Analyzing scientific mobility and collaboration in the Middle East and North Africa

Merit, Expertise and Measuremen

Standing in a Garden of Forking Paths

According to the Path Principle, it is permissible to expand your set of beliefs iff (and because) the evidence you possess provides adequate support for such beliefs. If there is no path from here to there, you cannot add a belief to your belief set. If some thinker with the same type of evidential support has a path that they can take, so do you. The paths exist because of the evidence you possess and the support it provides. Evidential support grounds propositional justification. The principle is mistaken. There are permissible steps you may take that others may not even if you have the very same evidence. There are permissible steps that you cannot take that others can even if your beliefs receive the same type of evidential support. Because we have to assume almost nothing about the nature of evidential support to establish these results, we should reject evidentialism

Mapping the field of physical therapy and identification of the leading active producers: a bibliometric analysis of the period 2000-2018

Objectives The objectives of the study were: 1) Describe the thematic structure and evolution of the field of physical therapy; 2) identify the main research producers (i.e. countries and institutions); and 3) compare their research output and citation impact. Methods Papers related to physical therapy indexed in Web of Science (2000-2018) were identified to delineate the field, using keywords, journals, and citation networks. VOSviewer software, advanced bibliometric text mining, and visualization techniques were used to evaluate the thematic structure. We collected data about the country and institutional affiliation of all the authors and calculated production and citation impact indicators. Results 85,697 papers were analyzed. Eleven thematic clusters were identified: 1) "health care and education"; 2) "biomechanics"; 3) "psychosocial, chronic pain and quality of life outcomes"; 4) "evidence-based physical therapy research methods"; 5) "traumatology and orthopedics"; 6) "neurological rehabilitation"; 7) "psychometrics and cross-cultural adaptation"; 8) "gait-balance analysis and Parkinson's disease"; 9) "exercise"; 10) "respiratory physical therapy"; and 11) "back pain." The United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia were the most productive countries. Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden had the highest citation impact. Conclusions Our bibliometric visualization approach makes it possible to comprehensively study the thematic structure of physical therapy. The ranking of producers has evolved and now includes China and Brazil. High research production does not imply a high citation impact.Merit, Expertise and Measuremen

Evolution of the thematic structure and main producers of physical therapy interventions research: a bibliometric analysis (1986 to 2017)

Background: Bibliometric studies are used to analyse and map scientific areas, and study the sci-entific output and impact of institutes and countries. Objectives: Describe the thematic structure and evolution of the field of physical therapy inter-ventions using articles indexed in Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro). Also, identify and compare the main producers (countries, institutions) over time (research output, citation impact). Methods: Eligible articles were those indexed in PEDro (1986-2017) and matched to Web of Sci-ence. VOSviewer software, bibliometric text mining, and visualisation techniques were used to evaluate the thematic structure of the included articles. We collected data about authors' coun-try and institutional affiliation, and calculated bibliometric indicators (production, citation impact). Results: A total of 29 090 articles were analysed. Eight topics were identified: "neurological rehabilitation"; "methods"; "exercise for prevention and rehabilitation of lifestyle diseases"; "assessment and treatment of musculoskeletal pain"; "physical activity", "health promotion and behaviour change"; "respiratory physical therapy"; "hospital, primary care and health eco-nomics"; "cancer and complementary therapies". The most productive countries were United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The most impactful countries were United States, France, Finland, and Canada. The most productive institutions were University of Sydney, VU University of Amsterdam, University of Queensland, and University of Toronto. Conclusions: The thematic structure of physical therapy interventions has evolved over time with "neurological rehabilitation", "methods", "exercise related to lifestyle diseases", and "physical activity" becoming increasingly important. Main producers of this research were tradi-tionally located in North America and Europe but now include countries like China and Brazil. Merit, Expertise and Measuremen

a transparent plastic varnish with nanoparticulate magnetic additives

For the purpose of preparing TCCs (= transparent and electrical conducting coatings), metallic and ferromagnetic nano-additives were dispersed into a transparent varnish and the obtained dispersions were coated on transparent plastic substrates. During hardening of the dispersion the magnetic nano- additives were aligned by a magnetic field. The resulting coatings have electrical pathways along lines of nano-additive chains and are highly transparent in the areas between the lines. Therefore, the electrical conductivity is anisotropic, and it depends on the alignment of the nano- additives (i.e. on the distance between the nano-additives within the chains and the length of the lines) as well as on the thickness of an oxide and/or solvent shell around the nano-additives. The transparency depends also on the alignment and here especially on the thickness and the distance between the formed lines. The quality of the alignment in turn, depends on the magnetic properties and on the size of the particles. We used commercial plastic varnishes, which form electrically isolating (≥ 10− 12 S/m) and transparent (about 90% transparency) coatings, and the following magnetic additives: Co-, Fe-, CoPt3, CoPt3@Au- and Fe@Au-nanoparticles as well as CoNi-nanowires. Coatings with Fe@Au-nanoparticles show the best results in terms of the electrical conductivity (10− 5 S/m–10− 6 S/m) at transparencies above 70%. Furthermore, in addition to the magnetic nano-additives, transparent additives (Al2O3-particles) and non-magnetic, but better conducting additives (carbon- nanotubes) were added to the varnish to increase the transparency and the electrical conductivity, respectively

Geographic and seasonal patterns and limits on the adaptive response to temperature of European Mytilus spp. and Macoma balthica populations

Seasonal variations in seawater temperature require extensive metabolic acclimatization in cold-blooded organisms inhabiting the coastal waters of Europe. Given the energetic costs of acclimatization, differences in adaptive capacity to climatic conditions are to be expected among distinct populations of species that are distributed over a wide geographic range. We studied seasonal variations in the metabolic adjustments of two very common bivalve taxa at European scale. To this end we sampled 16 populations of Mytilus spp. and 10 Macoma balthica populations distributed from 39° to 69°N. The results from this large-scale comprehensive comparison demonstrated seasonal cycles in metabolic rates which were maximized during winter and springtime, and often reduced in the summer and autumn. Studying the sensitivity of metabolic rates to thermal variations, we found that a broad range of Q10 values occurred under relatively cold conditions. As habitat temperatures increased the range of Q10 narrowed, reaching a bottleneck in southern marginal populations during summer. For Mytilus spp., genetic-group-specific clines and limits on Q10 values were observed at temperatures corresponding to the maximum climatic conditions these geographic populations presently experience. Such specific limitations indicate differential thermal adaptation among these divergent groups. They may explain currently observed migrations in mussel distributions and invasions. Our results provide a practical framework for the thermal ecophysiology of bivalves, the assessment of environmental changes due to climate change and its impact on (and consequences for) aquaculture

Communities of shared interests and cognitive bridges: the case of the anti-vaccination movement on Twitter

This paper presents an analysis of the anti-vaccination movement’s referencing of research articles on the topic of vaccination in the social media network Twitter. Drawing on the concept of bibliographic coupling, the paper demonstrates how Twitter users can be coupled based on articles mentioned on Twitter. The sample applied consists of 113 open access journal articles. The combination of tweeter coupling with the respective stance of Twitter accounts vis-à-vis vaccination makes possible the creation of a network graph of tweeters mentioning this corpus of articles. In addition to a common interest in the scientific literature, the findings show distinct communities of shared interests within the anti-vaccination movement, and demonstrate that tweeter coupling can be used to map these distinctive interests. The emergence of Twitter accounts serving as cognitive bridges within and between communities is noted and discussed with regard to their relative positions in the network. This paper’s results extend the knowledge on the application of altmetric data to study the interests of non-scientific publics in science; more specifically, it adds to the understanding of the potentials of open science and science–society interactions arising from increased access by non-scientists to scientific publications.</p