hα: An index to quantify an individual’s scientific leadership

Scientometrics - The $$\alpha$$ person is the dominant person in a group. We define the $$\alpha$$ -author of a paper as the author of the paper with the highest h-index among all the coauthors,...     

Yesterday’s dreams and today’s reality in telecommunications

Twenty-five years ago the telecommunications industry had its vision of the future. There were three dreams that, given the right technology, they could achieve: (1) the Dick Tracy wristwatch phone; (2) the Picturephone; and (3) the set-top box for the home television which could access an information store maintained by the telephone company. None of these dreams turned out as planned, but it is interesting to compare the original concepts with what has actually transpired in the last quarter-century. Today, having achieved some form of each of these three dreams, it seems as if, looking ahead to tomorrow’s technology, the industry has no similar vision.     

Editor’s Note

Editorial

Editor’s Note     

Editor’s Note

Editorial

Editor’s Note     

Trump’s COVID-19 tweets and Dr. Fauci’s emails

Scientometrics - The paper features an analysis of former President Trump’s early tweets on COVID-19 in the context of Dr. Fauci’s recently revealed email trove. The tweets are analysed...     

Literature-related discovery: common factors for Parkinson’s Disease and Crohn’s Disease

Literature-related discovery (LRD) is the linking of two or more literature concepts that have heretofore not been linked (i.e., disjoint), in order to produce novel, interesting, and intelligible knowledge (i.e., potential discovery). The mainstream software for assisting LRD is Arrowsmith. It uses text-based linkage to connect two disjoint literatures, and it generates intermediate linking literatures by matching Title phrases from two disjoint literatures (literatures that do not share common records). Arrowsmith then prioritizes these linking phrases through a series of text-based filters. The present study examines citation-based linkage in addition to text-based linkage to link disjoint literatures through a process called bibliographic coupling. Two disjoint literatures were selected for the demonstration: Parkinson’s Disease (PD) (neurodegeneration) and Crohn’s Disease (CD) (autoimmune). Three cases were examined: (1) matching phrases in records with no shared references (text-based linkage only); (2) shared references in records with no matching phrases (citation-based linkage only); (3) matching phrases in records with shared references (text-based and citation-based linkages). In addition, the main themes in the body of shared references were examined through grouping techniques to identify the common themes between the two literatures. All the high-level concepts in the Case 1) records could be found in Case 3) records Some new concepts (at the sub-set level of the main themes) not found in the Case 3) records were identified in the Case 2) records. The synergy of matching phrases and shared references provides a strong prioritization to the selection of promising matching phrases as discovery mechanisms. There were three major themes that unified the PD and CD literatures: Genetics; Neuroimmunology; Cell Death. However, these themes are not completely independent. For example, there are genetic determinants of the inflammatory response. Naturally occurring genetic variants in important inflammatory mediators such as TNF-alpha appear to alter inflammatory responses in numerous experimental and a few clinical models of inflammation. Additionally, there is a strong link between neuroimmunology and cell death. In PD, for example, neuroinflammatory processes that are mediated by activated glial and peripheral immune cells might eventually lead to dopaminergic cell death and subsequent disease progression.     

Measuring co-authors’ contribution to an article’s visibility

The visibility of an article depends to a large extent on its authors. We study the question how each co-author’s relative contribution to the visibility of the article can be determined and quantified using an indicator, referring to such an indicator as a CAV-indicator. A two-step procedure is elaborated, whereby one first chooses an indicator (e.g. total number of citations, h-index …) and subsequently one of two possible approaches. The case where the indicator is an h-type index is elaborated in a Lotkaian framework. Different examples illustrate the procedure and the choices involved in determining a CAV-indicator.     

UK’s Carlisle distributes Danish products

Carlisle Process Systems Ltd has signed an exclusive contract with Denmark’s DSS Silkeborg AS that will see it distributing membrane filtration systems to the dairy industry in the UK.This is a short news story only. Visit www.filtsep.com for the latest filtration industry news     

What’s in a name?

SomerecentsubmissiontoCARBONhaveindicatedatrendtogetcertain“buzz”wordsintothetitle .Themostcommonbeing“nano” ,andmore recently“fullerene like” .Inthelasteightmonthsover 35 %ofallpaperssubmittedtomehavenanointhetitle .WithrespecttotheformerIhavebeenp