2,123 research outputs found

    Scrambling for higher metrics in the Journal Impact Factor bubble period: a real-world problem in science management and its implications

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    Universities and funders in many countries have been using Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as an indicator for research and grant assessment despite its controversial nature as a statistical representation of scientific quality. This study investigates how the changes of JIF over the years can affect its role in research evaluation and science management by using JIF data from annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to illustrate the changes. The descriptive statistics find out an increase in the median JIF for the top 50 journals in the JCR, from 29.300 in 2017 to 33.162 in 2019. Moreover, on average, elite journal families have up to 27 journals in the top 50. In the group of journals with a JIF of lower than 1, the proportion has shrunk by 14.53% in the 2015–2019 period. The findings suggest a potential ‘JIF bubble period’ that science policymaker, university, public fund managers, and other stakeholders should pay more attention to JIF as a criterion for quality assessment to ensure more efficient science management

    Improving Bayesian statistics understanding in the age of Big Data with the bayesvl R package

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    The exponential growth of social data both in volume and complexity has increasingly exposed many of the shortcomings of the conventional frequentist approach to statistics. The scientific community has called for careful usage of the approach and its inference. Meanwhile, the alternative method, Bayesian statistics, still faces considerable barriers toward a more widespread application. The bayesvl R package is an open program, designed for implementing Bayesian modeling and analysis using the Stan language’s no-U-turn (NUTS) sampler. The package combines the ability to construct Bayesian network models using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation technique, and the graphic capability of the ggplot2 package. As a result, it can improve the user experience and intuitive understanding when constructing and analyzing Bayesian network models. A case example is offered to illustrate the usefulness of the package for Big Data analytics and cognitive computing

    On how religions could accidentally incite lies and violence: folktales as a cultural transmitter

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    Folklore has a critical role as a cultural transmitter, all the while being a socially accepted medium for the expressions of culturally contradicting wishes and conducts. In this study of Vietnamese folktales, through the use of Bayesian multilevel modeling and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, we offer empirical evidence for how the interplay between religious teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism) and deviant behaviors (lying and violence) could affect a folktale’s outcome. The findings indicate that characters who lie and/or commit violent acts tend to have bad endings, as intuition would dictate, but when they are associated with any of the above Three Teachings, the final endings may vary. Positive outcomes are seen in cases where characters associated with Confucianism lie and characters associated with Buddhism act violently. The results supplement the worldwide literature on discrepancies between folklore and real-life conduct, as well as on the contradictory human behaviors vis-à-vis religious teachings. Overall, the study highlights the complexity of human decision-making, especially beyond the folklore realm

    Multi-faceted insights of entrepreneurship facing a fast-growing economy: A literature review

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    This study explores entrepreneurship research in Vietnam, a lower-middle-income country in Southeast Asia that has witnessed rapid economic growth since the 1990s but has nonetheless been absent in the relevant Western-centric literature. Using an exclusively developed software, the study presents a structured dataset on entrepreneurship research in Vietnam from 2008 to 2018, highlighting: low research output, low creativity level, inattention to entrepreneurship theories, and instead, a focus on practical business matters. The scholarship remains limited due to the detachment between the academic and entrepreneur communities. More important are the findings that Vietnamese research on entrepreneurship, still in its infancy, diverges significantly from those in developed and emerging economies in terms of their content and methods. These studies are contextualized to a large extent to reflect the concerns of a developing economy still burdened by the high financial and nonfinancial costs

    Understanding the interplay of lies, violence, and religious values in folktales

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    This research employs the Bayesian network modeling approach, and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, to learn about the role of lies and violence in teachings of major religions, using a unique dataset extracted from long-standing Vietnamese folktales. The results indicate that, although lying and violent acts augur negative consequences for those who commit them, their associations with core religious values diverge in the outcome for the folktale characters. Lying that serves a religious mission of either Confucianism or Taoism (but not Buddhism) brings a positive outcome to a character. A violent act committed to serving Buddhist mission results in a happy ending for the committer

    Further Extensions of the Gr\"{o}tzsch Theorem

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    The Gr\"{o}tzsch Theorem states that every triangle-free planar graph admits a proper 33-coloring. Among many of its generalizations, the one of Gr\"{u}nbaum and Aksenov, giving 33-colorability of planar graphs with at most three triangles, is perhaps the most known. A lot of attention was also given to extending 33-colorings of subgraphs to the whole graph. In this paper, we consider 33-colorings of planar graphs with at most one triangle. Particularly, we show that precoloring of any two non-adjacent vertices and precoloring of a face of length at most 44 can be extended to a 33-coloring of the graph. Additionally, we show that for every vertex of degree at most 33, a precoloring of its neighborhood with the same color extends to a 33-coloring of the graph. The latter result implies an affirmative answer to a conjecture on adynamic coloring. All the presented results are tight

    Feedback vertex sets in (directed) graphs of bounded degeneracy or treewidth

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    We study the minimum size ff of a feedback vertex set in directed and undirected nn-vertex graphs of given degeneracy or treewidth. In the undirected setting the bound k1k+1n\frac{k-1}{k+1}n is known to be tight for graphs with bounded treewidth kk or bounded odd degeneracy kk. We show that neither of the easy upper and lower bounds k1k+1n\frac{k-1}{k+1}n and kk+2n\frac{k}{k+2}n can be exact for the case of even degeneracy. More precisely, for even degeneracy kk we prove that f0f 0, there exists a kk-degenerate graph for which f3k23k+4nϵf\geq \frac{3k-2}{3k+4}n -\epsilon. For directed graphs of bounded degeneracy kk, we prove that fk1k+1nf\leq\frac{k-1}{k+1}n and that this inequality is strict when kk is odd. For directed graphs of bounded treewidth k2k\geq 2, we show that fkk+3nf \leq \frac{k}{k+3}n and for every ϵ>0\epsilon>0, there exists a kk-degenerate graph for which fk2log2(k)k+1nϵf\geq \frac{k-2\lfloor\log_2(k)\rfloor}{k+1}n -\epsilon. Further, we provide several constructions of low degeneracy or treewidth and large ff.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

    Retractions Data Mining #1

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    Motivation: • Breaking barriers in publishing demands a proactive attitude • Open data, open review and open dialogue in making social sciences plausibl
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