An assessment of the coverage of non-communicable disease research reported in British and Irish newspapers, 2002-13

Background: The reporting of medical research in the mass media is often the only way for the general public to learn about it, as most people do not read, nor have access to, scientific papers. Aims: We wished to map non-communicable disease (NCDs) research stories in two UK newspapers, the Daily Mail and The Guardian, and an Irish newspaper, the Irish Times, in 2002–13. Methodology: We identified relevant stories by means of the Factiva database, and obtained details of the cited research papers from the Web of Science. We compared coverage of research on five NCDs with the disease burden, and with the amount of research, in the two countries. We also analysed the sex distribution of the journalists, the researchers whose work was cited and any commentators mentioned in the stories. Results: There were 3921 stories in total (1990 in the Daily Mail, 1127 in the Irish Times, and 804 in The Guardian). Cancer and mental health disorders research attracted most attention. The other NCDs were cardiovascular disease & stroke, diabetes, and respiratory diseases. The stories tended to focus on epidemiological research, and means to reduce the risk of disease, rather than treatment. Both countries over-cited their own research, particularly Ireland. Conclusions: Coverage of the five NCDs tended to mirror the amounts and changes in the disease burden, both in time and between the two countries, notably for dementia and depression. Male researchers and commentators received more attention than females, and so reinforced existing gender stereotypes

European non-communicable respiratory disease research, 2002-13: Bibliometric study of outputs and funding

©2016 Begum et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This study was conducted in order to map European research in chronic respiratory diseases (CRDs). It was intended to assist the European Commission and other research funders to identify gaps and overlaps in their portfolios, and to suggest ways in which they could improve the effectiveness of their support and increase the impact of the research on patient care and on the reduction of the incidence of the CRDs. Articles and reviews were identified in the Web of Science on research in six non-communicable respiratory diseases that were published in 2002-13 from 31 European countries. They represented only 0.8% of biomedical research output but these diseases accounted for 4.7% of the European disease burden, as measured by Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), so the sub-field is seriously under-researched. Europe is prominent in the sub-field and published 56% of the world total, with the UK the most productive and publishing more than France and Italy, the next two countries, combined. Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) were the diseases with the most publications and the highest citation rates. They also received the most funding, with around two acknowledgments per paper (in 2009-13), whereas cystic fibrosis and emphysema averaged only one. Just over 37% of papers had no specific funding and depended on institutional support from universities and hospitals

Using the DPSIR framework for transdisciplinary training and knowledge elicitation in the Gulf of Thailand

No abstract available

COVID-19 publications: Database coverage, citations, readers, tweets, news, Facebook walls, Reddit posts

© 2020 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00066The COVID-19 pandemic requires a fast response from researchers to help address biological, medical and public health issues to minimize its impact. In this rapidly evolving context, scholars, professionals and the public may need to quickly identify important new studies. In response, this paper assesses the coverage of scholarly databases and impact indicators during 21 March to 18 April 2020. The rapidly increasing volume of research, is particularly accessible through Dimensions, and less through Scopus, the Web of Science, and PubMed. Google Scholar’s results included many false matches. A few COVID-19 papers from the 21,395 in Dimensions were already highly cited, with substantial news and social media attention. For this topic, in contrast to previous studies, there seems to be a high degree of convergence between articles shared in the social web and citation counts, at least in the short term. In particular, articles that are extensively tweeted on the day first indexed are likely to be highly read and relatively highly cited three weeks later. Researchers needing wide scope literature searches (rather than health focused PubMed or medRxiv searches) should start with Dimensions (or Google Scholar) and can use tweet and Mendeley reader counts as indicators of likely importance

Systematic Grant and Funding Body Acknowledgment Data for Publications: An Examination of New Dimensions and New Controversies for Bibliometrics

Bibliographic databases are beginning to provide systematic grant and funding body acknowledgement data for the publications they index. This paper considers how this new data might be used for policy purposes and the key issues that are likely to arise in its use. While the attempt to provide this kind of systematic data is in its relative infancy, there is already sufficient information within the WOS database to examine a number of controversies in science studies. This paper considers one such issue, namely the relationship between the number of funding sources acknowledged and the citation impact of publications where a positive relationship has been assumed to exist. Analyses of sets of publications from 2009 from the journals Cell and Physical Review Letters give contrasting results, suggesting that our understanding of the issue of the relationship between the impact of a publication and the number of funding sources which it acknowledges is not fully understood and may be more complicated that previously considered. It is proposed that scientific research findings are packaged by researchers into papers in a variety of ways for a wide variety of purposes. Individual funding quanta from whatever source are not therefore inputs to papers directly; rather, such funding supports a process that has amongst its outcomes, the production of papers

Marine heatwaves redistribute pelagic fishing fleets

Marine heatwaves (MHWs) have measurable impacts on marine ecosystems and reliant fisheries and associated communities. However, how MHWs translate to changes in fishing opportunities and the displacement of fishing fleets remains poorly understood. Using fishing vessel tracking data from the automatic identification system (AIS), we developed vessel distribution models for two pelagic fisheries targeting highly migratory species, the U.S. Atlantic longline and Pacific troll fleets, to understand how MHW properties (intensity, size, and duration) influence core fishing grounds and fleet displacement. For both fleets, MHW size had the largest influence on fishing ground area with northern fishing grounds gaining and southern fishing grounds decreasing in area. However, fleet displacement in response to MHWs varied between coasts, as the Atlantic longline fleet displaced farther in southern regions whereas the most northern and southern regions of the Pacific troll fleet shifted farther. Characterizing fishing fleet responses to these anomalous conditions can help identify regional vulnerabilities under future extreme events and aid in supporting climate-readiness and resilience in pelagic fisheries

Small-Scale Fisheries Bycatch Jeopardizes Endangered Pacific Loggerhead Turtles

Background. Although bycatch of industrial-scale fisheries can cause declines in migratory megafauna including seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles, the impacts of small-scale fisheries have been largely overlooked. Small-scale fisheries occur in coastal waters worldwide, employing over 99 % of the world’s 51 million fishers. New telemetry data reveal that migratory megafauna frequent coastal habitats well within the range of small-scale fisheries, potentially producing high bycatch. These fisheries occur primarily in developing nations, and their documentation and management are limited or non-existent, precluding evaluation of their impacts on non-target megafauna. Principal Findings/Methodology. 30 North Pacific loggerhead turtles that we satellite-tracked from 1996–2005 ranged oceanwide, but juveniles spent 70 % of their time at a high use area coincident with small-scale fisheries in Baja California Sur, Mexico (BCS). We assessed loggerhead bycatch mortality in this area by partnering with local fishers to 1) observe two small-scale fleets that operated closest to the high use area and 2) through shoreline surveys for discarded carcasses. Minimum annual bycatch mortality in just these two fleets at the high use area exceeded 1000 loggerheads year 21, rivaling that of oceanwide industrial-scale fisheries, and threatening the persistence of this critically endangered population. As a result of fisher participation in this study and a bycatch awareness campaign, a consortium of local fishers and other citizens are working to eliminate their bycatch and to establish a national loggerhea

Reviewing, indicating, and counting books for modern research evaluation systems

In this chapter, we focus on the specialists who have helped to improve the conditions for book assessments in research evaluation exercises, with empirically based data and insights supporting their greater integration. Our review highlights the research carried out by four types of expert communities, referred to as the monitors, the subject classifiers, the indexers and the indicator constructionists. Many challenges lie ahead for scholars affiliated with these communities, particularly the latter three. By acknowledging their unique, yet interrelated roles, we show where the greatest potential is for both quantitative and qualitative indicator advancements in book-inclusive evaluation systems.Comment: Forthcoming in Glanzel, W., Moed, H.F., Schmoch U., Thelwall, M. (2018). Springer Handbook of Science and Technology Indicators. Springer Some corrections made in subsection 'Publisher prestige or quality