Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility in the Perspective of Social Economy Entities: A Bibliometric Study

We start from the conceptual interconnection between Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility, which, although continuously subject to controversy, both within the scope of its definition and in its performance, advocate, as the ultimate goal, human development and of the society in general, promoting the interests of the Communities on a permanent, long-term basis and without compromising the options of the future generations. In this context, we cannot fail to draw a parallel with the entities that constitute the Social Economy Sector. The activities they carry out are of economic and social nature and must be pursued in the general interest of their members, users and beneficiaries, thus in the general interest of the Community. These institutions also reveal concerns about the sustainability in all the dimensions involved (economic, social and environmental), in which the organizational performance is particularly important, as it becomes imperative to guarantee their continuity, fostering and promoting their social action. We will, therefore, start by framing what is meant by Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Economy, with a particular focus on the current requirements of stakeholders regarding the socially responsible behaviour of the institutions as these, in turn, will entail the adoption of more comprehensive management tools, also more efficient and transparent concerning all dimensions (economic, financial and social). It is within this framework that a project called “TFA—TheoFrameAccountability—Theoretical framework for the promotion of accountability in the social economy sector: The IPSS case” emerges, being promoted by the University of Aveiro, with the participation of National Confederation of Solidarity Institutions (CNIS—acronym in Portuguese), and the Polytechnic Institutes of Coimbra and Porto. This project aims to promote the accountability of the social economy sector (economic, financial and social aspects), in the Private Social Solidarity Institutions (IPSS—acronym in Portuguese), assisting them not only in fulfilling their legal obligations, but also facilitating the reporting of results of activities carried out in a more effective manner and promoting transfer of knowledge (for the IPSS and also for the academic community), thus contributing to the development and sustainability of these institutions. Thus, we develop an exploratory and descriptive analysis, of a quantitative-qualitative nature, in which the procedures of data collection determine the result of the search strategy by the defined descriptors. For this purpose, the analysis will focus on the following variables: number of articles published per year; methodologies used; theories of support; identification by sector/area of activity; countries of origin; more representative institutions; authors who publish more and journals with the largest number of publications. The main results indicate a growing concern about sustainability and a growing publication in this area. This paper presents a bibliometric study to evaluate the main trends of current research on sustainability and on corporate social responsibility, thus contributing to the construction of the theoretical basis underlying the “TFA—TheoFrameAccountability” project.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Brazilian obstetrician-gynecologists and abortion: a survey of knowledge, opinions and practices

BACKGROUND: Abortion laws are extremely restrictive in Brazil. The knowledge, opinions of abortion laws, and abortion practices of obstetrician-gynecologists can have a significant impact on women's access to safe abortion. METHODS: We conducted a mail-in survey with a 10% random sample of obstetrician-gynecologists affiliated with the Brazilian Federation of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. We documented participants' experiences performing abortion under a range of legal and illegal circumstances, and asked about which abortion techniques they had experience with. We used chi-square tests and crude logistic regression models to determine which sociodemographic, knowledge-related, or practice-related variables were associated with physician opinion. RESULTS: Of the 1,500 questionnaires that we mailed out, we received responses from 572 (38%). Less than half (48%) of the respondents reported accurate knowledge about abortion law and 77% thought that the law should be more liberal. One-third of respondents reported having previous experience performing an abortion, and very few of these physicians reported having experience with manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) or with misoprostol with either mifepristone or methotrexate. Physicians that favored liberalization of the law were more likely to have correct knowledge about abortion law, and to be in favor of public funding for abortion services. CONCLUSION: Brazilian obstetrician-gynecologists need more information on abortion laws and on safe, effective abortion procedures

Cutoff Scanning Matrix (CSM): structural classification and function prediction by protein inter-residue distance patterns

BACKGROUND: The unforgiving pace of growth of available biological data has increased the demand for efficient and scalable paradigms, models and methodologies for automatic annotation. In this paper, we present a novel structure-based protein function prediction and structural classification method: Cutoff Scanning Matrix (CSM). CSM generates feature vectors that represent distance patterns between protein residues. These feature vectors are then used as evidence for classification. Singular value decomposition is used as a preprocessing step to reduce dimensionality and noise. The aspect of protein function considered in the present work is enzyme activity. A series of experiments was performed on datasets based on Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers and mechanistically different enzyme superfamilies as well as other datasets derived from SCOP release 1.75. RESULTS: CSM was able to achieve a precision of up to 99% after SVD preprocessing for a database derived from manually curated protein superfamilies and up to 95% for a dataset of the 950 most-populated EC numbers. Moreover, we conducted experiments to verify our ability to assign SCOP class, superfamily, family and fold to protein domains. An experiment using the whole set of domains found in last SCOP version yielded high levels of precision and recall (up to 95%). Finally, we compared our structural classification results with those in the literature to place this work into context. Our method was capable of significantly improving the recall of a previous study while preserving a compatible precision level. CONCLUSIONS: We showed that the patterns derived from CSMs could effectively be used to predict protein function and thus help with automatic function annotation. We also demonstrated that our method is effective in structural classification tasks. These facts reinforce the idea that the pattern of inter-residue distances is an important component of family structural signatures. Furthermore, singular value decomposition provided a consistent increase in precision and recall, which makes it an important preprocessing step when dealing with noisy data