Asian Authors Research Articles

International journal editors and East Asian authors: two surveys

Countries in East Asia – specifically China, Japan, and South Korea – are rapidly emerging as major contributors to global research output. However, owing to barriers in language and culture, it is possible that authors from these countries face unique challenges in getting published. Moreover, as submissions from these countries increase, journal editors may be able to spot some trends in the problems encountered when processing these submissions. This study presents the results of two surveys – one involving non-native English-speaking authors from East Asia and another involving international journal editors. The surveys were designed to throw light on the challenges East Asian authors face in the publication process and the perceptions journal editors have of submissions from East Asian countries. Here, we present and discuss the survey results, highlight gaps in the perspectives of authors and journal editors, and make recommendations to bridge these gaps.

Some Syntactic Innovations in New Literatures in English

New literatures in English mirror the identity of non-native writers who are eager to weave linguistic and thematic elements in English in divergence to the so-called Anglo English literature so that their nationality appearing in the characterization and various literary devices would contribute to the uniqueness of new varieties of English. This paper pays attention to an innovative facet of such linguistic components, particularly regarding syntax, which are manifested in the discipline of World Englishes. It aims to present particular types of syntactic innovations used in literary texts in English produced by Asian, African and Caribbean authors whose mother tongue is not English, through a range of previous studies. It appears that those authors mainly point out six types of syntactic creativity - literal translation, overgeneralization, omission, reduction, restructuring and progressive verb forms - to highlight their writings which reflect localization of the English language.

Role of Preoperative Biliary Drainage in Jaundiced Patients Who Are Candidates for Pancreatoduodenectomy or Hepatic Resection

In this review of the literature, we analyze the indications for preoperative drainage in jaundiced patients who are candidates for pancreaticoduodenectomy (PD) or major hepatectomy due to periampullary or proximal bile duct neoplasms. The aim of this study is to review the literature and to report on the current management of jaundiced patients with periampullary or proximal bile duct neoplasms who are candidates for PD or major liver resection. Jaundiced patients represent a major challenge for surgeons. Alterations and functional impairment caused by jaundice increase the risk of surgery; therefore, preoperative biliary decompression has been suggested. A literature review was performed in the MEDLINE database to identify studies on the management of jaundice in patients undergoing PD or liver resection. Papers considering palliative drainage in jaundiced patients were excluded. The first group of papers considered patients affected by middle-distal obstruction from periampullary neoplasms, in which preoperative drainage was applied selectively. The second group of papers evaluated patients with biliary obstructions from proximal biliary neoplasms. In these cases, Asian authors and a few European authors considered it mandatory to drain the future liver remnant (FLR) in all patients, while American and most European authors indicated preoperative drainage only in selected cases (in malnourished patients and in those with hypoalbuminemia, cholangitis or long-term jaundice; with an FLR < 30% or 40%) given the high risk of complications of drainage (choleperitoneum, cholangitis, bleeding, and seeding). The optimal type of biliary drainage is still a matter of debate; recent studies have indicated that endoscopy is preferable to percutaneous drainage. Although the type of endoscopic biliary drainage has not been clearly established, the choice is made between plastic stents and short, covered, metallic stents, while other authors suggest the use of nasobiliary drainage. : A multidisciplinary evaluation (made by a surgeon, biliary endoscopist, gastroenterologist, and radiologist) of jaundiced neoplastic patients should be performed before deciding to perform biliary drainage. Middle-distal obstruction in patients who are candidates for PD does not usually require routine biliary drainage. Proximal obstruction in patients who are candidates for major hepatic resection in the majority of cases requires a drain; however, the type, site, number, and approach must be defined and tailored according to the planned hepatic resection. Recently, the use of preoperative biliary drainage limited to the FLR has been a suggested strategy. However, multicenter, randomized, controlled trials should be conducted to clarify this issue.

Creative Solutions for Higher Education Research Issues In Asia and Beyond

The current system of journal metrics adopted by most Western countries appears to marginalize many Asian and Latin American authors. Impact factors (both at the author and journal levels) rely heavily on citation indices which, understandably, favor Western authors. Of course, impact factors are used heavily in research funding decisions. Creative solutions are explored in this paper for Asian countries experiencing these problems.Keywords: journal metrics, impact factor, citation indices.

Repeatability and workability evaluation of SIGMOD 2011

SIGMOD has offered, since 2008, to verify the experiments published in the papers accepted at the conference. This year, we have been in charge of reproducing the experiments provided by the authors (repeatability), and exploring changes to experiment parameters (workability). In this paper, we assess the SIGMOD repeatability process in terms of participation, review process and results. While the participation is stable in terms of number of submissions, we find this year a sharp contrast between the high participation from Asian authors and the low participation from American authors. We also find that most experiments are distributed as Linux packages accompanied by instructions on how to setup and run the experiments. We are still far from the vision of executable papers.

"Eye Science"in 2011.

2011 is an opportune time for Yanke Xuebao (Eye Science) to launch its bilingual edition as a platform for cooperation between Chinese and international vision researchers. The yearly research output of Chinese investigators in all fields of science, but particularly biomedicine, has been growing recently by leaps and bounds. As an example, the American Journal of Ophthalmology (AJO), one of the most prestigious clinical journals in our field, received more submissions from East Asian authors (Japan, China and Korea alone) than they did from the United States in 2010. Chinese investigators ranked third on the list, climbing rapidly, only after the US and Japan. Top vision research centers in China, such as Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, where Eye Science is published, now rank alongside Moorfields and Johns Hopkins as among the most prolific institutions in the world, measured by articles appearing annually in peer-reviewed SCI journals.

Scientific publications in anesthesiology journals from East Asia: a 10-year survey of the literature

The scientific publications in anesthesiology research from East Asian authors have not been reported yet. The present study was designed to analyze the contribution of articles from East Asia to anesthesiology research. Articles published in 17 journals in anesthesiology originating from Japan, China, and South Korea from 2000 to 2009 were retrieved from the PubMed database and Web of Science. From 2000 to 2009, there were 3,076 articles published from East Asia. During this period, there were a notable decrease in publications from Japan and modest increases in publications from both China and South Korea. The average 5-year impact factor of the published articles was similar among the three regions, and China had the highest average number of citations to each article. Anesthesia & Analgesia published more articles than any other journal from all three regions. Our analysis showed that Japan was the most productive region in East Asia, but there was a notable decrease in publications from Japan in 2000-2009. The impact factor of the articles suggests similar levels of scholarship. Anesthesia & Analgesia was the most popular journal in East Asia.

Eluned Summers-Bremner, Insomnia: a cultural history, London, Reaktion Books, 2008, pp. 176, £19.95 (hardback 978-1-86189-317-8).

In Insomnia: a cultural history, Eluned Summers-Bremner seeks to explore attitudes toward sleeplessness from ancient times to the present. Because her sources are drawn primarily from literature, the book makes little effort to probe popular beliefs, much less how people across time and space actually grappled with insomnia. Also slighted are the causes of sleeplessness and its consequences upon the cadences of daily life. Summers-Bremner initially draws upon modern medicine to define insomnia “as the habitual inability to fall asleep or remain asleep when one wishes or needs to do so” (p. 7). So far, so good. But within several pages, we are off on a disjointed, at times perplexing tour that takes us, in the ensuing chapters, from Gilgamesh and the Odyssey to Charles Dickens and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Nor are references wanting to East Asian authors. In short, the author brings little rigour or discipline to her narrative. Making matters worse is that the topic of insomnia all but disappears amid metaphors and digressions that are at best tangential, involving such diverse matters as the European colonization of indigenous cultures, the prevalence of boredom in eighteenth-century England, and the Atlantic slave trade (“like insomnia, the slave trade was an actively dark state—dark because unseen, often distant from the site of investment and dealing—as well as a lack: the inability to see how to run an economy without it” [p. 12]). Not that the narrative is devoid of interesting insights, particularly in its discussion of modern sleep research; but these are obscured by prose that is often impenetrable, a grab-bag of jargon that undercuts the book’s appeal to either non-specialists or historians of medicine. What are we to make of the following: “To wake from sleep is to be found in the world and to have been remade by it, and to experience insomnia is to be kept from seeing, most often by means of excessive thoughts, how the productions of consciousness forestall the arrival of an unconscious state” (p. 12)? The principal thesis seems to be that insomnia has become a growing problem given the decreasing amount of sleep enjoyed by industrialized societies—what Summers-Bremner refers to as the increasing demands of a “wired world” that rarely pauses for rest or relaxation (p. 131). This, in turn, presumably fuels over-stimulation and anxiety that render sleep both troubled and brief. Fair enough; but in actuality, we have probably never slept so well, due to the problems that typically afflicted our forebears. Had Summers-Bremner relied less on literature and sought instead to incorporate a larger number of empirical sources, such as diaries, memoirs, legal records, and newspapers, she might have given greater credence to the impact of disease, hunger, frigid temperatures, noise, and lice, among myriad other sources of disturbed slumber—hence the chronic sleep deprivation that plagued labouring classes in pre-industrial western societies. Such is the importance of the history of insomnia that it deserves systematic study in its own right rather than to serve as a device by which to reflect upon a disparate body of imaginative literature. An index might also have helped.

Authors' opinions on publication in relation to annual performance assessment.

BackgroundIn the past 50 years there has been a substantial increase in the volume of published research and in the number of authors per scientific publication. There is also significant pressure exerted on researchers to produce publications. Thus, the purpose of this study was to survey corresponding authors in published medical journals to determine their opinion on publication impact in relation to performance review and promotion.MethodsCross-sectional survey of corresponding authors of original research articles published in June 2007 among 72 medical journals. Measurement outcomes included the number of publications, number of authors, authorship order and journal impact factor in relation to performance review and promotion.ResultsOf 687 surveys, 478 were analyzed (response rate 69.6%). Corresponding authors self-reported that number of publications (78.7%), journal impact factor (67.8%) and being the first author (75.9%) were most influential for their annual performance review and assessment. Only 17.6% of authors reported that the number of authors on a manuscript was important criteria for performance review and assessment. A higher percentage of Asian authors reported that the number of authors was key to performance review and promotion (41.4% versus 7.8 to 22.2%). compared to authors from other countries.ConclusionsThe number of publications, authorship order and journal impact factor were important factors for performance reviews and promotion at academic and non-academic institutes. The number of authors was not identified as important criteria. These factors may be contributing to the increase in the number of authors per publication.

Assessing Asian Scholarly Research in Library and Information Science: A Quantitative View As Reflected in Web of Knowledge

This paper highlights the quantitative performance of scholarly LIS research in Asian countries based on articles published during 2001–2007 in journals indexed by the Social Science Citation Index of Web of Knowledge. The quantitative performance of Asian countries has been judged and compared on the basis of various quantitative indicators: (a) size of scientific activity measured by volume of production in various types of publications during the period of study, (b) authorship pattern and collaboration of scientific activity measured by co-authorship and the amount of national and international collaboration, (c) the pattern of citations measured by counting the cited and citing references of published articles, and (d) a newly developed metrics-research performance.The results show that during the last seven years, the publication rate has increased twofold and, among the Asian countries, the authors of the People's Republic of China contributed the greatest number of articles, followed by Taiwan and South Korea. There is also an increasing trend toward collaborative research among Asian authors, with most of the collaboration occurring either among authors from the same country or with authors of non-Asian origin. The research performance analysis indicates that articles written by authors from South Korea received the highest number of citations, followed by Taiwan. Although the quantity of articles published by authors of Taiwan and South Korea is higher than Singapore and Israel, the articles contributed by authors from these latter two blocks appear in higher-impact journals.These findings show the increasing contribution made by Asian scholars to the international LIS literature, and the quality of that research.

Science Beyond Impact Factors

Over the next month, some exciting changes will take place in the functionality of Editorial Manager, the online submission system for Pharmaceutical Research. Authors will be able to select a preferred Editor for handling their manuscripts, provide suggestions for preferred (or non-preferred) reviewers, amongst other changes. On the review side, we will implement new areas of reviewer feedback that will allow for better communication with editors. Ultimately, these changes are designed to better serve our authors in making the review process more transparent and providing more constructive feedback on individual aspects of manuscripts. There will also be a few additional changes (1 )o n “Team PharmRes”: After serving the journal for more than 7 years, Dr. Toshikiro Kimura will retire his position as Professor and Dean of Okayama University and step down as Editor for Pharmaceutical Research. Toshikiro has been a devoted Editor in the area of drug delivery and served as a strong advocate for our Asian authors and reviewers. He is currently assisting the editorial office in the search for his successor in related areas of expertise. Second, Dr. Christine Vauthier will be taking over as Editor for Dr. Patrick Couvreur. Christine is a prolific scholar in the area of drug delivery and nanotechnology who has worked closely with Patrick during his tenure with Pharmaceutical Research; as a result, she is very familiar with the editorial process allowing for a smooth transition. Welcome on board, Christine! Lastly, Dr. Uday Kompella haschampionedthe journal forseveral years in the capacity asEditor, Expert Reviews. Thanks to his efforts, the journal has seen a steady stream of high-quality review articles in burgeoning new areas of research. He will now assume the role of regular editor for the journal in the areas of nanotechnology for drug delivery, gene delivery, and imaging. A long-standing debate about the value of impact factors in appraising the scientific value of publications may get more complicated with the introduction of the Eigenfactor Score (somewhat similar to a journal’s impact factor but corrected for self-citations) and the Article Influence Score (AIS), which calculates the relative importance of the journal on a per-article basis. The AIS is determined by dividing the Eigenfactor Score by the number of articles published in the journal and normalized to

High Impact IS Papers and Researchers in the Pacific Asia Region

As research in information systems (IS) becomes increasingly popular, it is interesting to know the impact of research from the Pacific Asia region and who has contributed more high impact papers. With the assistance of SSCI/SCIE database of Web of Science and Google Scholar, this study investigates the impact of Pacific Asian researchers and their papers by the citation numbers of their published papers in 21 IS journals. Common keywords and theories adopted in the most cited papers are also examined. The results indicate that scholars in Hong Kong, Australia, and Singapore are major contributors in the region. MIS Quarterly publishes most highly cited papers. Papers co-authored across regions are more likely to create high citations. Our findings provide insights into how research reports from Pacific Asian authors have influenced the development of knowledge in information systems.

BIBLIOMETRIC OVERVIEW OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH/MANAGEMENT SCIENCE RESEARCH IN ASIA

This paper evaluates the distribution of papers published by Asian authors in Operations Research and Management Science (OR/MS) journals from 1968 to 2006. The impact of OR/MS research in Asia is compared with that of the United States and the World, and research trends are highlighted through an analysis of keywords. From 1968 to 2006, 89,293 papers were published in 60 OR/MS journals. Of these, 41.4% came from USA and 16.6% came from seven Asian countries/regions. The contribution of different countries/regions is as follows: Japan 3.7%, Taiwan 3.2%, India 2.3%, Hong Kong 2.2%, South Korea 2.1%, People's Republic of China (PRC) 1.9%, and Singapore 1.2%. Among all the articles analyzed, 20% have a single author, and 9% have more than three authors; additionally, 22 papers have been cited more than 100 times and 29% have never been cited. Most articles originating in Japan, Taiwan, India, South Korea, PRC, and Singapore are produced in collaboration with local scholars, followed by authors from the United States. Hong Kong is a notable exception, 73% of articles from Hong Kong are produced in cooperation with the PRC, followed by local scholars. The five most productive institutions are as follows: The Indian Institute of Technology, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, the National University of Singapore, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the National Chiao-Tung University (Taiwan).

Variations of author origins in World Journal of Gastroenterology during 2001-2007

To discuss the variations and distributions of authors who published their papers in World Journal of Gastroenterology (WJG) during 2001-2007 and evaluate the development of WJG and gastroenterology core journals in recent years by comparing the contributions of the authors. WJG articles published in 2001-2007 were searched from MEDLINE database (by ISI Web of Knowledge). The variations (cooperation degree, cooperation rate) and distributions of the first authors were analyzed with bibliometric methods. SCIE was used to collect articles published in Am J Gastroenterol, Gastroenterology, Scand J Gastroenterol and WJG in 2007, and comparison of the data was made. Comparison indicators included the article number of annual journals, cooperation degree of authors, cooperation rate, mean number of articles published in each WJG issue, number of countries of the first WJG authors, geographical distribution and article contribution ratio of all WJG authors and domestic authors. Of the 5851 articles covered in MEDLINE, 173, 236, 633, 826, 1496, 1382 and 1105 articles were cited from 2001 to 2007. The cooperation degree was 5.11, 5.56, 5.75, 5.76, 6.31, 5.90 and 5.64 respectively. The cooperation rates was 94.80%, 99.15%, 98.89%, 98.55%, 99.13%, 96.67% and 95.66%, respectively. The mean number of articles published in each WJG issue from 2001 to 2007 was 28, 39, 52, 34, 31, 28 and 23, respectively. The number of countries of the first WJG authors was 8, 8, 27, 32, 49, 61 and 56, respectively. The first authors of WJG came from 3 continents in 2001 and covered 6 continents in 2006-2007. The number of articles written by Asian authors was 136 (79.07%), 227 (96.19%), 575 (90.98%), 713 (87.81%), 1111 (75.32%), 712 (53.98%) and 555 (53.21%), respectively in 2001-2007. The number of articles written by European & American authors increased from 36 (20.93%) and 8 (3.39%) in 2001-2002 to 563 (42.68%) and 452(43.34%) in 2006-2007. The number of countries except for China contributing papers was increased. The number of articles written by first authors of Japan rose from 0 (0%) in 2001-2002 to 287 (12.15%) in 2006-2007. The number of articles written by American authors increased from 6 (1.47%) in 2001-2002 to 158 (6.69%) in 2006-2007. The number of articles written by Chinese authors was 136 (79.07%), 227 (96.19%), 548 (86.71%), 669 (82.39%), 884 (59.93%), 380 (28.81%) and 320 (30.68%), respectively, in 2001 to 2007. The number of articles published in Am J Gastroenterol, Gastroenterology, Scand J Gastroenterol and WJG was 565, 586, 238 and 1118, respectively in 2007. The cooperation degree was 4.77, 6.14, 5.95 and 5.64, respectively, in 2007. The cooperation rate was 95.40%, 84.18%, 96.63% and 95.66%, respectively, in 2007. The number of countries of authors contributing papers was 44, 35, 42 and 62, respectively, in 2007. The geographical distribution of WJG authors is wide for the past 2 years. WJG has made a step onto international publishing, and drawn even more attentions from gastroenterology researchers. Its authors are distributed over 74 countries in 6 global continents, and the journal has become the main intermediary for international gastroenterology researchers to demonstrate their research accomplishments.

Some Musings on Cultural Responses to Asian American Literature in Singapore

For my students the sense of relative ease in accessing the theoretical and thematic concerns of Asian literature appears to derive from a perception of the contemporaneity, and hence relevancy, of the Asian experience; and part of it also seems to stem from the view that there are shared and distinctive affinities between Asian culture and the Singaporean or Asian one. To understand this phenomenon, it should be pointed out that the make up the major ethnic constituency in Singapore. Given that I start my reading of Asian literature by considering the canonical literary productions of Asian authors of descent—Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan—it is not exactly surprising for my students then to respond and react to the side of the Chinese American equation in certain ways, such as by bringing into play a sense of shared cultural affinities. A teacher encountering such perceptions finds that one challenge lies in enabli...

Asia—Growing Stronger

Asia—Growing Stronger

Select Books – the struggle of an independent bookshop

This is a first‐hand account of the initial 28 years of Select Books, an independent bookshop, located in Singapore, but with a regional Southeast Asian focus and a global reach. Select Books carved a niche for itself by specializing in books about Southeast Asia and published in Southeast Asia. Its comprehensive and in‐depth book stock gave it an edge over formidable competition at home and abroad. The author relates the difficulties encountered and the novel solutions Select Books employed to overcome administrative problems and sidestep bureaucratic red tape. Select Books operated on all levels of the book trade: as bookseller, distributor, library supplier and publisher. Equally important is its intangible role as a promoter of Southeast Asian authors and their works in Singapore as well as to the first world. Select Books provided a cultural space where authors could meet with their readership. Turning to the broader book community, the author is critical of the Eurocentric mindsets of public and academic institutions in Singapore. She is equally critical of the parochial and prejudiced international market that dismisses books about Asia as insufficiently ‘mainstream’ for their market.

Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. By Gabriele Griffin. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. x + 291. $75 cloth.

Gabriele Griffin's study of black and Asian women playwrights in contemporary Britain fills a gap in British theatre studies. Although a comprehensive study of black British theatre has yet to see print, two developments have, in the past decade or so, begun to stimulate critical attention in the field. One is the publication of plays by black and Asian authors, including collections of plays exclusively by women (such as Khadija George's edition of Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers of 1993), as well as the more systematic inclusion of works by writers such as Winsome Pinnock and Trish Cooke in anthologies of plays by new British dramatists. A second is the work of British cultural-studies scholars and sociologists during the same period, which has offered theatre historians some new approaches and challenges: Kobena Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle (1994); Catherine Ugwu's Let's Get It On (1995); Baker et al.'s Black British Cultural Studies (1996); Heidi Mirza's edited volume Black British Feminism (1997)—not to mention a vast body of work by Stuart Hall, Avtar Brah, Paul Gilroy, and others. Still, as Griffin notes at the outset, while immigrant and second-generation novels and films have received attention and accolades, black British theatre has tended to be ignored except by a handful of feminist theatre scholars.

USING ENGLISH LITERATURE WRITTEN BY ASIAN AUTHORS IN EFL/ESL CLASSROOMS IN ASIA

This paper proposes an argument that literary texts in English which are written by Asian authors should be more extensively used as language teaching materials designed for EFL/ESL classrooms in Asian countries. The use of these texts can overcome the cultural stumbling blocks experienced by students. In addition, the texts can be utilized to promote cultural awareness and the role of English as an international language. To support this point of view, various issues in using what is often called non-native English literature are examined in the essay.

Internationalization of general surgical journals: origin and content of articles published in North America and Great Britain from 1983 to 1998.

The origin and characteristics of articles published in the 6 highest rated (Institute for Scientific Information classification) English-language general surgical journals have changed significantly during the past 15 years. All articles published in 1983, 1988, 1993, and 1998 in 5 US surgical journals and 1 British surgical journal were reviewed and characterized. Absolute numbers and proportions of national and international articles published in each journal. Articles reviewed included 4868 in US journals and 1380 in the British journal. The total number of US journal articles decreased by 15.1%. The total number of British journal articles increased by 58.9%. The percentage of national articles decreased from 87.5% to 68.8% in US journals (P<.001) and constituted the minority of freely submitted articles in 1998 in 3 of 5 US journals. The percentage of national articles also decreased from 74.8% to 47.1% in the British journal (P<.001). Articles by European and Asian authors showed the most striking increases in all journals. The percentage of basic research articles declined in US journals from 23.3% to 17.9% (P =.001) owing to a 14.9% decline in national basic research articles. The percentage of clinical randomized studies increased from 2.2% to 4.1% (P<.008), but the increase was attributable to international articles. Government funding alone decreased from 13.6% to 11.2%, and government plus another source of funding decreased from 19.2% to 16.7% for national articles in US journals. Internationalization of the highly rated British and the 5 highest rated US general surgical journals has occurred. The decrease in the number of national articles in the US journals has been accompanied by significant decreases in government funding and basic research articles and a static output of clinical randomized studies from North America.