366 research outputs found

    Maintaining stability while boosting growth? The long-term impact of environmental accreditations on firms’ financial risk and sales growth

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    202105 bchyAccepted ManuscriptRGCOthersRGC: 156050/17B,Others: National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant number 71525005, 71821002, and 71961137004Publishe

    Customer heterogeneity in operational e-service design attributes: n empirical investigation of service quality

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    Purpose – This study aims to empirically examine whether heterogeneity in personal customer profiles translates to heterogeneity in the valued operational e-service design attributes. It focuses on a key operational e-service design attribute – service quality – by investigating whether customers with different profiles (demographics, pattern of use of the service, and pattern of channel use) attach different levels of importance to different dimensions of web site quality. Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on path analysis of data collected from multiple sources in a commercial e-service setting (e-banking): data from an online survey of the customers of the e-service; data stored in the transaction and log files generated by the operation of the e-service over time; and data from the e-service provider’s customer database and back office IT systems. Findings – The results suggest that: customer demographics, pattern of service use, and pattern of channel use have no influence on the importance attached by customers to web site quality dimensions; and customer demographics affect the pattern of use of an e-service. Research limitations/implications – Future research should examine this question in other types of e-services and should examine other types of profile variables. Practical implications – Service providers may not need to employ customization at the level of web site quality dimensions. The findings support the existence of the concept of an “optimal” web site design for quality. Originality/value – The paper answers calls for an increased understanding of the design of high quality e-services and for multidisciplinary research in the field of services management, in particular, incorporating operations management perspectives

    The Growth of Dental Implant Literature from 1966 to 2016: A Bibliometric Analysis

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    This bibliometric book chapter overviewed the dental implant literature from 1966 to 2016 via the Web of Science database. Articles and reviews published by 2016 on the topic of dental implants were identified and analyzed in terms of their authors, affiliations, countries/territories of the affiliations, journal title and journal category. The performance indices of the 10 journals with the highest numbers of dental implant publications were extracted from Journal Citation Reports. A total of 14,335 articles or reviews were published in 1081 academic journals, with majority (10,487; 73.2%) in dental journals. With 317,263 total citations, each publication was cited 22.1 times on average. About 10 journals accounted for 47.0% of total publications, five dedicated to dental implants. Performance indices of journals publishing dental implant manuscripts have been stable over the last decade. Clinical Oral Implants Research was the best performing journal among them in 2016

    Antibody engineering for cancer therapy

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    Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Chemical Engineering, 2005.Vita.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-141).Antibodies targeting various tumor-associated antigens have been developed successfully to treat cancer. In this Thesis, novel antibodies and antibody-conjugate against two tumor antigens, AF-20 antigen and human aspartyl (asparaginyl) [beta]- hydroxylase (HAAH), were developed. Previously, these two tumor antigens have been shown to be present on a variety of tumor cells, while they have minimal expression on normal tissues, rendering them excellent targets for antibody therapy. For the AF-20 work, the variable region (V) gene of a previously isolated mouse monoclonal antibody (mAb) AF-20 was cloned from hybridoma mRNA and used to construct an AF-20 single-chain Fv (scFv). The AF-20 scFv was shown to bind specifically to the same epitope as mAb AF-20 with a binding affinity of 4nM. The AF- 20 scFv was also internalized into tumor cells in a manner identical to that of the original mAb AF-20. The scFv was later employed for cellular internalization of virus-sized fluorescent quantum dots. In addition, to demonstrate the versatility of this antibody, an immunotoxin composed of AF-20 scFv fused to the highly cytotoxic recombinant toxin gelonin was constructed, and its in-vitro efficacy against three different tumor cell lines were evaluated. The IC50 of the AF-20 scFv-gelonin fusion was consistently one to two logs lower than the IC50 of free gelonin on FOCUS (liver), L3.6pl (pancreas) and PC3 (prostate) cells, further demonstrating the capability of the AF-20 scFv as a targeting module. Therefore, this AF-20 scFv is a potential internalization vector for toxins, enzymes, radionuclides and virus for targeted therapy of AF-20-antigen expressing tumor cells.For the HAAH study, twelve novel human scFv against HAAH were isolated from a human non-immune scFv library displayed on the surface of yeast. Five of the twelve scFv were reformatted as human IgG 1. One of the reformatted IgG, 6-22, showed significant binding to recombinant HAAH protein in ELISA, tumor cell lines, and tumor tissues. 6-22 IgG was also shown to target the catalytic domain of HAAH, and its apparent dissociation constant was determined to be 1.OnM. 6-22 IgG alone does not exhibit significant cytotoxicity toward the tumor cells. However, 6-22 IgG internalizes into tumor cells and can therefore be employed to deliver cytotoxic moieties into tumor cells. A goat anti-human IgG-saporin conjugate was delivered into tumor cells by 6-22 IgG and hence elicited cytotoxicity toward the tumor cells in vitro. Meanwhile, the monovalent affinity of 6-22 scFv was too low for therapeutic or diagnostic application, so 6-22 scFv was affinity matured using directed evolution and yeast surface display. After two rounds of mutagenesis, a mutant, C4-18, with an affinity of 0.6nM was isolated. Overall, these human [gamma]-HAAH scFv and IgG can potentially be used in the diagnosis and therapeutic treatment of HAAH-expressing tumor cells.by Yik Andy Yeung.Ph.D

    The Impact of Industry 4.0 on Supply Chain Capability and Supply Chain Resilience: A Dynamic Resource-Based View

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    Industry 4.0, a collection of emerging intelligent and digital technologies, has been the main interest of both researchers and practitioners in operations management (OM) in recent years. Despite its proclaimed effectiveness in supply chain (SC) management, empirical studies examining the effects of Industry 4.0 adoption on SC resilience have been underrepresented in the current OM literature. In our study, we explore the effects of 16 Industry 4.0 technologies and IT advancement concerning SC resilience through the mediating roles of SC capabilities with respect to SC collaboration and SC visibility. Following the dynamic resource-based view (RBV), we regard Industry 4.0 adoption and IT advancement as two important IT resources with heterogeneity, SC collaboration and SC visibility as essential SC dynamic capabilities, and SC resilience as competitive advantages. We suggest the combination and evolution of IT resources and dynamic SC capabilities helps firms obtain the competitive advantage regarding SC resilience. Using data from a survey of 408 Chinese manufacturing firms, we reveal Industry 4.0 adoption is positively related to IT advancement and that Industry 4.0 has a nonsignificant impact on SC capabilities, whereas IT advancement has a positive impact on SC capabilities. Additionally, both SC collaboration and visibility positively influence SC resilience and significantly mediate the impacts of Industry 4.0 and IT advancement on SC resilience. Our study offers an enhanced understanding of the specific flows between Industry 4.0 and SC resilience and provides nuanced insights for both literature and practice

    Resveratrol, a popular dietary supplement for human and animal health: Quantitative research literature analysis - a review

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    Resveratrol is a stilbene-type bioactive molecule with a broad spectrum of reported biological effects. In this sense, the current work provides a comprehensive literature analysis on resveratrol, representing a highly-researched commercially available dietary ingredient. Bibliometric data were identified by means of the search string TOPIC=(“resveratrol*”) and analyzed with the VOSviewer software, which yielded 17,561 publications extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection electronic database. The ratio of original articles to reviews was 9.5:1. More than half of the overall manuscripts have been published since 2013. Major contributing countries were USA, China, Italy, South Korea, and Spain. Most of the publications appeared in journals specialized in biochemistry and molecular biology, pharmacology and pharmacy, food science technology, cell biology, or oncology. The phytochemicals or phytochemical classes that were frequently mentioned in the keywords of analyzed publications included, in descending order: resveratrol, trans-resveratrol, polyphenols, flavonoids, quercetin, stilbenes, curcumin, piceatannol, cis-resveratrol, and anthocyanins.Atanas G. Atanasov and Dongdong Wang acknowledge the support by the Polish KNOW (Leading National Research Centre) Scientific Consortium “Healthy Animal - Safe Food,” decision of Ministry of Science and Higher Education No. 05-1/KNOW2/2015 and the European Union under the European Regional Development Fund (Homing/2017-4/41). Antoni Sureda was supported by the Institute of Health Carlos III (Project CIBEROBN CB12/03/30038)

    The 100 Most Cited Papers Concerning the Insular Cortex of the Brain: A Bibliometric Analysis

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    Background: The insula is one of the most researched brain regions with many highly cited papers. However, unlike the literature of other fields, there is currently no study that has identified the 100 most cited papers within the literature of the insula. The aim of the current study was to fill in the knowledge gap by determining which publications concerning the insula have been cited most often, who contributed to them, and what topics they were dealing with.Methods: The Web of Science online database was searched to identify the 100 most cited publications mentioning the insular cortex in their titles, abstracts or keywords. To systematically exclude irrelevant publications, the search strategy was finalized as: TS = (insula OR insular OR “island of Reil”) NOT TS = (“insular biogeography” OR “insular mammal*” OR “*insular lymphatic*”) NOT WC = (“Geochemistry and Geophysics” OR “Ecology”). The identified publications were sorted in descending order of citation count. The 100 most cited publications concerning the insula of the brain were identified and their bibliometric data was extracted and assessed. The VOSviewer software was used with default parameters to generate a bubble map that analyzes and visualizes the words/phrases used in the titles and abstracts of the publications.Results: There were 67 articles on experiments/lab studies and 33 meta-analyses/reviews but no opinion or methods paper. They had an average of 943.4 citations (or 62.9 citations per year), 93.5 references and 13.4 pages. There were 35 papers published in open access. USA was the major contributing country. The most top-ranked publications were concerning emotion, salience and pain.Conclusion: Two-thirds of the publications concerned the normal brain function/mechanism (n = 67), whereas 20 publications concerned disease/therapeutic intervention and another 13 concerned normal anatomy. For the 67 original articles, 57 used human subjects whereas 10 used animal models. MRI was the commonest modality (n = 37), followed by PET (n = 16). Nine articles investigated by histology, two by multiple modalities and three by other modality
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