At 21 - the Journal of Business to Business Marketing Book Review Section with an analysis of book reviews rendered : looking toward the future

Purpose: The aim of this article is to examine the development of the book review section of the Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing relative to changes in the publication industry. Methodology/approach: The analysis compared descriptive categories and content analysis of the book reviews and book review essays across four time periods. The content analysis was conducted using Leximancer, an automatic text analytic tool that codes according to the co-occurrence of main concepts within the text. The time periods relate to the journal volumes: 1–5, 6–10, 11–15, and 16–21. These time periods were tagged within Leximancer indicating the differences and commonalities of the book review content between each time period. Findings: The results indicated that the number of book reviews has fallen over the journal’s life. The following reasons influencing the falling number of book reviews were proposed: changing promotion/tenure criteria for academics over the last 20 years, the different attitudes between academics and practitioners in relation to book content, financial pressures placed on academic publishers, and the changing proportion of the university library budget allocated to procuring books. The results also indicated that the topics covered in the book reviews have changed over the four time periods. These changes are thought to be influenced by the changing “hot topics” business marketing academics are interested in and topics preferred by book publishers. Implications: Although the publishing industry and academic reward systems continue to change, books will continue to be an important outlet for the dissemination of knowledge and academics will continue to publish books. The broader publishing environment and discipline specific trends should be considered when determining publishing approaches. Books offer an alternative avenue for reaching a broad academic audience (rather than those who only read specialized journals) and academics passionate about their research will be motivated to share with a broad audience.Peer reviewe

Can animation support the visualisation of dynamic graphs?

Animation and small multiples are methods for visualizing dynamically evolving graphs. Animations present an interactive movie of the data where positions of nodes are smoothly interpolated as the graph evolves. Nodes fade in/out as they are added/removed from the data set. Small multiples presents the data like a comic book with the graph at various states in separate windows. The user scans these windows to see how the data evolves. In a recent experiment, drawing stability (known more widely as the “mental map”) was shown to help users follow specific nodes or long paths in dynamically evolving data. However, no significant difference between animation and small multiples presentations was found. In this paper, we look at data where the nodes in the graph have low drawing stability and analyze it with new error metrics: measuring how close the given answer is from the correct answer on a continuous scale. We find evidence that when the stability of the drawing is low and important nodes in the task cannot be highlighted throughout the time series, animation can improve task performance when compared to the use of small multiples

On the effective visualisation of dynamic attribute cascades

Cascades appear in many applications, including biological graphs and social media analysis. In a cascade, a dynamic attribute propagates through a graph, following its edges. We present the results of a formal user study that tests the effectiveness of different types of cascade visualisations on node-link diagrams for the task of judging cascade spread. Overall, we found that a small multiples presentation was significantly faster than animation with no significant difference in terms of error rate. Participants generally preferred animation over small multiples and a hierarchical layout to a force-directed layout. Considering each presentation method separately, when comparing force-directed layouts to hierarchical layouts, hierarchical layouts were found to be significantly faster for both presentation methods and significantly more accurate for animation. Representing the history of the cascade had no significant effect. Thus, for our task, this experiment supports the use of a small multiples interface with hierarchically drawn graphs for the visualisation of cascades. This work is important because without these empirical results, designers of dynamic multivariate visualisations (in many applications) would base their design decisions on intuition with little empirical support as to whether these decisions enhance usability

Impact of interaction technique in interactive data visualisations:A study on lookup, comparison, and relation-seeking tasks

This paper presents an analysis of different interaction techniques used in interactive data visualisations to support end-users in visual analytics tasks. Our selection of interaction techniques is based on prior work and consists of the interaction techniques SELECT, EXPLORE, RECONFIGURE, ENCODE, FILTER, ABSTRACT/ELABORATE, and CONNECT. Through a within-subject study, we assessed participants’ abilities to utilise these techniques when faced with three distinct types of data-driven tasks; lookup, comparison, and Relation-seeking. Our research investigates the impact of these interaction techniques on the correctness, confidence, perceived difficulty, and cognitive load of N = 80 self-identified data scientists and N = 80 non-experts. We find that interaction technique significantly impacts answer correctness and participant confidence. Participants performed best across those interaction techniques that allow for information that is deemed least relevant to be concealed, which is reflected in lower intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load. Interestingly, participants’ expertise affected their confidence but not their accuracy. Our results provide insights useful for a more targeted and informed design and usage of interactive data visualisations.</p

The state of the art in empirical user evaluation of graph visualizations

While graph drawing focuses more on the aesthetic representation of node-link diagrams, graph visualization takes into account other visual metaphors making them useful for graph exploration tasks in information visualization and visual analytics. Although there are aesthetic graph drawing criteria that describe how a graph should be presented to make it faster and more reliably explorable, many controlled and uncontrolled empirical user studies flourished over the past years. The goal of them is to uncover how well the human user performs graph-specific tasks, in many cases compared to previously designed graph visualizations. Due to the fact that many parameters in a graph dataset as well as the visual representation of them might be varied and many user studies have been conducted in this space, a state-of-the-art survey is needed to understand evaluation results and findings to inform the future design, research, and application of graph visualizations. In this paper, we classify the present literature on the topmost level into graph interpretation, graph memorability, and graph creation where the users with their tasks stand in focus of the evaluation not the computational aspects. As another outcome of this work, we identify the white spots in this field and sketch ideas for future research directions

Using gamification to transform the adoption of servitization

Increasingly, manufacturing organizations compete by developing product-service systems rather than offering products alone. To transform themselves into providers of advanced services, however, product-centric manufacturing firms need to overcome a range of barriers. While previous studies have highlighted the teaching/learning potential of 'gamification' (the use of ideas and techniques found in game-playing), the opportunities to harness this approach to help tackle such barriers have yet to be fully realized. Our study extends the debate by integrating established frameworks relating to emotional mechanics of gamification with the adoption of advanced services, arguing that such mechanics can facilitate and strengthen companies' transformation into advanced-service providers. Based on a systematic analysis of nearly 90 selected publications, we develop six conceptual propositions to explore how gamification can aid the transformation process. Our findings will help both practitioners and researchers apply emotional mechanics of gamification when seeking to address different hurdles hindering the development and provision of advanced services

Four consecutive yearly point-prevalence studies in Wales indicate lack of improvement in sepsis care on the wards

The ‘Sepsis Six’ bundle was promoted as a deliverable tool outside of the critical care settings, but there is very little data available on the progress and change of sepsis care outside the critical care environment in the UK. Our aim was to compare the yearly prevalence, outcome and the Sepsis Six bundle compliance in patients at risk of mortality from sepsis in non-intensive care environments. Patients with a National Early Warning Score (NEWS) of 3 or above and suspected or proven infection were enrolled into four yearly 24-h point prevalence studies, carried out in fourteen hospitals across Wales from 2016 to 2019. We followed up patients to 30 days between 2016–2019 and to 90 days between 2017 and 2019. Out of the 26,947 patients screened 1651 fulfilled inclusion criteria and were recruited. The full ‘Sepsis Six’ care bundle was completed on 223 (14.0%) occasions, with no significant difference between the years. On 190 (11.5%) occasions none of the bundle elements were completed. There was no significant correlation between bundle element compliance, NEWS or year of study. One hundred and seventy (10.7%) patients were seen by critical care outreach; the ‘Sepsis Six’ bundle was completed significantly more often in this group (54/170, 32.0%) than for patients who were not reviewed by critical care outreach (168/1385, 11.6%; p < 0.0001). Overall survival to 30 days was 81.7% (1349/1651), with a mean survival time of 26.5 days (95% CI 26.1–26.9) with no difference between each year of study. 90-day survival for years 2017–2019 was 74.7% (949/1271), with no difference between the years. In multivariate regression we identified older age, heart failure, recent chemotherapy, higher frailty score and do not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation orders as significantly associated with increased 30-day mortality. Our data suggests that despite efforts to increase sepsis awareness within the NHS, there is poor compliance with the sepsis care bundles and no change in the high mortality over the study period. Further research is needed to determine which time-sensitive ward-based interventions can reduce mortality in patients with sepsis and how can these results be embedded to routine clinical practice

Development of system components for Raman spectrometers

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