scholarly journals Analyzing Promising Researchers Using Network Centralities of Co-authorship Networks from Academic Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masanori Fujita ◽  
Hiroto Inoue ◽  
Takao Terano
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Betweenness Centrality ◽  
Japan Society ◽  
Centrality Measure ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literature Database ◽  
Network Centralities ◽  
Young Researchers

Abstract We propose a new way of using the betweenness centrality measure with co-author networks from an academic literature database to evaluate young researchers. It is difficult to discover and evaluate promising young researchers with indexes based on the number of cited papers, such as the h-index to which published papers introduce a lag and whose impact only becomes apparent after they have been cited by other papers. We validated the effectiveness of the measure as an index for evaluating young researchers. Our investigation of 1.92 million publications in the biological sciences shows that Research Fellows with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) have higher rankings and progress more quickly than other researchers. In addition, differences between JSPS Research Fellows and other researchers were observed at earlier stages using the proposed method than with the h-index and with centralities from literature published in the past 4 years. We expect that the proposed use of the betweenness centrality measure can be applied effectively to extract promising young researchers.

Proving God's Existence? A Reassessment of al-Rāzī’s Arguments for the Existence of the Creator

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah C. Erlwein
Keyword(s):  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theological Thought ◽  
Thematic Context

Arguments for God's existence, it has often been argued in the secondary academic literature, form an essential part of classical Islamic theology (ʿilm al-kalām) and philosophy (falsafa). In the past decades, numerous scholars have dealt with what could be termed the Islamic discourse on arguments for God's existence, and have commonly analysed these arguments making recourse to Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) categorisation of such arguments as cosmological, teleological, or ontological. The great Ashʿarī theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) is, unsurprisingly, seen as no exception to this: he, too, has been regarded as a participant in the aforementioned discourse, and in several of his major kalām works he introduces four methods to ‘prove the existence of the creator’. In this article, I will, however, argue that al-Rāzī had no concern for proving God's existence; the arguments in his kalām works, which, in the secondary academic literature, have been described as seeking to prove that God exists, it shall be suggested, serve a different purpose. This shall become clear when al-Rāzī’s commentary on the Qur'an, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, is taken into account. Previous studies of al-Rāzī’s (alleged) arguments for God's existence have only focused on his kalām works proper, however, in the Tafsīr al-Rāzī not only presents the very same four kalām methods to ‘prove the existence of the creator’ and stresses that they originate in Qur'anic forms of argumentation, but he also places them in a thematic context which, in his theological works, is oftentimes lacking. This article therefore clarifies the objective underlying al-Rāzī’s arguments for the existence of the creator and explains their significance in his broader theological thought.

scholarly journals Niche Construction Theory in Archaeology: A Critical Review

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert N. Spengler
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Heuristic Function ◽  
Evolutionary Mechanism ◽  
Ecosystem Impacts ◽  
Niche Construction Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Explanatory Mechanism

AbstractOver the past decade, niche construction theory (NCT) has been one of the fastest-growing theories or scholarly approaches in the social sciences, especially within archaeology. It was proposed in the biological sciences 25 years ago and is often referred to as a neglected evolutionary mechanism. Given its rapid acceptance by the archaeological community, it is important that scholars consider how it is being applied and look for discrepancies between applications of the concept. Many critical discussions of NCT have already been published, but most of them are in biology journals and may be overlooked by scholars in the social sciences. In this manuscript, my goal is to synthesis the criticisms of NCT, better allowing archaeologists to independently evaluate its usefulness. I focus on the claims of novelty and differences between NCT and other approaches to conceptualizing anthropogenic ecosystem impacts and culture-evolution feedbacks. I argue that the diverse concepts currently included in the wide-reaching purview of NCT are not new, but the terminology is and may be useful to some scholars. If proponents of the concept are able to unify their ideas, it may serve a descriptive function, but given that lack of a testable explanatory mechanism, it does not have a clear heuristic function.

The Rise of Behavioral Economics: A Quantitative Assessment

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 555-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niels Geiger
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Economics ◽  
Quantitative Assessment ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Short Summary ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Goal

This article is devoted to the issue of operationalizing and empirically measuring the development of behavioral economics, focusing on trends in the academic literature. The main research goal is to provide a quantitative, bibliometric assessment to answer the question of whether the relative importance of behavioral economics has increased over the past decades. After an introduction and a short summary of the history of behavioral economics, several studies are laid out and evaluated. The results generally provide a quantitative confirmation of the story of a rise of behavioral economics that can be found in the literature, and add some notable additional insights.

scholarly journals Climate Change and Conflict

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 343-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vally Koubi
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climatic Changes ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Future Research ◽  
General Effect ◽  
Substantial Agreement ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Level Of Economic Development

The link between climate change and conflict has been discussed intensively in academic literature during the past decade. This review aims to provide a clearer picture of what the research community currently has to say with regard to this nexus. It finds that the literature has not detected a robust and general effect linking climate to conflict onset. Substantial agreement exists that climatic changes contribute to conflict under some conditions and through certain pathways. In particular, the literature shows that climatic conditions breed conflict in fertile grounds: in regions dependent on agriculture and in combination and interaction with other socioeconomic and political factors such as a low level of economic development and political marginalization. Future research should continue to investigate how climatic changes interact with and/or are conditioned by socioeconomic, political, and demographic settings to cause conflict and uncover the causal mechanisms that link these two phenomena.

scholarly journals Secularizing Effects of Christian Mission: Fifty Years After Elmer Miller’s “The Christian Missionary, Agent of Secularization”

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Maryse Kruithof
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
American Anthropologist ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Primary Driver ◽  
Christian Missionary ◽  
Mission Field ◽  
Made In

Abstract It has been suggested that Christianity is inextricably linked with secularization due to its emphasis on purification and rationalization. But if we believe secularization in Europe is at least partly caused by internal developments within Christianity, may we then assume that secularization emerges wherever Christian missionaries are successful? Has the Christian mission unwittingly instigated secularization in its mission fields? This literature review analyses the argument that American anthropologist Elmer Miller made in the article “The Christian Missionary, Agent of Secularization” (1970) and explores whether his thesis has been confirmed in academic literature during the past fifty years. Miller presents rationalization as the primary driver of secularization and explains how missionaries have played a decisive role in this process. This paper demonstrates that while rationalization has often been mentioned as an effect of the Christian mission in other sources, the process has rarely been linked to secularization in the mission field.

scholarly journals The annual International Scientific School on Paleopedology for Young researchers in Siberia: "Paleosols as source of information about past environments" (2010–2019)

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria I. Dergacheva ◽  
Alexander O. Makeev
Keyword(s):  
Natural Environment ◽  
Soil Profile ◽  
Loess Soil ◽  
Scientific School ◽  
Soil Series ◽  
Soil Environment ◽  
Altai Region ◽  
The Past ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
Young Researchers

The article presents information about of the work of the International Scientific School on Paleopedology for Young Researchers. This school was conducted for ten years in Siberia in the Altai region, where unique Pleistocene loess-soil series are common and paleosoil horizons and modern soils are present simultaneously in one and the same soil profile. For ten years leading Russian and foreign scientists gave lectures both on fundamental theoretical and applied issues of paleopedology, as well as on a number of topical issues of related sciences, conducted master classes on the basic methods of field study of paleosols, and young researchers discussed their ideas and results. The article lists the main themes of the lectures/ naming Russian and foreign scientists who read them. It also informs about the monograph “Paleosols, the natural environment and methods for their diagnosis”, based on selected lectures at the School from its start until 2014 and published in Russian. Other selected lectures were published in two languages (Russian and English) in the series “Paleosols – a source of information about the Past environment”. The aricle draws attention to the key site "Volodarka" as being of great importance not only for conducting field master classes, but also as a convenient training ground for scientific research, since there occur various soil environment that can serve as models created by nature itself.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Richard H. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenal Experience ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The Past

The introduction to this study explores the notion of audiovisuality as it pertains to John Cage’s interaction with avant-garde filmmakers. Moving from the corporeal notion of Cage’s “everyday awareness,” audiovisuality is akin to the lived phenomenal experience. Artworks expressing such an awareness point to our understanding of the self and the lived experience. Such a framework allows for the exploration of a number of issues concerning “Cage Studies,” the flood of academic literature from the past two decades that has attempted to situate Cage’s complex aesthetic stances within 20th- and 21st-century theories of history.

Understanding Empathy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Changming Duan ◽  
Kristen Sager
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Societal Health

Empathy, one of the most studied and most multidisciplinary theoretical constructs, has garnered the attention of scholars from psychology as well as the social and biological sciences. The scholarship of empathy has developed significantly in the past century, with the most notable knowledge emerging in the areas of the neuroscience of empathy and the interplay between race/culture and empathy in recent decades. The positive psychology of empathy also continues to occupy researchers, as the links between empathy and individual and societal health abound. Future empathy research by socially and scholastically responsible scientists must overcome a long history of Euro-ethnocentric biases and integrate social justice into the understanding of this important construct. The scholarship and application of empathy will continue to be an important source of positivity for humans and for society as a whole.

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