Changes in College Student Anxiety and Depression From Pre- to During-COVID-19: Perceived Stress, Academic Challenges, Loneliness, and Positive Perceptions

The COVID-19 pandemic is a major stressor that has negatively impacted global mental health. Many U.S. college students faced an abrupt transition to remote learning in March 2020 that significantly disrupted their routines, likely causing changes in mental health. The current study examined changes in anxiety and depressive symptoms among 990 college students, from before COVID-19 had reached U.S. community spread to 5 months into the pandemic. Results indicate overall increases in anxiety and depressive symptoms; this effect was amplified as more COVID-related challenges with academic impact and loneliness were reported. Increases in anxiety and depression were buffered as a function of greater perceived positive changes attributed to COVID-19; the differences in anxiety and depressive symptoms over time were also lessened when greater perceived stress prior to COVID-19 was reported. Findings reveal an unexpected effect involving pre-pandemic stress, and highlight potential targets to promote resilience, which should be examined long-term.

Pediatric neurology and telehealth before and during SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

Telehealth has been known in medicine for over 70 years. Until the year 2020 it has been utilized in a limited setting to provide long-distance care for individuals residing in areas lacking health facilities. SARS-CoV-2 pandemic shifted the priorities of healthcare system towards COVID-19 infections, which resulted in the transition of non-emergency consultations to telemedicine in many countries. Since pediatric neurology requires frequent follow-up and multidisciplinary care, the purpose of our work is to determine the spectrum of use of telehealth in pediatric neurology before and during the pandemic. Secondly, we would like to discuss the differences of focus in tele-neurology for children patients between the pre-pandemic and during pandemic timeframes.Within 171 articles of PubMED database, 36 substantial articles on the introduction of telehealth to pediatric neurology were included in the review. 30.5% of the articles have included the implementation of telemedicine before the pandemic, 69.5% of the articles discussed improvements made after the pandemic started. The spectrum of disorders and interventions considered for telehealth included epilepsy, cerebral palsy, rare diseases, teleneuropsychology and teleneurorehabilitation. Among major differences between pre-pandemic and pandemic research, increase in international cooperation and discussion of not only medical, but also scientific and academic impact of the pandemic could be noted.Telehealth offers sustainable alternatives to many interventions which cannot be performed in-person during public health emergency such as SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Despite high satisfaction of caregivers and healthcare professionals from the virtual visits, solutions are still far from perfection and need improvements to provide more support for the patients with various disorders, cover the concerns of privacy and confidentiality, as well as support patients from low-income and lack of electronic techology backgrounds.

Research on the Academic Impact of Sports in the Multidimensional Matrix Evaluation Framework

Sport trade frictions have continued to evolve and escalate, which has a great impact on sport academic cooperation. In order to objectively assess the impact of sports scholarship on China and provide evidence to support future changes in sports academic cooperation, this study takes 269,647 academic papers produced by sports alone from 2010–2018 as the research object and integrates explicit, implicit, and performance information contained in the paper output to construct a multidimensional matrix assessment framework. The horizontal dimension splits the collaborative research output into three mutually exclusive subsets: China-led collaborative research, sport-led collaborative research, and bisectional collaborative research; the vertical dimension systematically analyzes the characteristics of collaborative sport academic research in terms of participants, research content, and research level. The purpose of this study is to characterize the role and status of academic cooperation between the two countries through a long period, large sample, and multidimensional perspective, to make an objective assessment of the impact of academic cooperation between the two countries, and to provide evidence to support a reasonable response to the impact of changes in the relationship between the two countries on academic cooperation.

A new index to evaluate the academic impact of journals: RAQ index

PurposeTo improve the deficiencies of the existing journal influencing evaluation indexes, which have single influencing factors and are greatly affected by the number of papers published, this paper proposes a new evaluation of the journal influence method based on the RA index.Design/methodology/approachIn the metrics create, the paper introduces the RA index for evaluating the impact of authors and analyzing its feasibility in journal evaluation. Then the RA index is divided by the number of journal's published papers to obtain the RAQ index to evaluate journal impact. In the metrics analysis, the authors analyze the statistical characteristics of the RAQ index using statistical analysis, and t-test, Roc curve and PLS were used to analyze the relationship between the RAQ index and other indicators.FindingsEmpirical results show that the RAQ index can effectively identify high-quality journals and reduce the number of published papers on journal evaluation. The empirical results show that the RAQ index has higher stability and discrimination than the h-index and g-index. Compared with other indexes, the RAQ index has better evaluation effects and statistical characteristics.Originality/valueThe current study proposes journals' RAQ index, which integrates the influence of high-, low- and zero-cited papers. It solves the problem of the virtual high of the h-type index. The findings will contribute to the evaluation of journal influence by offering a new research idea that facilitates the fairness and rationality of journal evaluation.

The weighted impact factor: the paper evaluation index based on the citation ratio

PurposeThis study distinguishes the academic influence of different papers published in journals of the same subject or field based on the modification of the journal impact factor.Design/methodology/approachTaking SSCI journals in library and information science (LIS) as the research object, the authors first explore the skewness degree of the citation distribution of journal articles. Then, we define the paper citation ratio as the weight of impact factor to modify the journal impact factor for the evaluation of papers, namely the weighted impact factor. The authors further explore the feasibility of the weighted impact factor in evaluating papers.FindingsThe research results show that different types of skewness exist in the citation distribution of journal papers. Particularly, 94% of journal paper citations are highly skewed, while the rest are moderately skewed. The weighted impact factor has a closer correlation with the citation frequency of papers than the journal impact factor. It resolves the issue that the journal impact factor tends to exaggerate the influence of low-cited papers in journals with high impact factors or weaken the influence of high-cited papers in journals with low impact factors.Originality/valueThe weighted impact factor is constructed based on the skewness of the citation distribution of journal articles. It provides a new method to distinguish the academic influence of different papers published in journals of the same subject or field, then avoids the situation that papers published in the same journal having the same academic impact.