Open bibliographic data and the Italian National Scientific Qualification: measuring coverage of academic fields

The importance of open bibliographic repositories is widely accepted by the scientific community. For evaluation processes, however, there is still some skepticism: even if large repositories of open access articles and free publication indexes exist and are continuously growing, assessment procedures still rely on proprietary databases, mainly due to the richness of the data available in these proprietary databases and the services provided by the companies they are offered by. This paper investigates the status of open bibliographic data of three of the most used open resources, namely Microsoft Academic Graph, Crossref and OpenAIRE, evaluating their potentialities as substitutes of proprietary databases for academic evaluation processes. We focused on the Italian National Scientific Qualification (NSQ), the Italian process for University Professor qualification, which uses data from commercial indexes, and investigated similarities and differences between research areas, disciplines and application roles. The main conclusion is that open datasets are ready to be used for some disciplines, among which mathematics, natural sciences, economics and statistics, even if there is still room for improvement; but there is still a large gap to fill in others - like history, philosophy, pedagogy and psychology - and a stronger effort is required from researchers and institutions

Do open citations inform the qualitative peer-review evaluation in research assessments? An analysis of the Italian National Scientific Qualification

In the past, several works have investigated ways for combining quantitative and qualitative methods in research assessment exercises. Indeed, the Italian National Scientific Qualification (NSQ), i.e. the national assessment exercise which aims at deciding whether a scholar can apply to professorial academic positions as Associate Professor and Full Professor, adopts a quantitative and qualitative evaluation process: it makes use of bibliometrics followed by a peer-review process of candidates' CVs. The NSQ divides academic disciplines into two categories, i.e. citation-based disciplines (CDs) and non-citation-based disciplines (NDs), a division that affects the metrics used for assessing the candidates of that discipline in the first part of the process, which is based on bibliometrics. In this work, we aim at exploring whether citation-based metrics, calculated only considering open bibliographic and citation data, can support the human peer-review of NDs and yield insights on how it is conducted. To understand if and what citation-based (and, possibly, other) metrics provide relevant information, we created a series of machine learning models to replicate the decisions of the NSQ committees. As one of the main outcomes of our study, we noticed that the strength of the citational relationship between the candidate and the commission in charge of assessing his/her CV seems to play a role in the peer-review phase of the NSQ of NDs

It ROCS! The RASH Online Conversion Service

In this poster paper we introduce the RASH Online Conversion Service, i.e., a Web application that allows the conversion of ODT documents into RASH, a HTML-based markup language for writing scholarly articles, and from RASH into LaTeX according to Springer LNCS and ACM ICPS

Food Pyramid for Subjects with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases

Nutritional problems are an important part of rehabilitation for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. COPD patients often present with malnutrition, sarcopenia, and osteoporosis with possible onset of cachexia, with an inadequate dietary intake and a poor quality of life. Moreover, diet plays a pivotal role in patients with COPD through three mechanisms: regulation of carbon dioxide produced/oxygen consumed, inflammation, and oxidative stress. A narrative review based on 99 eligible studies was performed to evaluate current evidence regarding optimum diet therapy for the management of COPD, and then a food pyramid was built accordingly. The food pyramid proposal will serve to guide energy and dietary intake in order to prevent and treat nutritionally related COPD complications and to manage progression and COPD-related symptoms. The nutrition pyramid described in our narrative review is hypothetical, even in light of several limitations of the present review; the main limitation is the fact that to date there are no randomized controlled trials in the literature clearly showing that improved nutrition, via the regulation of carbon dioxide produced/oxygen consumed, inflammation and oxidative stress, improves symptoms and/or progression of COPD. Even if this nutritional pyramid is hypothetical, we hope that it can serve the valuable purpose of helping researchers focus on the often-ignored possible connections between body composition, nutrition, and COPD

Sirtuin 6 localization at cortical brain level of young diabetic mice

The metabolic syndrome, characterized by visceral obesity, dyslipidaemia, hyperglycaemia and hypertension, has become one of the major public-health challenges worldwide and it is strictly associated with the development of type II diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases (Alberti et al. 2005; Panza et al. 2010). Increased metabolic flux to the brain during overnutrition can orchestrate stress response, blood-brain barrier alteration, microglial cells activation and neuroinflammation (Nerurkar et al., 2011). The protein sirtuin family is a class of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+)-dependent histone deacetylase that act on a variety of targets and so play a key role in central physiological regulation (Sebastian et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2012). To assess the physiopathological significance of sirtuin6 (SIRT6) at brain cortical level, we analysed its specific expression and subcellular localization in young db/db mice, animal model of type II diabetes mellitus, and respective control lean mice. In particular, we analysed the cytoarchitecture of the brain cortex, evaluated SIRT6 expression and its localization by immunohistochemistry comparing young db/db mice to lean control mice, distinguishing among the six cortical layers and between motor and somatosensory cortex. We observed that SIRT6 is mainly localized in the nucleus of both lean and db/db mice. Diabetic mice showed few SIRT6 positive cells respect to lean control mice in all cortical layers without significant differences between motor and somatosensory cortex. No morphological alteration have been find. In conclusion, our findings contribute to further understand SIRT6 protein expression in the early steps of type II diabetes mellitus and suggest its implication in the pathogenic processes of diabetes mellitus and diabetes–induced neurodegeneration

Sirtuin 6 localization at cortical brain level of young diabetic mice

The metabolic syndrome, characterized by visceral obesity, dyslipidaemia, hyperglycaemia and hypertension, has become one of the major public-health challenges worldwide and it is strictly associated with the development of type II diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases (Alberti et al. 2005; Panza et al. 2010). Increased metabolic flux to the brain during overnutrition can orchestrate stress response, blood-brain barrier alteration, microglial cells activation and neuroinflammation (Nerurkar et al., 2011). The protein sirtuin family is a class of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+)-dependent histone deacetylase that act on a variety of targets and so play a key role in central physiological regulation (Sebastian et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2012). To assess the physiopathological significance of sirtuin6 (SIRT6) at brain cortical level, we analysed its specific expression and subcellular localization in young db/db mice, animal model of type II diabetes mellitus, and respective control lean mice. In particular, we analysed the cytoarchitecture of the brain cortex, evaluated SIRT6 expression and its localization by immunohistochemistry comparing young db/db mice to lean control mice, distinguishing among the six cortical layers and between motor and somatosensory cortex. We observed that SIRT6 is mainly localized in the nucleus of both lean and db/db mice. Diabetic mice showed few SIRT6 positive cells respect to lean control mice in all cortical layers without significant differences between motor and somatosensory cortex. No morphological alteration have been find. In conclusion, our findings contribute to further understand SIRT6 protein expression in the early steps of type II diabetes mellitus and suggest its implication in the pathogenic processes of diabetes mellitus and diabetes–induced neurodegeneration

Collaborative Practices and Multidisciplinary Research : The Dialogue Between Entrepreneurship, Management, and Data Science

Author's accepted version (post-print).Available from 06/06/2020.acceptedVersio

A Vision for User-Defined Semantic Markup

Typesetting systems, such as LaTeX, permit users to define custom markup and corresponding formatting to simplify authoring, ensure the consistent presentation of domain-specific recurring elements and, potentially, enable further processing, such as the generation of an index of such elements. In XML-based and similar systems, the separation of content and form is also reflected in the processing pipeline: while document authors can define custom markup, they cannot define its semantics. This could be said to be intentional to ensure structural integrity of documents, but at the same time it limits the expressivity of markup. The latter is particularly true for so-called lightweight markup languages like Markdown, which only define very limited sets of generic elements. This vision paper sketches an approach for user-defined semantic markup that could permit authors to define the semantics of elements by formally describing the relations between its constituent parts and to other elements, and to define a formatting intent that would ensure that a default presentation is always available