Quantity does matter as citation impact increases with productivity

Many scholars are encouraged to focus on the quality not the quantity of their publications, the rationale being that becoming too focused on productivity risks reducing the quality of one's work. But is this, in fact, the case? Peter van den Besselaar and Ulf Sandström have studied a large sample of researchers and found that, while results vary by field, there is a positive and stronger than linear relationship between productivity and quality (in terms of the top cited papers). This same pattern appears to apply to institutions as well as individual researchers

The social construction of indicators for evaluation: Internationalization of Funding Agencies

The article investigates the participatory co-development of suitable indicators for the assessment of internationalization of funding agencies (FAs). Our research questions are: How can we measure different functions and institutional characteristics using a participatory process? What and who do we measure (and assess), against what do we assess? Which of the stakeholders should/could use the indicators (ministerial principals to assess the agencies, agency leadership, agency staff, external evaluators) and for what purposes? In this way we intend to contribute to the literature on social construction of S&T indicators, and to explore the representation of FAs' functions and activities for evaluation purposes. The results show how the process was designed and evolved, its strengths and weaknesses, and the effects generated as to the conceptualization for the indicators production. The work confirms the importance of indicators assessment forums for designing indicators, and how these arenas allow constituting a common language, enable the actors to discuss their representations, and favour collective learnin

Photometric Variability in the Faint Sky Variability Survey

The Faint Sky Variability Survey (FSVS) is aimed at finding photometric and/or astrometric variable objects between 16th and 24th mag on time-scales between tens of minutes and years with photometric precisions ranging from 3 millimag to 0.2 mag. An area of 23 deg$^2$, located at mid and high Galactic latitudes, was covered using the Wide Field Camera (WFC) on the 2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) on La Palma. Here we present some preliminary results on the variability of sources in the FSVS.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, to appear in 14th European Workshop on White Dwarfs, ASP Conference Series, eds. D. Koester, S. Moehle

Формалізація основних принципів взаємодії інвестора (кредитора) та позичальника (господарюючого суб’єкта)

Здійснено аналіз питань пов’язаних з організацією раціонального інвестування як з точки зору позичальника (господарюючого суб’єкта) так і з точки зору інвестора (кредитора). Проблему узгодження інтересів інвестора та позичальника сформульовано як багатокритеріальну задачу математичного програмування. Запропонована формалізація взаємодії господарюючого суб’єкта та інвестора за допомогою дослідження дискретного Марковського процесу, стани якого задаються вектором інтегральних показників діяльності кредитора та позичальника.This work comprises the rational investment organizationrelated issues analysis from the borrower’s (managing entity), as well as from the investor’s (creditor’s) point of view. The borrower and investor’s interests’ coordination issue is formulated as a mathematical programming multicriterion problem. The borrower and investor cooperation formalization with help of discreet Markov’s process study is introduced. The Markov’s process’ states are determined by the investor and borrower’s integral activities’ rates vector

Identification of 13 DB + dM and 2 DC + dM binaries from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We present the identification of 13 DB + dM binaries and 2 DC + dM binaries from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Before the SDSS only 2 DB + dM binaries and 1 DC + dM binary were known. At least three, possibly 8, of the new DB + dM binaries seem to have white dwarf temperatures well above 30000 K which would place them in the so called DB-gap. Finding these DB white dwarfs in binaries may suggest that they have formed through a different evolutionary channel than the ones in which DA white dwarfs transform into DB white dwarfs due to convection in the upper layers.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in A&A Letter