Medical theses as part of the scientific training in basic medical and dental education: experiences from Finland

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Teaching the principles of scientific research in a comprehensive way is important at medical and dental schools. In many countries medical and dental training is not complete until the candidate has presented a diploma thesis. The objective of this study was to evaluate the nature, quality, publication pattern and visibility of Finnish medical diploma theses.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A total of 256 diploma theses presented at the University of Oulu from 2001 to 2003 were analysed. Using a standardised questionnaire, we extracted several characteristics from each thesis. We used the name of the student to assess whether the thesis resulted in a scientific publication indexed in medical article databases. The number of citations received by each published thesis was also recorded.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A high proportion of the theses (69.5%) were essentially statistical in character, often combined with an extensive literature review or the development of a laboratory method. Most of them were supervised by clinical departments (55.9%). Only 61 theses (23.8%) had been published in indexed scientific journals. Theses in the fields of biomedicine and diagnostics were published in more widely cited journals. The median number of citations received per year was 2.7 and the range from 0 to 14.7.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The theses were seldom written according to the principles of scientific communication and the proportion of actually published was small. The visibility of these theses and their dissemination to the scientific community should be improved.</p

The impact of better access to scientific journals on the quality of research work

Linking a publication with scientific research results and the use of information resources is a key component of the collection - development and assessment of an academic library. Librarians often use quantitative data, but it is not easy to come by. Directly connecting library and information services to the impact they have can be quite difficult. Focusing on the 2010-2014 period, we have linked the quality and quantity of published papers to usage statistics for the newly acquired consortia access to scholarly journals in three international publisher databases: ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and WileyOnline. We found that the share of scholarly journals from the ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and WileyOnline consortia cited by University of Primorska researchers% of in their scholarly papers has gradually increased every year, ranging from 13.5% in 2010 up to 24.8% in 2014. The share of scholarly papers published by University of Primorska researchers% in scholarly journals with the highest impact (measured in Web of Science and Scopus) has also increased substantially, from 18.03% in 2011 to 31.55% in 2014. Study shows that better access to quality information resources for scientific researchers lead to an increase in its use and results in higher quality research shown by the gradual increase of publications of research results in higher impact scholarly journals

Map of science with topic modeling: Comparison of unsupervised learning and human‐assigned subject classification

The delineation of coordinates is fundamental for the cartography of science, and accurate and credible classification of scientific knowledge presents a persistent challenge in this regard. We present a map of Finnish science based on unsupervised-learning classification, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this approach vis-à-vis those generated by human reasoning. We conclude that from theoretical and practical perspectives there exist several challenges for human reasoning-based classification frameworks of scientific knowledge, as they typically try to fit new-to-the-world knowledge into historical models of scientific knowledge, and cannot easily be deployed for new large-scale data sets. Automated classification schemes, in contrast, generate classification models only from the available text corpus, thereby identifying credibly novel bodies of knowledge. They also lend themselves to versatile large-scale data analysis, and enable a range of Big Data possibilities. However, we also argue that it is neither possible nor fruitful to declare one or another method a superior approach in terms of realism to classify scientific knowledge, and we believe that the merits of each approach are dependent on the practical objectives of analysis

Bioaccumulation of Hg, Cd and Pb by Fucus vesiculosus in single and multi-metal contamination scenarios and its effect on growth rate

Results of 7-days exposure to metals, using environmentally realistic conditions, evidenced the high potential of living Fucus vesiculosus to remove Pb, Hg and Cd from contaminated salt waters. For different contamination scenarios (single- and multi-contamination), ca 450 mg L-1 (dry weight), enable to reduce the concentrations of Pb in 65%, of Hg in 95% and of Cd between 25 and 76%. Overall, bioconcentration factors ranged from 600 to 2300. Elovich kinetic model described very well the bioaccumulation of Pb and Cd over time, while pseudo-second-order model adjusted better to experimental data regarding Hg. F vesiculosus showed different affinity toward studied metals, following the sequence order: Hg >Pb>Cd. Analysis of metal content in the macroalgae after bioaccumulation, proved that all metal removed from solution was bound to the biomass. Depuration experiments reveled no significant loss of metal back to solution. Exposure to contaminants only adversely affected the organism's growth for the highest concentrations of Cd and Pb. Findings are an important contribute for the development of remediation biotechnologies for confined saline waters contaminated with trace metal contaminants, more efficient and with lower costs than the traditional treatment methods. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.University of Aveiro, FCT/MEC [UID/AMB/50017/2013, UID/CTM/50011/2013, UID/Multi/04423/2013, UID/BIA/04004/2013]Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through a FCT project [PTDC/MAR-BI0/3533/2012, SFRH/BPD/112576/2015, SFRH/BPD/99453/2014]FEDE