What is the significance of defining terms in a research paper?

Key summary pointsAimThe aim of this paper is to define terms commonly related to sarcopenia to enable standardization of these terms in research and clinical settings.FindingsThis paper provides definitions for commonly used terminology in sarcopenia in both clinical and research settings. As new methods and technologies are developed, this terminology may be expanded or refined over time.MessageWe hope that the use of common terminology in sarcopenia research will increase understanding of the concept and improve communication around this important age-related condition.

The purpose of the article is to clarify the essence of the concept of regional development strategy. The object of research is the definition of regional development strategies. The subject of research is structural and logical characteristics of regional development strategies. Research methods are: comparative and decomposition analysis, logical analysis, generalization. The article presents the results of the author's comparative analysis of the structural and logical essence of regional development strategy definitions proposed by domestic scientists. The absence of a stable definition and the need to clarify it in view of the new meaningful characteristics that appear in modern economic conditions and should be inherent in the relevant regional development strategy are noted. The definition of the regional development strategy has gained further development, under which it is proposed to understand the general comprehensive program of actions aimed at ensuring sustainable socio-ecological and economic development of the region and increasing its competitiveness at the national and international levels based on the effective use of resource potential, activation of local initiatives, support of promising directions development of the territory, interregional cooperation, etc., capable of ensuring economic growth in the medium and long term. This clarification, unlike the existing ones, allows to expand the understanding of the structural and logical essence of the concept of "Regional Development Strategy" in terms of clarification of the ecological component of development, positioning at the national and international levels, activation of local initiatives. The obtained results of the research can be used as a basis for further scientific research on improving the strategic management of the region.

Purpose“Scholarly Communication” is a frequent topic of both the professional and research literature of Library and Information Science (LIS). Despite efforts by individuals (e.g. Borgman, 1989) and organizations such as the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) to define the term, multiple understandings of it remain. Discussions of scholarly communication infrequently offer a definition or explanation of its parameters, making it difficult for readers to form a comprehensive understanding of scholarly communication and associated phenomena.Design/methodology/approachThis project uses the evolutionary concept analysis (ECA) method developed by nursing scholar, Beth L. Rodgers, to explore “Scholarly Communication” as employed in the literature of LIS. As the purpose of ECA is not to arrive at “the” definition of a term but rather exploring its utilization within a specific context, it is an ideal approach to expand our understanding of SC as used in LIS research.Findings“Scholarly Communication” as employed in the LIS literature does not refer to a single phenomenon or idea, but rather is a concept with several dimensions and sub-dimensions with distinct, but overlapping, significance.Research limitations/implicationsThe concept analysis (CA) method calls for review of a named concept, i.e. verbatim. Therefore, the items included in the data set must include the phrase “scholarly communication”. Items using alternate terminology were excluded from analysis.Practical implicationsThe model of scholarly communication presented in this paper provides language to operationalize the concept.Originality/valueLIS lacks a nuanced understanding of “scholarly communication” as used in the LIS literature. This paper offers a model to further the field's collective understanding of the term and support operationalization for future research projects.

Background:Terminology concerning sedation in palliative care is heterogeneous, vague, and difficult to apply with negative impact on the reliability of quantitative data, practice, and ethical discourse.Design:To clarify the concept, we systematically developed definitions of core terms in an interdisciplinary research group comprising palliative care, ethics, law, and philosophy, integrating feedback from external experts.Results:We define terms stepwise, separating matters of terminology (What is the practice?) from matters of good practice (How to use it?). We start with an operational definition of “reduced level of consciousness” (score < 0 on the Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale modified for palliative care inpatients (RASS-PAL), followed by defining “sedating,” “sedation,” and “intentional sedation” as the result or process of sedating a patient as a means of achieving a previously defined treatment goal and the terms “light,” “deep,” “temporary,” and “sedation until death.”Conclusion:The terminology facilitates the precise phrasing of aims, indications, and rules for good practice. Empirical research on acceptance and feasibility is needed.

The article studies the concept of “military terminology” in modern Russian. The relevance of the study is due to the widespread use of military terminology in the media and the rapid advancement of weapons technology. The aim of our research is to study the features of military terminology in modern Russian. The research methods are: the study of scientific literature on the topic, the analysis and the classification. The article distinguishes between the concepts of “military vocabulary” and “military terminology”, defining military terminology as a significant part of military vocabulary. The article explores the problem of studying military terminology in a historical context and analyzes various modern approaches to the classification of military terms concluding that these classifications have a number of shortcomings. The novelty of the study lies in the expansion and deepening of the existing classifications of military terminology. The system of military terms is quite mobile: old terms are replaced by new ones, and many foreign borrowings appear. The article concludes that military terminology occupies a significant place in the lexical system of the language, it is widely used in everyday speech of native speakers and in journalism. The study of military terminology is of great importance not only within the framework of linguistics, but is also of high value for history.

The relevance of this paper is strengthened by the significant proliferation of smart city projects worldwide as well as the importance of developing the comprehensive urban development strategies in the post-war recovery of Ukraine. The author focuses on systematizing the theoretical and practical understanding of smart cities, in terms of the international practices. Firstly, the article establishes a correlation between the concept of a smart city and frequently used terms such as “learning city,” “wise city,” “innovation city,” “digital city,” “e-city,” “sustainable (green) city,” and “wired city.” Secondly, it analyzes the characteristics of three models of defining the concept of a smart city such as the technological approach, sustainable development approach, and component-based approach. Thirdly, the article explores teleological, functional, and descriptive approaches to formulating definitions that can be applied in practice. The author emphasizes the importance of having a comprehensive, purposeoriented definition or a series of definitions for the concept of a smart city in order to develop effective strategies at various levels, including local, regional, and national. It is pointed out that such a strategy should be based on the principles of sustainable development, human-centricity, transparency, and openness, while promoting education, partnerships, collaboration, while preserving security, confidentiality, and accessibility. The primary goal outlined in the strategic vision of a smart city should be to ensure the sustainable development of cities, enhance the well-being of people, and enable the safe utilization of advanced technologies and digital solutions. The article proposes a working format for defining the concept, based on in-depth literature review and an overview of international perspectives. The findings are intended to have promising implications for the development of effective multi-level city development strategies for the sustainable recovery of Ukraine.

The “relevance” of research to stakeholders is an important factor in influencing the uptake of new knowledge into practice; however, this concept is neither well defined nor routinely incorporated in clinical rehabilitation research. Developing a uniform definition, measurement standards, stakeholder engagement strategies, and guiding frameworks that bolster relevance may help incorporate the concept as a key element in research planning and design. This article presents a conceptual argument for why relevance matters, proposes a working definition, and suggests strategies for operationalizing the construct in the context of clinical rehabilitation research. We place special emphasis on the importance of promoting relevance to patients, caregivers, and clinicians and provide preliminary frameworks and innovative study designs that can assist clinical rehabilitation researchers in doing so. We argue that researchers who include a direct statement regarding why and to whom a study is relevant and who incorporate considerations of relevance throughout all phases of study design produce more useful research for patients, caregivers, and clinicians, increasing its chance of uptake into practice. Consistent consideration of relevance, particularly to nonacademic audiences, during the conceptualization, study design, presentation, and dissemination of clinical rehabilitation research may promote the uptake of findings by patients, caregivers, and providers.

There is a general agreement that it is important to consider the practical relevance of an effect in addition to its statistical significance, yet a formal definition of practical relevance is still pending and shall be provided within this paper. It appears that an underlying decision problem, characterized by actions and a loss function, is required to define the notion of practical relevance, rendering it a decision theoretic concept. In the context of hypothesis-based analyses, the notion of practical relevance relates to specifying the hypotheses reasonably, such that the null hypothesis does not contain only a single parameter null value, but also all parameter values that are equivalent to the null value on a practical level. In that regard, the definition of practical relevance is also extended into the context of hypotheses. The formal elaborations on the notion of practical relevance within this paper indicate that, typically, a specific decision problem is implicitly assumed when dealing with the practical relevance of an effect or some results. As a consequence, involving decision theoretic considerations into a statistical analysis suggests itself by the mere nature of the notion of practical relevance.

Precisely defining the terminology is the first step in scientific communication. Developing neural text generation models for definition generation can circumvent the labor-intensity curation, further accelerating scientific discovery. Unfortunately, the lack of large-scale terminology definition dataset hinders the process toward definition generation. In this paper, we present a large-scale terminology definition dataset Graphine covering 2,010,648 terminology definition pairs, spanning 227 biomedical subdisciplines. Terminologies in each subdiscipline further form a directed acyclic graph, opening up new avenues for developing graph-aware text generation models. We then proposed a novel graph-aware definition generation model Graphex that integrates transformer with graph neural network. Our model outperforms existing text generation models by exploiting the graph structure of terminologies. We further demonstrated how Graphine can be used to evaluate pretrained language models, compare graph representation learning methods and predict sentence granularity. We envision Graphine to be a unique resource for definition generation and many other NLP tasks in biomedicine.

Relevance evaluation of a query and a passage is essential in Information Retrieval (IR). Recently, numerous studies have been conducted on tasks related to relevance judgment using Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, demonstrating significant improvements. However, the efficacy of LLMs is considerably influenced by the design of the prompt. The purpose of this paper is to identify which specific terms in prompts positively or negatively impact relevance evaluation with LLMs. We employed two types of prompts: those used in previous research and generated automatically by LLMs. By comparing the performance of these prompts in both few-shot and zero-shot settings, we analyze the influence of specific terms in the prompts. We have observed two main findings from our study. First, we discovered that prompts using the term ‘answer’ lead to more effective relevance evaluations than those using ‘relevant.’ This indicates that a more direct approach, focusing on answering the query, tends to enhance performance. Second, we noted the importance of appropriately balancing the scope of ‘relevance.’ While the term ‘relevant’ can extend the scope too broadly, resulting in less precise evaluations, an optimal balance in defining relevance is crucial for accurate assessments. The inclusion of few-shot examples helps in more precisely defining this balance. By providing clearer contexts for the term ‘relevance,’ few-shot examples contribute to refine relevance criteria. In conclusion, our study highlights the significance of carefully selecting terms in prompts for relevance evaluation with LLMs.