Workshop on 'Dosimetric Issues in the Medical use of Ionising Radiation'

A joint workshop was initiated by EURADOS based on the work programme of the working group 'Radiation protection dosimetry of medical staff'. The workshop was held within the framework of the regular EURADOS Annual Meeting series, of which the 2008 event was held in Paris (AM2008). The topic 'Dosimetric Issues in the Medical Use of Ionising Radiation' is very broad, and is covered by the different European projects of FP6 and FP7. This topic is also a major part of the current activities of the French Society of Medical Physic (SFPM). By promoting this joint initiative, AM2008 was an opportunity for the wider scientific community with interests in this area to meet and follow the progress in the different fields. This report introduces the themes addressed during the workshop, from which most of the papers presented in this volume are included.     

Growing trend of China’s contribution to tissue engineering

This study examines China’s performance on tissue engineering using scientometrics measures such as China’s global publication share, rank, growth rate and citation impact, its publications in various sub-fields, top journals in terms of national share based on last 5 years (2008–2012) publications data obtained from ISI Science citation index expanded database. We have also determined Chinese share with international collaborative papers at the national level, as well as h-core papers and high-cited papers, etc.     

Influence of a performance indicator on Danish research production and citation impact 2000–12

This paper analyses the patterns of Danish research productivity, citation impact and (inter)national collaboration across document types 2000–2012, prior to and after the introduction of the Norwegian publication point-based performance indicator in 2008. Document types analysed are: research articles; conference proceedings papers excluding meeting abstracts; and review articles. The Danish Research & Innovation Agency’s basic statistics combined with Web of Science (WoS) are used for data collection and analyses. Findings demonstrate that the research article productivity increases steeply (37 %) after the start of the performance indicator and the citation impact progresses linearly over the entire period, regardless the introduction of the performance indicator. Academic staff progression is only 24 % during the same time period. The collaboration ratio between purely Danish and internationally cooperated research articles remains stable during the period, the number of collaborative countries increases while the ratio declines significantly for proceedings papers. The citation impact of internationally cooperated research articles increases since 2009 but drops for proceedings papers; also their productivity declines slightly from 2009 according to Research Agency statistics. Since 2006 the WoS indexing of proceedings papers is fast declining; as a consequence the ratio between Danish proceedings papers and research articles declines in WoS. According to Research Agency statistics a decline likewise takes place, starting from 2009. The positive growth in research articles mainly derives from the Science and Technology fields published in prestigious Level 2 journals; the development of articles published in less prestigious Level 1 journals derives from all fields. Three of the eight Danish universities have significantly altered their research publication profiles since 2009. The publication performance model is regarded as the significant accelerator of these processes in recent years.     

Heat-transfer enhancement by additives

A workshop on heat-transfer enhancement by additives in absorption processes was held last year at the Bavarian Center for Applied Energy Research (ZAE Bayern) in Garching, Germany, in collaboration with the Technical University München. The workshop was the first in a series of München Discussion Meetings, designed to bring together a limited number of researchers active in specific fields in order to facilitate not only presentations of research results but also discussion of related issues and problems. The specific purpose of the present workshop has been to establish the current state of knowledge in the area of transfer enhancement by additives and bring forth the outstanding problems so as to formulate research needs. During the 2 days of the workshop, 14 papers were presented and discussions were conducted by 34 participants from eight countries. At the conclusion of the workshop it was stated that well-known additives contribute a significant increase of heat and mass transfer in liquid sorption systems. However, from a fundamental point of view almost nothing is satisfactorily explained. On the one hand, in solid sorption systems the basic understanding of the combined heat- and mass-transfer processes seems to be better, on the other hand, the best means for enhancement is disputed much more controversially. This paper is a summary of the presentations and discussions during the München Discussion Meeting with the main emphasis on liquid sorption systems.     

Road safety in a globalised and more sustainable world: Current issues and future challenges

Although many countries have had considerable success in reducing traffic injuries over recent decades, there are still some fundamental problems in this area. At the same time, there is increasing focus on road safety research and policy development in the context of globalisation, sustainability, liveability and health. This special section presents a selection of papers that were presented at the annual ICTCT workshop held on the 8th and 9th of November 2012 in Hasselt, Belgium, and accepted for publication in Accident Analysis and Prevention following the journal's reviewing procedure. The aim of the ICTCT workshop was to analyse road safety facts, data and visions for the future in the wider context of current issues and future challenges in road safety.     

Where demographics meets scientometrics: towards a dynamic career analysis

In computer science, as opposed to many other disciplines, papers published in conference and workshop proceedings count as formal publications when evaluating the scholarship of an academic. We consider the relationship between high quality journals and conferences in the computer vision (CV) subfield of computer science. We determined that 30% of papers in the top-3 CV journals base their work on top-3 conference papers by the same authors (which we call priors (See “Methods” section for the definition of a prior)). Journal papers with priors are significantly more cited than journal papers without priors. Also the priors themselves are cited more than other papers from the conferences. For a period of 3–5 years after the journal paper publication, the priors receive more citations than the follow-up journal paper. After that period, the journal paper starts receiving most of the citations. Furthermore, we found that having the prior conference paper did not make it any easier (faster) to publish in a journal. We also surveyed journal authors and based on their answers and the priors analysis, we discovered that authors seem to be divided into different groups depending on their preferred method of publication.     

Are highly cited papers more international?

Several bibliometric studies have shown that international or multicountry papers are generally more cited than domestic or single country papers. Does this also hold for the most cited papers? In this study, the citation impact of domestic versus international papers is analyzed by comparing the share of international papers among the hundred most cited papers in four research specialities, from three universities, four cities and two countries. It is concluded that international papers are not well represented among high impact papers in research specialities, but dominate highly cited papers from small countries, and from cities and institutions within them. The share of international papers among highly cited papers is considerably higher during 2001–2008 compared to earlier years for institutions, cities and countries, but somewhat less for two of the research fields and slightly higher for the other two. Above all, domestic papers from the USA comprise about half of the highly cited papers in the research specialities.     

Editor-in-Chief's Note—I$^{2}$MTC 2008 Special Issue

The 62 papers in this special issue are extended versions of papers presented at the 2008 International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference, held in Victoria, BC, Canada, from May 12 to 15.     

South–South research collaboration of countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC)

This study investigates South–South collaboration in research, and specifically collaboration among the 15 countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) as well as between the SADC and the rest of Africa. It was found that only 3% of SADC papers during 2005–2008 were jointly authored by researchers from two or more SADC countries (intra-regional collaboration), and only 5% of SADC papers were jointly authored with researchers from African countries outside the SADC (continental collaboration). In contrast, 47% of SADC papers were co-authored with scientists from high-income countries. The few instances of intra-regional and continental collaboration in the SADC are largely the product of North–South collaboration. Authors from high-income countries are included in 60% of intra-regional co-authored papers and in 59% of continental co-authored papers. Moreover, between 2005 and 2008, South Africa produced 81% of all SADC papers and 78% of all intra-regional co-authored papers. This implies that there is a highly unbalanced and unequal partnership that can best be described as a variant of North–South collaboration with the scientific giant in the South taking on the role of the ‘political North’. As a consequence, guidelines for successful North–South collaborations should be extended to include South–South collaborations that comprise highly unequal partners, as is the case between South Africa and the other SADC countries.     

The influence of scientific research output of academics on economic growth in South Africa: an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) application

An increasing number of researchers have recently shown interest in the relationship between economic growth of a country and its research output, measured in scientometric indicators. The answer is not only of theoretical interest but it can also influence the specific policies aimed at the improvement of a country’s research performance. Our paper focuses on this relationship. We argue that research output is a manifestation of the improvement of human capital in the economy. We examine this relationship specifically in South Africa for the period 1980–2008. Using the autoregressive distributed lag method, we investigate the relationship between GDP and the comparative research performance of the country in relation to the rest of the world (the share of South African papers compared to the rest of the world). The relationship is confirmed for individual fields of science (biology and biochemistry, chemistry, material sciences, physics, psychiatry and psychology). The results of this study indicate that in South Africa for the period 1980–2008 the comparative performance of the research output can be considered as a factor affecting the economic growth of the country. Similarly, the results confirm the results of Vinkler (2008) and Lee et al. (2011). In contrast, economic growth did not influence the research output of the country for the same period. Policy implications are also discussed.     

Overview of the wisdom stakeholder workshop on restoration management

A Workshop to extend the Involvement of Stakeholders in Decisions On restoration Management (WISDOM) was held at New College, Oxford from 15 to 17 September 2003. The aim was to promote awareness and interest in the wider application of stakeholder involvement in the formulation of strategies for the management of contaminated agricultural land and produce following a nuclear accident. The workshop, through 25 plenary papers and a set of two facilitated discussion sessions, provided valuable feedback on a wide range of issues including technical and social factors affecting countermeasure selection, acceptability of intervention levels, the challenges of rural waste disposal and crisis management. The workshop achieved its aim and the findings will be disseminated widely. Stakeholder groups are already active in the UK, Finland, Belgium, France and Greece; there was commitment from participants to establish further, similar groups in other member states within the European Union.     

2008 Conference on Precision Electromagnetic Measurements (CPEM)

The 88 papers in this special issue are extended versions of papers presented at the 2008 Conference on Precision Electromagnetic Measurements (CPEM), held in Broomfield, CO, from June 8 through June 13.     

Research profiling for ‘standardization and innovation’

This paper addresses the profiling of research papers on ‘standardization and innovation’—exploring major topics and arguments in this field. Drawing on 528 papers retrieved from the database, Web of Science, we employed trend, factor, and clustering analyses to demonstrate that the standardization and innovation research has continuously grown from publication of 13 papers in 1995 to 68 papers in 2008; the majority of these papers have been published in the six subject group domains of management, economics, environment, chemistry, computer science, and telecommunications. Technology innovation management specialty journals are the most central sources favorable for these themes. We also present an exploratory taxonomy that offers nine topical clusters to demonstrate the contextual structures of standardization and innovation. The implications of our results for ongoing consistent policy and future research into standardization and innovation are discussed.     

The citation advantage of foreign language references for Chinese social science papers

Contemporary scientific exchanges are international, yet language continues to be a persistent barrier to scientific communication, particularly for non-native English-speaking scholars. Since the ability to absorb knowledge has a strong impact on how researchers create new scientific knowledge, comprehensive access to and understanding of both domestic and international scientific publications is essential for scientific performance. This study explores the effect of absorbed knowledge on research impact by analyzing the relationship between the language diversity of cited references and the number of citations received by the citing paper. Chinese social sciences are taken as the research object, and the data, 950,302 papers published between 1998 and 2013 with 8,151,327 cited references, were collected from the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index. Results show that there is a stark increase in the consumption of foreign language material within the Chinese social science community, and English material accounts for the vast majority of this consumption. Papers with foreign language references receive significantly more citations than those without, and the citation advantage of these internationalized work holds when we control for characteristics of the citing papers, such as the discipline, prestige of journal, prestige of institution, and scientific collaboration. However, the citation advantage has decreased from 1998 to 2008, largely as an artifact of the increased number of papers citing foreign language material. After 2008, however, the decline of the citation advantage subsided and became relatively stable, which suggests that incorporating foreign language literature continues to increase scientific impact, even as the scientific community itself becomes increasingly international. However, internationalization is not without concerns: the work closes with a discussion of the potential problems associated with the lack of linguistic diversity in scientific communication.

     

Summary from the epistemic uncertainty workshop: consensus amid diversity

The ‘Epistemic Uncertainty Workshop’ sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories was held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 6–7 August 2002. The workshop was organized around a set of Challenge Problems involving both epistemic and aleatory uncertainty that the workshop participants were invited to solve and discuss. This concluding article in a special issue of Reliability Engineering and System Safety based on the workshop discusses the intent of the Challenge Problems, summarizes some discussions from the workshop, and provides a technical comparison among the papers in this special issue. The Challenge Problems were computationally simple models that were intended as vehicles for the illustration and comparison of conceptual and numerical techniques for use in analyses that involve: (i) epistemic uncertainty, (ii) aggregation of multiple characterizations of epistemic uncertainty, (iii) combination of epistemic and aleatory uncertainty, and (iv) models with repeated parameters. There was considerable diversity of opinion at the workshop about both methods and fundamental issues, and yet substantial consensus about what the answers to the problems were, and even about how each of the four issues should be addressed. Among the technical approaches advanced were probability theory, Dempster–Shafer evidence theory, random sets, sets of probability measures, imprecise coherent probabilities, coherent lower previsions, probability boxes, possibility theory, fuzzy sets, joint distribution tableaux, polynomial chaos expansions, and info-gap models. Although some participants maintained that a purely probabilistic approach is fully capable of accounting for all forms of uncertainty, most agreed that the treatment of epistemic uncertainty introduces important considerations and that the issues underlying the Challenge Problems are legitimate and significant. Topics identified as meriting additional research include elicitation of uncertainty representations, aggregation of multiple uncertainty representations, dependence and independence, model uncertainty, solution of black-box problems, efficient sampling strategies for computation, and communication of analysis results.     

A bibliometric analysis of the performance of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Water Research</Emphasis>

This paper presents a detailed chronological survey of papers published in the journal titled Water Research which started publication since 1967. This current investigation reviews publication patterns between 1967 and 2008. An analysis of the research performance according to publication output, distribution of words in article title, author keywords, and keywords plus. Performances of countries, institutes, and authors, including total, single, collaborative, first author, and corresponding author publications were analyzed. The most-frequently cited articles each year and the articles of the highest impact in 2008 were also reported. Results showed that “activated sludge” was the most frequently used author keyword, followed by “adsorption,” and “drinking water.” Authors from 114 different countries/territories published in the journal, with the most articles submitted by authors from the USA.     

报纸印刷车间洁净空调系统整体解决方案

针对报纸印刷车间空气污染问题,提出一种空调系统整体解决方案。采用分区设计压力梯度送风,结合过滤和净化手段,配合适量新风置换,融入节能措施等技术,设计一套实际可行的具备安全性能和节能性能的报纸印刷车间洁净空调系统。     

工业炸药成品装车位的隔爆设计

对于一些工业炸药生产线老厂区,由于厂区内建设用地紧张、内部距离受限等原因,无法在原有生产线基础上单独设置成品中转站台或成品中转库时,需要找到一种可靠措施,在保证转运车辆中工业炸药与生产工房内存药不相互殉爆的前提下实现工房土堤外装车。通过某公司的隔爆墙设计实例得出,采用两层钢砼墙板中间夹砂的组合隔爆墙替代防护土堤,占地面积小,能够起到抗爆、防殉爆效果,可以有效阻止生产工房或成品装车位有一方爆炸时导致另一方主体结构遭受严重破坏,是解决工业炸药生产企业老厂区工业炸药生产线防护土堤外装车的有效途径之一。     

Mapping of dental science research in India: a scientometric analysis of India’s research output, 1999–2008

The study examines India’s performance based on its publication output in dental sciences during 1999–2008, based on several parameters, including the country annual average growth rate, global publication share & rank among 25 most productive countries of the world, national publication output and impact in terms of average citations per paper, international collaboration output and share and contribution of major collaborative partners, contribution and impact of select top 25 Indian institutions and select top 15 most productive authors, patterns of communication in national and international journals and characteristics of its 45 high cited papers. The study uses 10 years (1999–2008) publications data in dental sciences of India and other countries drawn from Scopus international multidisciplinary bibliographical database.     

The unbalanced performance and regional differences in scientific and technological collaboration in the field of solar cells

This study attempts to explore collaborations in the field of solar cell science and technology, focusing on the productivity and citations of papers and patents at the global and country levels. This study finds that most papers and patents are collaborative efforts, however, the rate of collaboration is higher for papers. In particular, international collaboration is not common in patents. In terms of performance, international collaborations have shown the best performance overall if looking at trends that cover the 30 years from 1980 to 2009, but the performance of single-authored papers has been better in the more recent ten-year period, 2000–2009. At the country level, we found that most countries have higher rates of international collaboration with greater numbers in papers and patents. Asian countries such as Japan, Taiwan and India have significant citation performance with high ratios for domestic collaboration; the rates are even greater than the average ratio for international collaboration.