Un retardement de l'entrée dans la toxicomanie

A partir d'un échantillon important d'usagers de drogues injectables interviewés dans cinq villes de France, nous avons délimité quatre générations en fonction de la date de la pre mière injection. Bien que les groupes ainsi créés ne puissent être considérés comme des cohortes, on constate une évolution très marquée des caractéristiques de ces diverses générat ionsde toxicomanes. L'âge à la première injection s'est élevé de 19 ans pour les générations anciennes à plus de 22 ans pour les générations récentes et parallèlement on a constaté une diminution de la proportion des toxicomanes dont les parents appartiennent aux strates aisées de la population. Ce vieillissement et cette prolétarisation de ceux qui commencent à s'injecter dans les années 1990 suggère que la toxicomanie loin d'être une dérive existentielle de jeunes en mal d'idéal ou de projet est l'issue de parcours marqués par l'échec et le chô mage; elle intervient souvent après l'engagement d'une «carrière» délinquante plutôt qu'à sa source

Detection and characterization of translational research in cancer and cardiovascular medicine

Background Scientists and experts in science policy have become increasingly interested in strengthening translational research. Efforts to understand the nature of translational research and monitor policy interventions face an obstacle: how can translational research be defined in order to facilitate analysis of it? We describe methods of scientometric analysis that can do this. Methods We downloaded bibliographic and citation data from all articles published in 2009 in the 75 leading journals in cancer and in cardiovascular medicine (roughly 15,000 articles for each field). We calculated citation relationships between journals and between articles and we extracted the most prevalent natural language concepts. Results Network analysis and mapping revealed polarization between basic and clinical research, but with translational links between these poles. The structure of the translational research in cancer and cardiac medicine is, however, quite different. In the cancer literature the translational interface is composed of different techniques (e.g., gene expression analysis) that are used across the various subspecialties (e.g., specific tumor types) within cancer research and medicine. In the cardiac literature, the clinical problems are more disparate (i.e., from congenital anomalies to coronary artery disease); although no distinctive translational interface links these fields, translational research does occur in certain subdomains, especially in research on atherosclerosis and hypertension. Conclusions These techniques can be used to monitor the continuing evolution of translational research in medicine and the impact of interventions designed to enhance it.Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF Investigator Award in Health Policy Research)Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC SE-124896)Canadian Institutes of Health Research (MOP-93553)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (SBE-0965259

Data search strategy for science and technology emergence: A scalable and evolutionary query for nanotechnology tracking

International audienceNanotechnology, like other emerging technologies that increasingly characterize the dynamic of our era, makes specific demands on datamining to track and interpret efficiently what is happening, through publications and other scientific output. We here propose and describe a strategy based on an automated lexical modular methodology to overcome rapidly evolving content and classification problems, which may otherwise accommodate poor quality of data and expert bias, with potential dire consequences for interpretation, decision and strategy. The proposed methodology is based on an initial nanostring enriched and screened by eight subfields, automatically identified and defined through the journal inter-citation network density displayed in the initial core nanodataset. Relevant keywords linked to each subfield are then tested for their specificity and relevance before being sequentially incorporated to build a modular query. We then, as a first test, compare the database constructed using this methodology for years 2003 and 2005 with those obtained by other approaches previously used to cover and explore the nanotechnology dynamic. Finally, using the inherent transparency, portablity and replicability of our methodology, we offer, in order to help our initial query evolve and develop, a set of evaluation processes for tests by researchers in the nano field, other scientometric teams and intelligence experts involved in decision-making processes

Biomedical innovation at the laboratory, clinical and commercial interface: A new method for mapping research projects, publications and patents in the field of microarrays: Using the example of microarrays, one of the constitutive technologies of post-genomic biomedicine, this paper introduces a method for analyzing publications, patents and research grants as proxies for "triple-helix interfaces" between university, industry and government activities. Our method creates bridges that allow one to move seamlessly between publication, patent and research project databases that use different fields and formats, and contain different information. These links do not require pre-defined categories in order to search for correspondences between sub-topics or research areas in the three databases. Finally, our results are not restricted to quantitative information but, rather, allow one to carry out qualitative investigations of the content of research activities. Our approach draws on a combination of text-mining and network analysis/mapping software packages.

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Textual analysis and scientometric mapping of the dynamic knowledge in and around the IFSA community

International audienceUsing the proceedings of six European IFSA Symposia, we analyse the themes that were central in these Symposia as well as trends in number of papers and authors. We then assess the wider domain of agricultural research based on a corpus extracted from the CAB and SCI databases of the Web of Knowledge. The co-word analysis allows generating maps which graphically represent how key-words are linked, and allows identifying thematic clusters. The dynamic of key-words in the period 1991-2007 is also analysed, thus allowing to identifying which keywords were of central importance during which period. It shows how themes such as sustainability emerge, disappear and re-emerge under a different guise. The various analyses are provided to further the reflexivity of the IFSA community, especially regarding its publication practices and thus its efforts to make results from Farming Systems Research widely available

Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories

Abstract Imaginary worlds are present and often central in many of the most culturally successful modern narrative fictions, be it in novels (e.g., Harry Potter), movies (e.g., Star Wars), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda), graphic novels (e.g., One Piece) and TV series (e.g., Game of Thrones). We propose that imaginary worlds are popular because they activate exploratory preferences that evolved to help us navigate the real world and find new fitness-relevant information. Therefore, we hypothesize that the attraction to imaginary worlds is intrinsically linked to the desire to explore novel environments and that both are influenced by the same underlying factors. Notably, the inter-individual and cross-cultural variability of the preference for imaginary worlds should follow the inter-individual and cross-cultural variability of exploratory preferences (with the personality trait Openness-to-experience, age, sex, and ecological conditions). We test these predictions with both experimental and computational methods. For experimental tests, we run a pre-registered online experiment about movie preferences (N = 230). For computational tests, we leverage two large cultural datasets, namely the Internet Movie Database (N = 9424 movies) and the Movie Personality Dataset (N = 3.5 million participants), and use machine-learning algorithms (i.e., random forest and topic modeling). In all, consistent with how the human preference for spatial exploration adaptively varies, we provide empirical evidence that imaginary worlds appeal more to more explorative people, people higher in Openness-to-experience, younger individuals, males, and individuals living in more affluent environments. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the cultural evolution of narrative fiction and, more broadly, the evolution of human exploratory preferences

The emergence and development of gene expression profiling: a key component of the 3B (bench, bedside, bytes) in translational research

National audienceThe emergence and development of gene expression profiling: a key component of the 3B (bench, bedside, bytes) in translational research This paper examines the emergence and development of one of the key components of genomics, namely gene expression profiling. It does so by resorting to computer-based methods to analyze and visualize networks of scientific publications. Our results show the central role played by oncology in this domain, insofar as the initial proof-of-principle articles based on a plant model organism have quickly led to the demonstration of the value of these techniques in blood cancers and to applications in the field of solid tumors, and in particular breast cancer. The article also outlines the essential role played by novel bioinformatics and biostatistical tools in the development of the domain. These computational disciplines thus qualify as one of the three corners (in addition to the laboratory and the clinic) of the translational research triangle

Les réseaux de l’expression génique :Émergence et développement d’un domaine clé de la génomique

International audienceThis paper examines the emergence and development of one of the key components of genomics, namely gene expression profiling. It does so by resorting to computer-based methods to analyze and visualize networks of scientific publications. Our results show the central role played by oncology in this domain, insofar as the initial proof-of-principle articles based on a plant model organism have quickly led to the demonstration of the value of these techniques in blood cancers and to applications in the field of solid tumors, and in particular breast cancer. The article also outlines the essential role played by novel bioinformatics and biostatistical tools in the development of the domain. These computational disciplines thus qualify as one of the three corners (in addition to the laboratory and the clinic) of the translational research triangle.Cet article analyse l’émergence et le développement d’un des domaines clés de la génomique, celui de l’expression génique (gene expression profiling), en utilisant des méthodes d’analyse informatisée et de cartographie du contenu des publications scientifiques. Les résultats de cette analyse détaillent le rôle central joué par l’oncologie dans le développement de ce domaine de recherche. Des démonstrations de principe utilisant un organisme modèle végétal ont rapidement débouché sur des preuves de l’utilité de cette approche dans le cas des hémopathies malignes et des applications dans le domaine des tumeurs solides, notamment les cancers du sein. L’étude met également en relief l’importance de la bioinformatique et des biostatistiques comme conditions de possibilité de ce type de recherches, qui s’imposent dès lors comme le troisième pôle, en plus du laboratoire et de la clinique, du triangle de la recherche translationnelle