scholarly journals The Research Behaviour and Dynamics of Science in Periods of Crisis: Case Study of COVID-19 Leading to Discovery of mRNA Vaccines

Author(s):  
Mario Coccia

Abstract No studies to date allow us to explain the dynamics of science and research behavior in the presence of crisis to support research policy for allocating resources with effectiveness and planning scientific research to provide solutions directed to positive societal impact. The main goal of this study is to explain the research behavior and dynamics of science during a global crisis, focusing on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) that has generated a pandemic crisis worldwide. Results suggest critical characteristics of the research behavior and dynamics of science in global crisis, namely: evolution of research field is driven by new and consequential environmental threats in human society to be solved in a short run; evolution of crisis-driven research fields field is pulled by few (parent) disciplines (3–5) that generate more than 80% of documents; the most active institutions in crisis-driven studies are mainly academic institutions localized in advanced countries; main funding institutions in scientific production of crisis-driven research fields are public organizations of rich nations and global charitable foundations; the most productive countries of crisis-driven research fields are nations direct to support their global leadership; moreover, research behavior of crisis-driven research fields is mainly based on scientific publications having open access for a widespread diffusion of results for a higher social impact; finally, scientific production of crisis-driven research field has a higher density of short communications with letters and notes to systematize quickly findings, publish and spread them. Overall, then, this study provides critical characteristics of research behavior and dynamics of science in global crises that could be of benefit to policymakers to design science policies and plan research programmes to generate fruitful science advances and technological breakthroughs directed to reduce negative effects of crisis on socioeconomic systems and improve wellbeing of people.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Coccia

Abstract Scholars argue that the ‘‘science of science’’ studies have to investigate the critical role of exogenous events in the emergence of new research fields. The goal of this study is to analyze and explain the birth and growth of new research fields driven by exogenous event to science, such as COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) global pandemic crisis. This study here analyzes how the novel research field of COVID-19 emerges, in a comparative analysis with other scientific fields concerning respiratory illnesses (e.g., Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, COPD and Lung Cancer), to explain factors determining the unique dynamics of science that is generating scientific breakthroughs in a short period of time. The origin and evolution of the research field of COVID-19 reveal that has an acceleration of scientific production equal to a growth of 1.71% daily in 2020, laying the foundations for science advances and a likely paradigm shift in the treatment of infectious diseases with novel mRNA vaccines. Main results are generalized in properties that clarify the dynamics of science and explain the characteristics that generate the origin and evolution of new research fields driven by unforeseen crises with critical implications for technological and social change directed scientific progress of human societies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Marin Vargas ◽  
Lorenzo Cominelli ◽  
Felice Dell’Orletta ◽  
Enzo Pasquale Scilingo

Verbal communication is an expanding field in robotics showing a significant increase in both the industrial and research field. The application of verbal communication in robotics aims to reach a natural human-like interaction with robots. In this study, we investigated how salient terms related to verbal communication in robotics have evolved over the years, what are the topics that recur in the related literature, and what are their trends. The study is based on a computational linguistic analysis conducted on a database of 7,435 scientific publications over the last 2 decades. This comprehensive dataset was extracted from the Scopus database using specific key-words. Our results show how relevant terms of verbal communication evolved, which are the main coherent topics and how they have changed over the years. We highlighted positive and negative trends for the most coherent topics and the distribution over the years for the most significant ones. In particular, verbal communication resulted in being highly relevant for social robotics. Potentially, achieving natural verbal communication with a robot can have a great impact on the scientific, societal, and economic role of robotics in the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. 1071-1077
Author(s):  
Aref G. Ghahsare ◽  
Zahra S. Nazifi ◽  
Seyed M.R. Nazifi

: Over the last decades, several heterocyclic derivatives compounds have been synthesized or extracted from natural resources and have been tested for their pharmaceutical activities. Xanthene is one of these heterocyclic derivatives. These compounds consist of an oxygen-containing central heterocyclic structure with two more cyclic structures fused to the central cyclic compound. It has been shown that xanthane derivatives are bioactive compounds with diverse activities such as anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, anti-cancer, and anti-inflammatory as well as therapeutic effects on diabetes and Alzheimer. The anti-cancer activity of such compounds has been one of the main research fields in pharmaceutical chemistry. Due to this diverse biological activity, xanthene core derivatives are still an attractive research field for both academia and industry. This review addresses the current finding on the biological activities of xanthene derivatives and discussed in detail some aspects of their structure-activity relationship (SAR).


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 35-59
Author(s):  
Suzanne Adema

Abstract Empirical research on the learning and instruction of Latin is still scarce. In this article, relevant research is surveyed, along with publications that report experiences of classics teachers or provide teaching suggestions. An overview is presented of where to find publications on the learning and instruction of Latin, as well as a brief introduction to several relevant research methods. The article is organized by reference to various research fields relevant to the learning and instruction of Latin. These fields are classics and Latin linguistics, second language acquisition, vocabulary acquisition and dictionary use, reading and text comprehension, translation research and pedagogy, child development and psychology.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 124
Author(s):  
Sofia Lindström Sol ◽  
Cia Gustrén ◽  
Gustaf Nelhans ◽  
Johan Eklund ◽  
Jenny Johannisson ◽  
...  

This article explores the broad and undefined research field of “the social impact of the arts”. The effects of art and culture are often used as justification for public funding, but the research on these interventions and their effects is unclear. Using a co-word analysis of over 10,000 articles published between 1990 and 2020, we examined the characteristics of the field as we have operationalised it through our searches. Since 2015, the research field of “the social impact of art” has expanded and consists of different epistemologies and methodologies, summarised in largely overlapping subfields belonging to the social sciences/humanities, arts education, and arts and health/therapy. In formal or informal learning settings, studies of theatre/drama as an intervention to enhance skills, well-being, or knowledge among children are most common. A study of the research front, operationalised as the bibliographic coupling of the most cited articles in the data set, confirmed the co-word analysis and revealed new themes that together form the ground for insight into research on the social impact of the arts. As such, this article can inform discussions on the social value of the arts and culture.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 669-686 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dietze

Abstract. Environmental seismology is the study of the seismic signals emitted by Earth surface processes. This emerging research field is at the intersection of seismology, geomorphology, hydrology, meteorology, and further Earth science disciplines. It amalgamates a wide variety of methods from across these disciplines and ultimately fuses them in a common analysis environment. This overarching scope of environmental seismology requires a coherent yet integrative software which is accepted by many of the involved scientific disciplines. The statistic software R has gained paramount importance in the majority of data science research fields. R has well-justified advances over other mostly commercial software, which makes it the ideal language to base a comprehensive analysis toolbox on. The article introduces the avenues and needs of environmental seismology, and how these are met by the R package eseis. The conceptual structure, example data sets, and available functions are demonstrated. Worked examples illustrate possible applications of the package and in-depth descriptions of the flexible use of the functions. The package has a registered DOI, is available under the GPL licence on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), and is maintained on GitHub.


Author(s):  
Luana Brito Oliveira ◽  
Suzana Leitão Russo

Ticks are distributed all over the world and significantly affect human and animal health. Increasing public health concern with tick borne diseases requires the strategic control of ticks in animals that transmit diseases to humans. The aim of this article is to present a bibliometric analysis of the scientific production related to tick control, using bibliometrics as an instrument of analysis to measure scientific activity. To identify the studies , a search was made on four Scopus databases, Web of Science, Medline / Pubmed and Science Direct. Of 1764 publications, only 480 were analyzed after the exclusion of certain productions according to previously defined criteria. It was pointed out that the identified studies have great relevance for the control of ticks, considering that scientific publications are important markers of the activity of production and development of the field of knowledge.


Author(s):  
Gabriel Franklin ◽  
Tibérius O. Bonates

This chapter describes an agent-based simulation of an incentive mechanism for scientific production. In the proposed framework, a central agency is responsible for devising and enforcing a policy consisting of performance-based incentives in an attempt to induce a global positive behavior of a group of researchers, in terms of number and type of scientific publications. The macro-level incentive mechanism triggers micro-level actions that, once intensified by social interactions, lead to certain patterns of behavior from individual agents (researchers). Positive reinforcement from receiving incentives (as well as negative reinforcement from not receiving them) shape the behavior of agents in the course of the simulation. The authors show, by means of computational experiments, that a policy devised to act at the individual level might induce a single global behavior that can, depending on the values of certain parameters, be distinct from the original target and have an overall negative effect. The agent-based simulation provides an objective way of assessing the quantitative effect that different policies might induce on the behavior of individual researchers when it comes to their preferences regarding scientific publications.


Symmetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 903
Author(s):  
Junchao Wang ◽  
Guodong Su ◽  
Chengrui Wan ◽  
Xiwei Huang ◽  
Lingling Sun

A scientific review is a type of article that summarizes the current state of a specific field, which is crucial for promoting the advancement of our science community. Authors need to read hundreds of research articles to prepare the data and insights for a comprehensive review, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this work, we present an algorithm that can automatically extract keywords from the meta-information of each article and generate the basic data for review articles. Two different fields—communication engineering, and lab on a chip technology—were analyzed as examples. We first built an article library by downloading all the articles from the target journal using a python-based crawler. Second, the rapid automatic keyword extraction algorithm was implemented on the title and abstract of each article. Finally, we classified all extracted keywords into class by calculating the Levenshtein distance between each of them. The results demonstrated its capability of not only finding out how communication engineering and lab on a chip were evolved in the past decades but also summarizing the analytical outcomes after data mining of the extracted keywords. Our algorithm is more than a useful tool for researchers during the preparation of a review article, it can also be applied to quantitatively analyze the past, present and help authors predict the future trend of a specific research field.


2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 68-77
Author(s):  
Marco van Veller

Purpose This paper aims to the identification of journal articles that probably report on interdisciplinary research at Wageningen University & Research (WUR). Design/methodology/approach For identification of interdisciplinary research, an analysis is performed on journals from which articles have been cited in articles (co-)authored by WUR staff. The journals with cited articles are inventoried from the reference lists of the WUR articles. For each WUR article, a mean dissimilarity is calculated between the journal in which it has been published and the journals inventoried from the reference lists. Dissimilarities are derived from a large matrix with similarity values between journals, calculated from co-occurrence of these journals in the WUR articles’ reference lists. Findings For 21,191 WUR articles published between 2006 and 2015 in 2,535 journals mean dissimilarities have been calculated. The analysis shows that WUR articles with high mean dissimilarities often are published in multidisciplinary journals. Also, WUR articles with high mean dissimilarities are found in non-multidisciplinary (research field-specific) journals. For these articles (with high mean dissimilarities), this paper shows that citations are often made to more various research fields than for articles with lower mean dissimilarities. Originality/value Identification of articles reporting on interdisciplinary research may be important to WUR policy for strategic purposes or for the evaluation of researchers or groups. Also, this analysis enables to identify journals with high mean dissimilarities (due to WUR articles citing more various research fields). Identification of these journals with a more interdisciplinary scope can be important for collection management by the library.


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