Long term productivity and collaboration in information science

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Scientometrics on 02/07/2016, available online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2061-8 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Funding bodies have tended to encourage collaborative research because it is generally more highly cited than sole author research. But higher mean citation for collaborative articles does not imply collaborative researchers are in general more research productive. This article assesses the extent to which research productivity varies with the number of collaborative partners for long term researchers within three Web of Science subject areas: Information Science & Library Science, Communication and Medical Informatics. When using the whole number counting system, researchers who worked in groups of 2 or 3 were generally the most productive, in terms of producing the most papers and citations. However, when using fractional counting, researchers who worked in groups of 1 or 2 were generally the most productive. The findings need to be interpreted cautiously, however, because authors that produce few academic articles within a field may publish in other fields or leave academia and contribute to society in other ways

MICRO-Foundations in Strategic Management: Squaring Coleman's Diagram

Abell, Felin and Foss argue that "macro-explanations" in strategic management, explanations in which organizational routines figure prominently and in which both the explanandum and explanans are at the macro-level, are necessarily incomplete. They take a diagram (which has the form of a trapezoid) from Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.)/London, (1990) to task to show that causal chains connecting two macro-phenomena always involve "macro-to-micro" and "micro-to-macro" links, links that macro-explanations allegedly fail to recognize. Their plea for micro-foundations in strategic management is meant to shed light on these "missing links". The paper argues that while there are good reasons for providing micro-foundations, Abell, Felin and Foss's causal incompleteness argument is not one of them. Their argument does not sufficiently distinguish between causal and constitutive relations. Once these relations are carefully distinguished, it follows that Coleman's diagram has to be squared. This in turn allows us to see that macro-explanations need not be incomplete

Legal framework for small autonomous agricultural robots

Legal structures may form barriers to, or enablers of, adoption of precision agriculture management with small autonomous agricultural robots. This article develops a conceptual regulatory framework for small autonomous agricultural robots, from a practical, self-contained engineering guide perspective, sufficient to get working research and commercial agricultural roboticists quickly and easily up and running within the law. The article examines the liability framework, or rather lack of it, for agricultural robotics in EU, and their transpositions to UK law, as a case study illustrating general international legal concepts and issues. It examines how the law may provide mitigating effects on the liability regime, and how contracts can be developed between agents within it to enable smooth operation. It covers other legal aspects of operation such as the use of shared communications resources and privacy in the reuse of robot-collected data. Where there are some grey areas in current law, it argues that new proposals could be developed to reform these to promote further innovation and investment in agricultural robots

Polycation-π Interactions Are a Driving Force for Molecular Recognition by an Intrinsically Disordered Oncoprotein Family

Molecular recognition by intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) commonly involves specific localized contacts and target-induced disorder to order transitions. However, some IDPs remain disordered in the bound state, a phenomenon coined "fuzziness", often characterized by IDP polyvalency, sequence-insensitivity and a dynamic ensemble of disordered bound-state conformations. Besides the above general features, specific biophysical models for fuzzy interactions are mostly lacking. The transcriptional activation domain of the Ewing's Sarcoma oncoprotein family (EAD) is an IDP that exhibits many features of fuzziness, with multiple EAD aromatic side chains driving molecular recognition. Considering the prevalent role of cation-π interactions at various protein-protein interfaces, we hypothesized that EAD-target binding involves polycation- π contacts between a disordered EAD and basic residues on the target. Herein we evaluated the polycation-π hypothesis via functional and theoretical interrogation of EAD variants. The experimental effects of a range of EAD sequence variations, including aromatic number, aromatic density and charge perturbations, all support the cation-π model. Moreover, the activity trends observed are well captured by a coarse-grained EAD chain model and a corresponding analytical model based on interaction between EAD aromatics and surface cations of a generic globular target. EAD-target binding, in the context of pathological Ewing's Sarcoma oncoproteins, is thus seen to be driven by a balance between EAD conformational entropy and favorable EAD-target cation-π contacts. Such a highly versatile mode of molecular recognition offers a general conceptual framework for promiscuous target recognition by polyvalent IDPs. © 2013 Song et al

What we talk about when we talk about "global mindset": managerial cognition in multinational corporations

Recent developments in the global economy and in multinational corporations have placed significant emphasis on the cognitive orientations of managers, giving rise to a number of concepts such as “global mindset” that are presumed to be associated with the effective management of multinational corporations (MNCs). This paper reviews the literature on global mindset and clarifies some of the conceptual confusion surrounding the construct. We identify common themes across writers, suggesting that the majority of studies fall into one of three research perspectives: cultural, strategic, and multidimensional. We also identify two constructs from the social sciences that underlie the perspectives found in the literature: cosmopolitanism and cognitive complexity and use these two constructs to develop an integrative theoretical framework of global mindset. We then provide a critical assessment of the field of global mindset and suggest directions for future theoretical and empirical research

An empirical investigation of the influence of collaboration in Finance on article impact

We investigate the impact of collaborative research in academic Finance literature to find out whether and to what extent collaboration leads to higher impact articles (6,667 articles across 2001-2007 extracted from the Web of Science). Using the top 5 % as ranked by the 4-year citation counts following publication, we also follow related secondary research questions such as the relationships between article impact and author impact; collaboration and average author impact of an article; and, the nature of geographic collaboration. Key findings indicate: collaboration does lead to articles of higher impact but there is no significant marginal value for collaboration beyond three authors; high impact articles are not monopolized by high impact authors; collaboration and the average author impact of high-impact articles are positively associated, where collaborative articles have a higher mean author impact in comparison to single-author articles; and collaboration among the authors of high impact articles is mostly cross-institutional

AUTOMATED LEAK DETECTION OF BURIED TANKS USING GEOPHYSICAL METHODS AT THE HANFORD NUCLEAR SITE

At the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State, the Department of Energy oversees the containment, treatment, and retrieval of liquid high-level radioactive waste. Much of the waste is stored in single-shelled tanks (SSTs) built between 1943 and 1964. Currently, the waste is being retrieved from the SSTs and transferred into newer double-shelled tanks (DSTs) for temporary storage before final treatment. Monitoring the tanks during the retrieval process is critical to identifying leaks. An electrically-based geophysics monitoring program for leak detection and monitoring (LDM) has been successfully deployed on several SSTs at the Hanford site since 2004. The monitoring program takes advantage of changes in contact resistance that will occur when conductive tank liquid leaks into the soil. During monitoring, electrical current is transmitted on a number of different electrode types (e.g., steel cased wells and surface electrodes) while voltages are measured on all other electrodes, including the tanks. Data acquisition hardware and software allow for continuous real-time monitoring of the received voltages and the leak assessment is conducted through a time-series data analysis. The specific hardware and software combination creates a highly sensitive method of leak detection, complementing existing drywell logging as a means to detect and quantify leaks. Working in an industrial environment such as the Hanford site presents many challenges for electrical monitoring: cathodic protection, grounded electrical infrastructure, lightning strikes, diurnal and seasonal temperature trends, and precipitation, all of which create a complex environment for leak detection. In this discussion we present examples of challenges and solutions to working in the tank farms of the Hanford site

Meta-analysis of GWAS of over 16,000 individuals with autism spectrum disorder highlights a novel locus at 10q24.32 and a significant overlap with schizophrenia.

To access publisher's full text version of this article, please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links field or click on the hyperlink at the top of the page marked FilesOver the past decade genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been applied to aid in the understanding of the biology of traits. The success of this approach is governed by the underlying effect sizes carried by the true risk variants and the corresponding statistical power to observe such effects given the study design and sample size under investigation. Previous ASD GWAS have identified genome-wide significant (GWS) risk loci; however, these studies were of only of low statistical power to identify GWS loci at the lower effect sizes (odds ratio (OR) <1.15).We conducted a large-scale coordinated international collaboration to combine independent genotyping data to improve the statistical power and aid in robust discovery of GWS loci. This study uses genome-wide genotyping data from a discovery sample (7387 ASD cases and 8567 controls) followed by meta-analysis of summary statistics from two replication sets (7783 ASD cases and 11359 controls; and 1369 ASD cases and 137308 controls).We observe a GWS locus at 10q24.32 that overlaps several genes including PITX3, which encodes a transcription factor identified as playing a role in neuronal differentiation and CUEDC2 previously reported to be associated with social skills in an independent population cohort. We also observe overlap with regions previously implicated in schizophrenia which was further supported by a strong genetic correlation between these disorders (Rg = 0.23; P = 9 × 10(-6)). We further combined these Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) ASD GWAS data with the recent PGC schizophrenia GWAS to identify additional regions which may be important in a common neurodevelopmental phenotype and identified 12 novel GWS loci. These include loci previously implicated in ASD such as FOXP1 at 3p13, ATP2B2 at 3p25.3, and a 'neurodevelopmental hub' on chromosome 8p11.23.This study is an important step in the ongoing endeavour to identify the loci which underpin the common variant signal in ASD. In addition to novel GWS loci, we have identified a significant genetic correlation with schizophrenia and association of ASD with several neurodevelopmental-related genes such as EXT1, ASTN2, MACROD2, and HDAC4.National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH, USA) ACE Network Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE) is a program of Autism Speaks (USA) The Autism Genome Project (AGP) from Autism Speaks (USA) Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Genome Canada Health Research Board (Ireland) Hilibrand Foundation (USA) Medical Research Council (UK) National Institutes of Health (USA) Ontario Genomics Institute University of Toronto McLaughlin Centre Simons Foundation Johns Hopkins Autism Consortium of Boston NLM Family foundation National Institute of Health grants National Health Medical Research Council Scottish Rite Spunk Fund, Inc. Rebecca and Solomon Baker Fund APEX Foundation National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders (NARSAD) endowment fund of the Nancy Pritzker Laboratory (Stanford) Autism Society of America Janet M. Grace Pervasive Developmental Disorders Fund The Lundbeck Foundation universities and university hospitals of Aarhus and Copenhagen Stanley Foundation Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Netherlands Scientific Organization Dutch Brain Foundation VU University Amsterdam Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing through Science Foundation Ireland Autism Genome Project (AGP) from Autism Speak

Weak Responses to Auditory Feedback Perturbation during Articulation in Persons Who Stutter: Evidence for Abnormal Auditory-Motor Transformation

Previous empirical observations have led researchers to propose that auditory feedback (the auditory perception of self-produced sounds when speaking) functions abnormally in the speech motor systems of persons who stutter (PWS). Researchers have theorized that an important neural basis of stuttering is the aberrant integration of auditory information into incipient speech motor commands. Because of the circumstantial support for these hypotheses and the differences and contradictions between them, there is a need for carefully designed experiments that directly examine auditory-motor integration during speech production in PWS. In the current study, we used real-time manipulation of auditory feedback to directly investigate whether the speech motor system of PWS utilizes auditory feedback abnormally during articulation and to characterize potential deficits of this auditory-motor integration. Twenty-one PWS and 18 fluent control participants were recruited. Using a short-latency formant-perturbation system, we examined participants’ compensatory responses to unanticipated perturbation of auditory feedback of the first formant frequency during the production of the monophthong [ε]. The PWS showed compensatory responses that were qualitatively similar to the controls’ and had close-to-normal latencies (~150 ms), but the magnitudes of their responses were substantially and significantly smaller than those of the control participants (by 47% on average, p<0.05). Measurements of auditory acuity indicate that the weaker-than-normal compensatory responses in PWS were not attributable to a deficit in low-level auditory processing. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that stuttering is associated with functional defects in the inverse models responsible for the transformation from the domain of auditory targets and auditory error information into the domain of speech motor commands

Prenatal Excess Glucocorticoid Exposure and Adult Affective Disorders:A Role for Serotonergic and Catecholamine Pathways

Fetal glucocorticoid exposure is a key mechanism proposed to underlie prenatal ‘programming’ of adult affective behaviours such as depression and anxiety. Indeed, the glucocorticoid metabolising enzyme 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2 (11β-HSD2), which is highly expressed in the placenta and the developing fetus, acts as a protective barrier from the high maternal glucocorticoids which may alter developmental trajectories. The programmed changes resulting from maternal stress or bypass or from the inhibition of 11β-HSD2 are frequently associated with alterations in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Hence, circulating glucocorticoid levels are increased either basally or in response to stress accompanied by CNS region-specific modulations in the expression of both corticosteroid receptors (mineralocorticoid and glucocorticoid receptors). Furthermore, early-life glucocorticoid exposure also affects serotonergic and catecholamine pathways within the brain, with changes in both associated neurotransmitters and receptors. Indeed, global removal of 11β-HSD2, an enzyme that inactivates glucocorticoids, increases anxiety‐ and depressive-like behaviour in mice; however, in this case the phenotype is not accompanied by overt perturbation in the HPA axis but, intriguingly, alterations in serotonergic and catecholamine pathways are maintained in this programming model. This review addresses one of the potential adverse effects of glucocorticoid overexposure in utero, i.e. increased incidence of affective behaviours, and the mechanisms underlying these behaviours including alteration of the HPA axis and serotonergic and catecholamine pathways