An assessment of the coverage of non-communicable disease research reported in British and Irish newspapers, 2002-13

Background: The reporting of medical research in the mass media is often the only way for the general public to learn about it, as most people do not read, nor have access to, scientific papers. Aims: We wished to map non-communicable disease (NCDs) research stories in two UK newspapers, the Daily Mail and The Guardian, and an Irish newspaper, the Irish Times, in 2002–13. Methodology: We identified relevant stories by means of the Factiva database, and obtained details of the cited research papers from the Web of Science. We compared coverage of research on five NCDs with the disease burden, and with the amount of research, in the two countries. We also analysed the sex distribution of the journalists, the researchers whose work was cited and any commentators mentioned in the stories. Results: There were 3921 stories in total (1990 in the Daily Mail, 1127 in the Irish Times, and 804 in The Guardian). Cancer and mental health disorders research attracted most attention. The other NCDs were cardiovascular disease & stroke, diabetes, and respiratory diseases. The stories tended to focus on epidemiological research, and means to reduce the risk of disease, rather than treatment. Both countries over-cited their own research, particularly Ireland. Conclusions: Coverage of the five NCDs tended to mirror the amounts and changes in the disease burden, both in time and between the two countries, notably for dementia and depression. Male researchers and commentators received more attention than females, and so reinforced existing gender stereotypes

European non-communicable respiratory disease research, 2002-13: Bibliometric study of outputs and funding

©2016 Begum et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This study was conducted in order to map European research in chronic respiratory diseases (CRDs). It was intended to assist the European Commission and other research funders to identify gaps and overlaps in their portfolios, and to suggest ways in which they could improve the effectiveness of their support and increase the impact of the research on patient care and on the reduction of the incidence of the CRDs. Articles and reviews were identified in the Web of Science on research in six non-communicable respiratory diseases that were published in 2002-13 from 31 European countries. They represented only 0.8% of biomedical research output but these diseases accounted for 4.7% of the European disease burden, as measured by Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), so the sub-field is seriously under-researched. Europe is prominent in the sub-field and published 56% of the world total, with the UK the most productive and publishing more than France and Italy, the next two countries, combined. Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) were the diseases with the most publications and the highest citation rates. They also received the most funding, with around two acknowledgments per paper (in 2009-13), whereas cystic fibrosis and emphysema averaged only one. Just over 37% of papers had no specific funding and depended on institutional support from universities and hospitals

Fisheries Bycatch Risk to Marine Megafauna Is Intensified in Lagrangian Coherent Structures

Incidental catch of nontarget species (bycatch) is a major barrier to ecological and economic sustainability in marine capture fisheries. Key to mitigating bycatch is an understanding of the habitat requirements of target and nontarget species and the influence of heterogeneity and variability in the dynamic marine environment. While patterns of overlap among marine capture fisheries and habitats of a taxonomically diverse range of marine vertebrates have been reported, a mechanistic understanding of the real-time physical drivers of bycatch events is lacking. Moving from describing patterns toward understanding processes, we apply a Lagrangian analysis to a high-resolution ocean model output to elucidate the fundamental mechanisms that drive fisheries interactions. We find that the likelihood of marine megafauna bycatch is intensified in attracting Lagrangian coherent structures associated with submesoscale and mesoscale filaments, fronts, and eddies. These results highlight how the real-time tracking of dynamic structures in the oceans can support fisheries sustainability and advance ecosystem-based managemen

Scholarly communication in transition: The use of question marks in the titles of scientific articles in medicine, life sciences and physics 1966–2005

The titles of scientific articles have a special significance. We examined nearly 20 million scientific articles and recorded the development of articles with a question mark at the end of their titles over the last 40 years. Our study was confined to the disciplines of physics, life sciences and medicine, where we found a significant increase from 50% to more than 200% in the number of articles with question-mark titles. We looked at the principle functions and structure of the titles of scientific papers, and we assume that marketing aspects are one of the decisive factors behind the growing usage of question-mark titles in scientific articles

Foraging in marine habitats increases mercury concentrations in a generalist seabird

Methylmercury concentrations vary widely across geographic space and among habitat types, with marine and aquatic-feeding organisms typically exhibiting higher mercury concentrations than terrestrial-feeding organisms. However, there are few model organisms to directly compare mercury concentrations as a result of foraging in marine, estuarine, or terrestrial food webs. The ecological impacts of differential foraging may be especially important for generalist species that exhibit high plasticity in foraging habitats, locations, or diet. Here, we investigate whether foraging habitat, sex, or fidelity to a foraging area impact blood mercury concentrations in western gulls (Larus occidentalis) from three colonies on the US west coast. Cluster analyses showed that nearly 70% of western gulls foraged primarily in ocean or coastal habitats, whereas the remaining gulls foraged in terrestrial and freshwater habitats. Gulls that foraged in ocean or coastal habitats for half or more of their foraging locations had 55% higher mercury concentrations than gulls that forage in freshwater and terrestrial habitats. Ocean-foraging gulls also had lower fidelity to a specific foraging area than freshwater and terrestrial-foraging gulls, but fidelity and sex were unrelated to gull blood mercury concentrations in all models. These findings support existing research that has described elevated mercury levels in species using aquatic habitats. Our analyses also demonstrate that gulls can be used to detect differences in contaminant exposure over broad geographic scales and across coarse habitat types, a factor that may influence gull health and persistence of other populations that forage across the land-sea gradient

Is Medical Research Informing Professional Practice More Highly Cited? Evidence from AHFS DI Essentials in Drugs.com

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Scientometrics on 21/02/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2292-3 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Citation-based indicators are often used to help evaluate the impact of published medical studies, even though the research has the ultimate goal of improving human wellbeing. One direct way of influencing health outcomes is by guiding physicians and other medical professionals about which drugs to prescribe. A high profile source of this guidance is the AHFS DI Essentials product of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, which gives systematic information for drug prescribers. AHFS DI Essentials documents, which are also indexed by Drugs.com, include references to academic studies and the referenced work is therefore helping patients by guiding drug prescribing. This article extracts AHFS DI Essentials documents from Drugs.com and assesses whether articles referenced in these information sheets have their value recognised by higher Scopus citation counts. A comparison of mean log-transformed citation counts between articles that are and are not referenced in AHFS DI Essentials shows that AHFS DI Essentials references are more highly cited than average for the publishing journal. This suggests that medical research influencing drug prescribing is more cited than average