144 research outputs found
Spatially Explicit Data: Stewardship and Ethical Challenges in Science
Scholarly communication is at an unprecedented turning point created in part by the increasing saliency of data stewardship and data sharing. Formal data management plans represent a new emphasis in research, enabling access to data at higher volumes and more quickly, and the potential for replication and augmentation of existing research. Data sharing has recently transformed the practice, scope, content, and applicability of research in several disciplines, in particular in relation to spatially specific data. This lends exciting potentiality, but the most effective ways in which to implement such changes, particularly for disciplines involving human subjects and other sensitive information, demand consideration. Data management plans, stewardship, and sharing, impart distinctive technical, sociological, and ethical challenges that remain to be adequately identified and remedied. Here, we consider these and propose potential solutions for their amelioration
Archiving and referencing source code with Software Heritage
Software, and software source code in particular, is widely used in modern
research. It must be properly archived, referenced, described and cited in
order to build a stable and long lasting corpus of scientic knowledge. In this
article we show how the Software Heritage universal source code archive
provides a means to fully address the first two concerns, by archiving
seamlessly all publicly available software source code, and by providing
intrinsic persistent identifiers that allow to reference it at various
granularities in a way that is at the same time convenient and effective. We
call upon the research community to adopt widely this approach.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1909.1076
Exploring the (missed) connections between digital scholarship and faculty development: a conceptual analysis
Abstract The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between two research topics: digital scholarship and faculty development. The former topic drives attention on academics' new practices in digital, open and networked contexts; the second is focused on the requirements and strategies to promote academics' professional learning and career advancement. The research question addressing this study is: are faculty development strategies hindered by the lack of a cohesive view in the research on digital scholarship? The main assumption guiding this research question is that clear conceptual frameworks and models of professional practice lead to effective faculty development strategies. Through a wide overview of the evolution of both digital scholarship and faculty development, followed by a conceptual analysis of the intersections between fields, the paper attempts to show the extent on which the situation in one area (digital scholarship) might encompass criticalities for the other (faculty development) in terms of research and practices. Furthermore, three scenarios based on the several perspectives of digital scholarship are built in order to explore the research question in depth. We conclude that at the current state of art the relationship between these two topics is weak. Moreover, the dialogue between digital scholarship and faculty development could put the basis to forge effective professional learning contexts and instruments, with the ultimate goal of supporting academics to become digital scholars towards a more open and democratic vision of scholarship
What Difference Does Quantity Make? On the Epistemology of Big Data Biology
publication-status: Acceptedtypes: ArticleIs Big Data science a whole new way of doing research? And what difference does data quantity make to knowledge
production strategies and their outputs? I argue that the novelty of Big Data science does not lie in the sheer quantity of
data involved, but rather in (1) the prominence and status acquired by data as commodity and recognised output, both
within and outside of the scientific community and (2) the methods, infrastructures, technologies, skills and knowledge
developed to handle data. These developments generate the impression that data-intensive research is a new mode of
doing science, with its own epistemology and norms. To assess this claim, one needs to consider the ways in which data
are actually disseminated and used to generate knowledge. Accordingly, this article reviews the development of sophisticated
ways to disseminate, integrate and re-use data acquired on model organisms over the last three decades of work
in experimental biology. I focus on online databases as prominent infrastructures set up to organise and interpret such
data and examine the wealth and diversity of expertise, resources and conceptual scaffolding that such databases draw
upon. This illuminates some of the conditions under which Big Data needs to be curated to support processes of
discovery across biological subfields, which in turn highlights the difficulties caused by the lack of adequate curation for
the vast majority of data in the life sciences. In closing, I reflect on the difference that data quantity is making to
contemporary biology, the methodological and epistemic challenges of identifying and analysing data given these developments,
and the opportunities and worries associated with Big Data discourse and methods.Economic and Social
Research CouncilES/F028180/1Leverhulme TrustRPG-2013-153European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013ERC grant
agreement number 335925
The Emerging Scholarly Brain
It is now a commonplace observation that human society is becoming a coherent
super-organism, and that the information infrastructure forms its emerging
brain. Perhaps, as the underlying technologies are likely to become billions of
times more powerful than those we have today, we could say that we are now
building the lizard brain for the future organism.Comment: to appear in Future Professional Communication in Astronomy-II
(FPCA-II) editors A. Heck and A. Accomazz
Tracing scientist's research trends realtimely
In this research, we propose a method to trace scientists' research trends
realtimely. By monitoring the downloads of scientific articles in the journal
of Scientometrics for 744 hours, namely one month, we investigate the download
statistics. Then we aggregate the keywords in these downloaded research papers,
and analyze the trends of article downloading and keyword downloading.
Furthermore, taking both the download of keywords and articles into
consideration, we design a method to detect the emerging research trends. We
find that in scientometrics field, social media, new indices to quantify
scientific productivity (g-index), webometrics, semantic, text mining, open
access are emerging fields that scientometrics researchers are focusing on.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure
Effects of a Water-Soluble Cinnamon Extract on Body Composition and Features of the Metabolic Syndrome in Pre-Diabetic Men and Women
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of supplementation with a water-soluble cinnamon extract (Cinnulin PF®) on body composition and features of the metabolic syndrome. Methods: Twenty-two subjects with prediabetes and the metabolic syndrome (mean ± SD: age, BMI, systolic blood pressure [SBP], fasting blood glucose [FBG]: 46.0 ± 9.7 y; 33.2 ± 9.3 kg/m 2; 133 ± 17 mm Hg; 114.3 ± 11.6 mg/dL) were randomly assigned to supplement their diet with either Cinnulin PF ® (500 mg/d) or a placebo for 12-weeks. Main outcome measures were changes in FBG, SBP, and body composition measured after 12-weeks of supplementation. The primary statistical analyses consisted of two factor (group x time), repeated-measures ANOVA for between group differences over time. In all analyses, an intent-to-treat approach was used and significance was accepted at P<0.05. Results: Subjects in the Cinnulin PF ® group had significant decreases in FBG (-8.4%: 116.3 ± 12.8 mg/dL [pre] to 106.5 ± 20.1 mg/dL [post], p<0.01), SBP (-3.8%: 133 ± 14 mm Hg [pre] to 128 ± 18 mm Hg [post], p<0.001), and increases in lean mass (+1.1%: 53.7 ± 11.8 kg [pre] to 54.3 ± 11.8 kg [post], p<0.002) compared with the placebo group. Additionally, within-group analyses uncovered small, but statistically significant decreases in body fat (-0.7%: 37.9 ± 9.2 % [pre] to 37.2 ± 8.9 % [post], p<0.02) in the Cinnulin PF ® group. No significant changes in clinical blood chemistries were observed betwee
How Digital Are the Digital Humanities? An Analysis of Two Scholarly Blogging Platforms
In this paper we compare two academic networking platforms, HASTAC and Hypotheses, to show the distinct ways in which they serve specific communities in the Digital Humanities (DH) in different national and disciplinary contexts. After providing background information on both platforms, we apply co-word analysis and topic modeling to show thematic similarities and differences between the two sites, focusing particularly on how they frame DH as a new paradigm in humanities research. We encounter a much higher ratio of posts using humanities-related terms compared to their digital counterparts, suggesting a one-way dependency of digital humanities-related terms on the corresponding unprefixed labels. The results also show that the terms digital archive, digital literacy, and digital pedagogy are relatively independent from the respective unprefixed terms, and that digital publishing, digital libraries, and digital media show considerable cross-pollination between the specialization and the general noun. The topic modeling reproduces these findings and reveals further differences between the two platforms. Our findings also indicate local differences in how the emerging field of DH is conceptualized and show dynamic topical shifts inside these respective contexts
- …