUR), NJC acknowledgesfunding from NWO through a Rubicon Grant (019.163LW.035) and a Veni Grant(VI.Veni.192.156).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Human matrix metalloproteinases: An ubiquitarian class of enzymes involved in several pathological processes

Human matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) belong to the M10 family of the MA clan of endopeptidases. They are ubiquitarian enzymes, structurally characterized by an active site where a Zn(2+) atom, coordinated by three histidines, plays the catalytic role, assisted by a glutamic acid as a general base. Various MMPs display different domain composition, which is very important for macromolecular substrates recognition. Substrate specificity is very different among MMPs, being often associated to their cellular compartmentalization and/or cellular type where they are expressed. An extensive review of the different MMPs structural and functional features is integrated with their pathological role in several types of diseases, spanning from cancer to cardiovascular diseases and to neurodegeneration. It emerges a very complex and crucial role played by these enzymes in many physiological and pathological processes

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Long-term changes in pharyngeal airway dimensions following activator-headgear and fixed appliance treatment

The aim of this study was to evaluate changes in the pharyngeal airway in growing children and adolescents and to compare these with a group of children who received activator-headgear Class II treatment. The sample consisted of 64 children (32 males and 32 females), 32 had a combined activator-headgear appliance for at least 9 months (study group) followed by fixed appliance therapy in most patients, while the other half received only minor orthodontic treatment (control group). Lateral cephalograms before treatment (T1, mean age 10.4 years), at the end of active treatment (T2, mean age 14.5 years), and at the long-term follow-up (T3, mean age 22.1 years) were traced and digitized. To reveal the influence of somatic growth, body height measurements were also taken into consideration. A two-sample t-test was applied in order to determine differences between the groups. At T1, the study group had a smaller pharynx length (P = 0.030) and a greater ANB angle (P < 0.001) than the controls. The pharyngeal area and the smallest distance between the tongue and the posterior pharyngeal wall also tended to be smaller in the study group. During treatment (T1-T2), significant growth differences between the two groups were present: the study group had a greater reduction in ANB (P < 0.001) and showed a greater increase in pharyngeal area (P = 0.007), pharyngeal length (P < 0.001) and the smallest distance between the tongue and the posterior pharyngeal wall (P = 0.038). At T2, the values for the study group were similar to those of the control group and remained stable throughout the post-treatment interval (T2-T3). Activator-headgear therapy has the potential to increase pharyngeal airway dimensions, such as the smallest distance between the tongue and the posterior pharyngeal wall or the pharyngeal area. Importantly, this increase seems to be maintained long term, up to 22 years on average in the present study. This benefit may result in a reduced risk of developing long-term impaired respiratory function