Benchmarking the research performance of United Arab Emirates with gulf cooperation council countries – A bibliometric study

The research performance of a country is an indicator of its scientific progress and benchmarking it with regional countries is critical to assess a country’s regional competitiveness. This study aims to assess and benchmark the research productivity of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) against other member nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), namely with Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, who have similar macroeconomic and socio-cultural characteristics. Scopus was used as the data source to extract the research output of each of the six countries studied for the period 1995–2019. Bibliometric indicators covering both quantity and impact of research such as publication output, citation, and collaboration indicators were used to assess the research performance of UAE and other GCC countries. The findings indicate good progress in the UAE’s overall research performance during the period of study. Also, UAE’s research performance in most of the bibliometric indicators is comparable or superior to the other GCC countries. This study is the first of its kind and addresses the dearth of bibliometric studies assessing UAE’s research productivity and GCC countries in general. The findings are useful for administrators and policymakers to benchmark the performance of the UAE with other GCC countries, including its impact, growth, and trajectories. For researchers, the study indicators and methods can be replicated to assess the overall research performance of other countries

Leveraging blockchain in medical tourism value chain

There are significant challenges facing the medical tourism industry: privacy and transparency concerns, lack of access to centralized medical records, fraudulent practices, opportunistic behavior of intermediaries, foreign currency risks, and contractual/legal issues. While blockchain technology has immense potential to address the industry’s inherent challenges and inefficiencies, the current understanding of blockchain application in medical tourism is fragmented. Through a pragmatic review of the literature, this study explores the blockchain applications and benefits for medical tourists across the stages of the medical tourism value chain, and in the process, proposes a meaningful and managerially relevant blockchain framework for medical tourism. The findings and the proposed novel framework to guide policy interventions and support mechanisms to take advantage of the full opportunities of blockchain in medical tourism

Examining the link between country-specific pull factors and international student mobility in the United Arab Emirates

Introduction To further grow Dubai and the United Arab Emirates as a higher education (HE) destination for international students, Visit Dubai (2020) collaborated with the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) to launch the Study Dubai campaign. The campaign highlights Dubai as a safe, dynamic, future-forward study destination that is pioneering innovation in a city of opportunities. The campaign is part of a strategy to position the UAE as a leading study destination to benefit from the increasing international student mobility, which has grown substantially from 2 million in 2000 to over 5.3 million in 2017 (UNESCO, 2019). While the traditional HE markets such as the US and UK have experienced recent slowdown, emerging transnational education hubs including Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and United Arab Emirates (UAE) have witnessed a surge. The number of international students in the UAE has increased from 48,653 in 2011 to 77,463 in 2016 (UNESCO, 2020) along with higher education institutions (HEIs) from 5 in 1990 to over 100, including several large international branch campuses (IBCs) in designated educational free zones (Ajayan and Balasubramanian, 2020). These HEIs, especially IBCs, largely cater to international students from over 165 countries. UAE has the highest inbound international student mobility ratio in the world among major HE destinations (UNESCO, 2020). Past studies have examined student motivation to study abroad (Nyaupane, Paris and Teye, 2010; 2011), travel behaviour at the study destination (Varasteh, Marzuki, and Rasoolimanesh, 2015), and country-specific pull factors motivating student destination choice including the culture of the host country, visa ease, cost of living, safety, employment prospects, and transportation connectivity (Ahmad and Buchanan, 2016; Wilkins et al., 2012). This research note explores the pull factors motivating international students to select UAE as their study destination

Molecular Simulation of MoS2 Exfoliation.

A wide variety of two-dimensional layered materials are synthesized by liquid-phase exfoliation. Here we examine exfoliation of MoS2 into nanosheets in a mixture of water and isopropanol (IPA) containing cavitation bubbles. Using force fields optimized with experimental data on interfacial energies between MoS2 and the solvent, multimillion-atom molecular dynamics simulations are performed in conjunction with experiments to examine shock-induced collapse of cavitation bubbles and the resulting exfoliation of MoS2. The collapse of cavitation bubbles generates high-speed nanojets and shock waves in the solvent. Large shear stresses due to the nanojet impact on MoS2 surfaces initiate exfoliation, and shock waves reflected from MoS2 surfaces enhance exfoliation. Structural correlations in the solvent indicate that shock induces an ice VII like motif in the first solvation shell of water

Second harmonic microscopy of monolayer MoS2

We show that the lack of inversion symmetry in monolayer MoS2 allows strong optical second harmonic generation. Second harmonic of an 810-nm pulse is generated in a mechanically exfoliated monolayer, with a nonlinear susceptibility on the order of 1E-7 m/V. The susceptibility reduces by a factor of seven in trilayers, and by about two orders of magnitude in even layers. A proof-of-principle second harmonic microscopy measurement is performed on samples grown by chemical vapor deposition, which illustrates potential applications of this effect in fast and non-invasive detection of crystalline orientation, thickness uniformity, layer stacking, and single-crystal domain size of atomically thin films of MoS2 and similar materials.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Local charge transfer doping in suspended graphene nanojunctions

We report electronic transport measurements in nanoscale graphene transistors with gold and platinum electrodes whose channel lengths are shorter than 100 nm, and compare them with transistors with channel lengths from 1 \textmu{}m to 50 \textmu{}m. We find a large positive gate voltage shift in charge neutrality point (NP) for transistors made with platinum electrodes but negligible shift for devices made with gold electrodes. This is consistent with the transfer of electrons from graphene into the platinum electrodes. As the channel length increases, the disparity between the measured NP using gold and platinum electrodes disappears.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Appl. Phys. Let

Intrinsic carrier mobility of multi-layered MoS2_2 field-effect transistors on SiO2_2

By fabricating and characterizing multi-layered MoS$_2$-based field-effect transistors (FETs) in a four terminal configuration, we demonstrate that the two terminal-configurations tend to underestimate the carrier mobility $\mu$ due to the Schottky barriers at the contacts. For a back-gated two-terminal configuration we observe mobilities as high as 125 cm$^2$V$^{-1}$s$^{-1}$ which is considerably smaller than 306.5 cm$^2$V$^{-1}$s$^{-1}$ as extracted from the same device when using a four-terminal configuration. This indicates that the intrinsic mobility of MoS$_2$ on SiO$_2$ is significantly larger than the values previously reported, and provides a quantitative method to evaluate the charge transport through the contacts.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, typos fixed, and references update