Cross-disciplinary Comparisons Research Articles

A Systematic Literature Review on Academic Title Studies in Genre Analysis

This systematic literature review examined the titles of academic texts in the context of genre analysis, an area obtaining increasing academic attention. Employing PRISMA (2020), this study systematically analyzed 52 studies (2004–2024) on academic titles sourced from three major academic databases (Web of Science, Scopus and ProQuest), with additional support from Google Scholar. A significant post-2020 increase in academic title studies illustrates the growing importance of effective title formulation in the digital age of academia. The review indicated a geographical concentration of studies from the regions of Asia and Europe, highlighting a gap in contributions from other regions like North and South America, and Africa. It also revealed a prevalent focus on the research contents of titles’ length, syntactic structure, and information attribute, alongside an emphasis on cross-disciplinary comparisons, particularly between titles from ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences. This review not only mapped the current landscape of academic title research in genre analysis but also suggested potential directions for further exploration, aiming to enhance a more comprehensive and globally representative understanding of this crucial aspect of academic communication.

Response of alpine ground temperatures to a rising atmospheric 0 °C isotherm in the period 1955–2021

Ground temperatures in alpine terrain vary considerably over short distances, particularly due to differences in elevation and incoming short-wave radiation but also snow and surface conditions. To allow for direct cross-site, interregional, and cross-disciplinary comparisons, we introduce a parameter called the potential 0 °C isotherm (PZDI) in the ground. This parameter represents an aspect- and elevation independent geo-projection of ground temperatures. It was calculated for several ground temperature datasets from the (sub-)permafrost zone in the European Alps. We analyse the reaction of the PZDI at different depths to long-term changes in atmospheric temperature, represented by the atmospheric 0 °C isotherm (AZDI). The close correspondence of PZDI and AZDI mainly provided two new insights: Based on 15 boreholes, the PZDI/AZDI interaction allowed a depth-dependent analysis of the magnitude and temporal evolution of the disequilibrium between atmosphere and ground and the potential heat transfer processes involved. Moreover, it allowed a reconstruction of the development of ground temperatures in the European Alps during the second half of the 20th century, adding 50 years to the longest existing time series measured in ice-poor permafrost. This extension into the past reveals a major warming at the end of the 1980s, which occurred before the start of the available permafrost temperature observations. In the 1955–2021 period, the 5-year running mean of the AZDI rose by 400 m, while the PZDI at 15 m depth rose by about 300 m. Projecting this warming into a permafrost distribution map shows a decline in shallow, ice-poor permafrost area by roughly 60 % since the 1980s. We expect the PZDI to follow the AZDI and to increase by another 100 m in the coming decade and up to at least 14 m depth. This would increase the area with loss of shallow permafrost to approximately 80 % since the 1980s.

Name and scale matter: Clarifying the geography of Tibetan Plateau and adjacent mountain regions

Geographical names and the entities they represent act as a fundamental cornerstone across numerous disciplines. However, inconsistent geographical names and arbitrarily defined regional geographical scales are common, hindering cross-disciplinary communication and synthesis. The Pan-Tibetan Highlands, comprising the Tibetan Plateau, Himalaya, Hengduan Mountains and Mountains of Central Asia, is a case in point. To rectify these inconsistencies of terminology, we employed a multi-disciplinary approach to standardize the nomenclature of the Tibetan Plateau and the three adjacent mountain regions, defining their spatial extent using historical and contemporary perspectives. A literature meta-analysis indicated that ‘Tibetan Plateau’, ‘Himalaya’ and ‘Hengduan Mountains’ are the most suitable names for these regions in terms of both priority (earliest use) and popularity, whereas ‘Mountains of Central Asia’ emerges as appropriate for the mountain chains to the west of the Tibetan Plateau. The new term ‘Pan-Tibetan Highlands’ is proposed to replace the less precise and arguably misleading ‘High Mountain Asia’ for these regions collectively. Additionally, new geographical boundaries, applicable back through time, are proposed for each region, based on geological and geomorphological features. Using these new boundaries, the Pan-Tibetan Highlands area is 3.95 × 106 km2 with a mean elevation of 3824 m, while the Tibetan Plateau is smaller (1.82 × 106 km2) and higher (4465 m) than commonly assumed. Across the Pan-Tibetan Highlands, the proportion of protected areas is far below the proposed 30% anticipated in the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework target with only a few exceptions. Additionally, the Hengduan Mountains showed the highest vascular plant species richness and endemism, followed by Himalaya, Mountains of Central Asia and the Tibetan Plateau. The obvious conservation gap in the Pan-Tibetan Highlands calls for urgent research-based optimization of conservation networks. Our approach benefits quantitative spatial analysis by providing well-defined geographical scales for various fields, aiding cross-disciplinary comparisons and synthesis.

Hedging in Academic Writing: Cross-disciplinary Comparisons in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP).

Hedging has been a long-standing challenge for English learners. Emerging from the research on hedging in academic writing is the natural/social science dichotomy that hedging is more common in social sciences than in natural sciences. Yet, this line of research has been primarily based on a limited number of disciplines. To bridge this gap, this study compares sixteen disciplines to uncover the cross-disciplinary variation in hedging based on successful student writing captured by the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). Five types of hedging devices were investigated. The results suggest that hedging is more common in argumentation-driven disciplines than in the data-driven ones. Cross-disciplinary differences were also found between disciplines under the same division. The findings challenge assumptions and raise questions about the natural/social science dichotomy in academic writing, calling for discipline-specific instruction on hedging in teaching English for academic purposes. The study also demonstrates the affordances of corpus tools for data-driven teaching and computer-assisted language learning in remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 impact on the health and emotional well-being of the general population

A tremendous number of studies describe results on the evolution of the COVID-19 impact on infected patients, hospital admissions, deaths, mental health and well-being of the population. However, there are hardly any reports on its impact and evolution since the beginning of the pandemic with clinical, contextual and individual perception information. Our work describes the research project called Health Care and Social Survey (ESSOC, Encuesta Sanitaria y SOCial). It arises from the need to provide specific, reliable, early, and timely data on the impact of COVID-19 that can be considered when making decisions to prepare and provide an effective Public Health response in the different affected populations. It is linked to official statistical operations included in the Andalusian Regional Government and has also been granted a favorable opinion by the Research Ethics Committee. The ESSOC is based on a Real-World Data design. It integrates observational data extracted from multiple sources including information based on surveys and clinical, epidemiological, population, and environmental registries. The surveys have an overlapping panel design with a total of over 22,000 effective interviews being carried out over three years from the beginning of the state of alarm in Spain. Their geographical scope is the Autonomous Region of Andalusia (8.4MM people, the fifth most populated region in Europe), and the population scopes are general population, population residing in disadvantaged areas, and population over the age of 55. The conceptual approach of this study encompasses all aspects affecting health that will contribute to an extraordinary increase in the current knowledge of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its results will be very useful for cross-disciplinary comparisons in population-based studies, and the methodology developed will serve as a model to be applied in other epidemiological studies.Key messages It is needed to provide specific, reliable, early, and timely data on the impact of COVID-19 that can be considered when making decisions to prepare and provide an effective Public Health response.Our research project integrates observational data extracted from multiple sources including information based on surveys and clinical, epidemiological, population, and environmental registries.

Survey of modern language research guides: a window on disciplinary information literacy

PurposeThis study aims to use research guides as a window to disciplinary information literacy in the field of modern language studies from a librarian’s point of view. Informed by literature on disciplinary research practices and on library research guides, it analyzes how librarians represent, and teach, an especially rich and multifaceted information landscape.Design/methodology/approachResearchers analyzed the topical coverage, organization, resource emphasis and instructional content of 182 research guides in the field of modern language studies. Data were collected both manually and automatically using a Web scraper. Data were then coded using categories developed by the authors.FindingsGuides focused on language and literature topics, with some interdisciplinary coverage. Guides tended to focus on resources and formats rather than user tasks or instruction. Over two thirds of guides included some type of instruction, primarily focused on locating resources, and a slim majority of instructional topics were specific to modern language studies.Research limitations/implicationsLooking at guides from another field would have allowed for cross-disciplinary comparisons. It is possible that including guides from additional languages or universities would have given different results.Originality/valueAlthough there is significant literature on research guides, few have analyzed how they reflect what information literacy looks like in a particular discipline. This study also contributes to research on information literacy instruction for modern languages and recommends that it be informed by an understanding of disciplinary research practices.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Where Do We Go from Here?

Scientific Production and Productivity in Curriculum Vitae Characterisation: Simple and Nested H Indices that Support Cross-Disciplinary Comparisons

In this study, I developed operational versions of Hirsch’s H index that can be applied to each researcher’s curriculum vitae (CV) to allow cross-disciplinary comparisons. The revised indices account for anomalies that potentially arise from tactical or opportunistic citation and publication behaviours by authors and editors, and can be calculated from readily available information. I split the original H index into nested indices to isolate networking activity, distinguish scientific production and productivity, and used nested Gini indices to identify intentional and successful inter-topical and inter-disciplinary research. I applied the most popular normalisations (i.e., per author and per year) using simple methodologies (i.e., least-squares linear and cubic interpolation fitting, whole-career vs. sub-periods, two-dimensional graphs) to solve empirical problems (e.g., sensitivity to citations, the “fashion” effect, attribution to disciplines, life cycle of articles) as well as open questions (e.g., the attribution of an article to a given discipline) associated with the original H index. I provided three numerical examples based on a representative heterodox, a representative orthodox multi-disciplinary, and a representative orthodox uni-disciplinary CV: the first CV includes 17 Scopus publications, and shows a highly heterodox (i.e., 5.8%), but no interdisciplinary research career, with a tiny networking component (i.e., 0.9%); the second CV includes 24 Scopus publications, and shows a slightly heterodox (i.e., 0.3%), but highly interdisciplinary (i.e., 53.9%) research career, with a small networking component (i.e., 14.3%); the third CV includes 16 Scopus publications, and shows slightly heterodox (i.e., 0.1%) and no interdisciplinary research career, with no networking component.

Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: a longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison

This article aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive comparison of the coverage of the three major bibliometric databases: Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science. Based on a sample of 146 senior academics in five broad disciplinary areas, we therefore provide both a longitudinal and a cross-disciplinary comparison of the three databases. Our longitudinal comparison of eight data points between 2013 and 2015 shows a consistent and reasonably stable quarterly growth for both publications and citations across the three databases. This suggests that all three databases provide sufficient stability of coverage to be used for more detailed cross-disciplinary comparisons. Our cross-disciplinary comparison of the three databases includes four key research metrics (publications, citations, h-index, and hI, annual, an annualised individual h-index) and five major disciplines (Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, Sciences and Life Sciences). We show that both the data source and the specific metrics used change the conclusions that can be drawn from cross-disciplinary comparisons.

Calibrated prevalence of infertility in 30- to 49-year-old women according to different approaches: a cross-sectional population-based study.

How does the estimated prevalence of infertility among 30- to 49-year-old women vary when using different approaches to its measurement? The prevalence of women with difficulties in conceiving differed widely according to the measurement approach adopted. Establishing the true magnitude of infertility as a public health problem is challenging, given that it is not categorized as a disability or chronic condition and may be largely unreported. The time required to conceive is an increasingly frequent concern among couples of reproductive age. Population-based studies do not consider multiple approaches to infertility measurement in the same sample. A face-to-face cross-sectional population-based survey of 443 women aged between 30 and 49 years residing in Huelva, southern Spain, was carried out. The sample size estimation was based on an assumed prevalence of infertility of 19%, a sampling error of ±4.84 percentage points, a design effect of 1.8 and a 95% confidence level. The information was collected in 2011. Self-reported information was gathered on socio-demographic data, pregnancy history, time required to become pregnant and perception of difficulties in becoming pregnant. Eight approaches to the estimation of infertility prevalence were considered: diagnosed infertility, subjective infertility, 1-year infertility, primary infertility, secondary infertility and subfertility based on the time taken to conceive (6, 12 or 24 months). Calibration estimators (indirect estimation techniques) were used to extrapolate the infertility prevalences to the whole of Spain. The response rate was 61.05%. Among 30- to 49-year-old Spanish women, 1.26% had a clinical diagnosis of infertility, 17.58% did not achieve pregnancy in 1 year (1-year infertility), 8.22% perceived difficulties in procreation (subjective infertility), 6.12% had not succeeded in having biological children (primary infertility) and 11.33% had not been able to have another biological child (secondary infertility). Finally, pregnancy was not achieved within 6, 12 and 24 months of starting to attempt conception in 19.98, 11.21 and 4.36% of women, respectively. These approaches to estimate the prevalence of infertility show similar socio-demographic patterns except for educational level. Calibration adjustments allowed extrapolation of these prevalences to Spain and a reduction of from 3.7 to 90.4% in their variances. The response rate was moderate but acceptable in comparison to similar studies. We only asked whether the women had practiced intercourse without contraceptive methods for >1 year. Hence, we could only calculate the time for which a couple were trying to become pregnant when the woman became pregnant, and we do not know whether it was longer than 1 year for the women failing to conceive. Future research should avoid this study weakness by gathering quantitative data on the months during which vaginal sexual intercourse was practiced, with no time limit. The only prevalence with a high coefficient of variation was that for diagnosed infertility, and our estimation for this prevalence should be interpreted with caution. Despite major differences according to the approach adopted, the prevalences of infertility estimated in our study are comparable with those obtained in other similar studies. A set of categories to measure infertility including subjective infertility, 1-year infertility and subfertility have been proposed here, which may be useful for cross-disciplinary comparisons of infertility in clinical and population-based studies. These measures may also assist health managers to tailor fertility resources and services to the real needs of the population and provide a more rapid and effective response to couples. Finally, the calibration adjustments (indirect estimation techniques) applied to the infertility prevalences help to maximize their generalization and improve accuracy. This technique may be considered as a model for application in other epidemiological studies.

Carsten Herrmann-Pillath's Foundations of economic evolution: a treatise on the natural philosophy of economics. Edward Elgar, 2013, 704 pp.

Review of Carsten Herrmann-Pillath's Foundations of economic evolution: a treatise on the natural philosophy of economics. Edward Elgar, 2013, 704 pp.There is no settled view among economists about the place of their discipline in the general architecture of the sciences, but in their methodological remarks one finds two common ways of side-stepping the issue. Some, for example Edward Leamer (2012), maintain that economics is not a science, but is rather a craft aimed at policy engineering. Leamer directs his criticisms against a more traditional alternative, which defends the scientific credentials of economics, and at the same time distinguishes economics from other sciences, by reference to applications and extensions1 of a set of axioms descended from Paul Samuelson (1947). The discipline's most influential textbooks (such as Mas-Colell, et al. 1995), present economics according to the latter approach, which finds its logical apotheosis in the work of Bernt Stigum (1990). In this context it is straightforward to identify relationships between economics and similarly axiomatized domains of inquiry, such as the psychology of decision making, by comparing axiom sets. I refer to this philosophy as a way of avoiding substantive questions about interdisciplinary relationships because it displaces them by purely technical ones and, more importantly, because it renders by fiat all questions about the place of economics among those sciences that are not axiomatically structured implicitly ill-formed and therefore unanswerable. This point applies to the majority of behavioral and social sciences.Since the demise of logical empiricism, few philosophers of science have supported the idea that the boundaries of empirical sciences can be literally identified with formal structures. This does not force us over to Leamer's view, because the dichotomy he assumes is too restrictive. It is possible to agree with him that economists are and should be practical in their focus and opportunistic in their use of sources of evidence, while nevertheless believing that economists have managed to collectively discover some theoretical generalizations about the structure of the social world. That is enough to motivate interest in how these generalizations can be true of the same world as claims in apparent tension with them that emerge from related disciplines such as sociology (Coleman 1990), demography (Clark 2009), cognitive science (Simon 1957; Clark 1997; Ross 2005; Kahneman 2011), neuroscience (Glimcher 2012), evolutionary psychology (Ofek 2001), the psychology of motivation and personality development (Schelling 1978, 1980; Ainslie 1992, 2001), ethology (Noe, et al. 2001), and the histories of technology (Ziman 2000; Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2012), business (Schumpeter [1911] 1982; Porter 1980, 1985; Ghemawat 1998) and political institutions (North 1990, 2005; Bates 2001; Grief 2006; Aligica and Boettke 2009). As noted, the formalist approach does not allow one to even begin to get purchase on most questions of this kind, though sometimes-as in Coleman (1990) and Glimcher (2012)-explicit implications for formal relationships are drawn from informal inductive reflection.Once we get as far as asking whether it is worthwhile to explore pairwise relationships between economics and specific other disciplines, we can generalize this style of questioning to ask what, if anything, might be said about the place of economics in the overall architecture of systematic inquiry. There have been very few sustained investigations of this type. The investment required is considerable, as it demands broad and synaptic mastery of the history and philosophy of multiple fields of study; and the expected return is relatively meager, as even the minority of economists who find value in cross-disciplinary comparisons are often skeptical about the practical point of studies that necessarily cast their focus far from the empirical ground. Yet, for all that, the general question once raised is irresistible, even if only for late-night reflections with a glass of wine, to any economist who is self-conscious about her discipline's roots, limits, and future. …

A Simple Journal Ranking Tactic to Address Coercive Citation and Discipline-Specific Citation Density in Academic Business Journals

This paper describes a flexible way to unify the many disparate citation-based journal ranking metrics commonly used to assess the relative merit of academic business journals. The guiding principle for the proposed approach is the simple and intuitively appealing idea that a journal in a given discipline should be judged relative to the prowess of the top journal(s) in its discipline. This ratio approach functions as a hybrid of the stated preference and revealed preference journal ranking ideologies, and accordingly offers several far reaching advantages, among them the ability to map all citation-based journal metrics to the zero-one interval, hence normalizing inter-metric and cross-disciplinary journal comparisons. The ratio approach also accounts for citation density across business fields and mitigates the effects of coercive citation, which can undermine cross-discipline journal comparisons if left unchecked.

A Reverse Engineering Approach to the Suppression of Citation Biases Reveals Universal Properties of Citation Distributions

The large amount of information contained in bibliographic databases has recently boosted the use of citations, and other indicators based on citation numbers, as tools for the quantitative assessment of scientific research. Citations counts are often interpreted as proxies for the scientific influence of papers, journals, scholars, and institutions. However, a rigorous and scientifically grounded methodology for a correct use of citation counts is still missing. In particular, cross-disciplinary comparisons in terms of raw citation counts systematically favors scientific disciplines with higher citation and publication rates. Here we perform an exhaustive study of the citation patterns of millions of papers, and derive a simple transformation of citation counts able to suppress the disproportionate citation counts among scientific domains. We find that the transformation is well described by a power-law function, and that the parameter values of the transformation are typical features of each scientific discipline. Universal properties of citation patterns descend therefore from the fact that citation distributions for papers in a specific field are all part of the same family of univariate distributions.

Testing the fairness of citation indicators for comparison across scientific domains: The case of fractional citation counts

Citation numbers are extensively used for assessing the quality of scientific research. The use of raw citation counts is generally misleading, especially when applied to cross-disciplinary comparisons, since the average number of citations received is strongly dependent on the scientific discipline of reference of the paper. Measuring and eliminating biases in citation patterns is crucial for a fair use of citation numbers. Several numerical indicators have been introduced with this aim, but so far a specific statistical test for estimating the fairness of these numerical indicators has not been developed. Here we present a statistical method aimed at estimating the effectiveness of numerical indicators in the suppression of citation biases. The method is simple to implement and can be easily generalized to various scenarios. As a practical example we test, in a controlled case, the fairness of fractional citation count, which has been recently proposed as a tool for cross-discipline comparison. We show that this indicator is not able to remove biases in citation patterns and performs much worse than the rescaling of citation counts with average values.

Publication Records of Faculty Promoted to Professor: Evidence from the UK Accounting and Finance Academic Community

This study investigates the publication profiles of 140 accounting and finance faculty promoted to the senior rank of professor at UK and Irish universities during the period 1992 to 2007. On average, approximately 9 papers in Association of Business Schools (ABS) (2008)-listed journals, with 5 at the highest 3*/4* quality levels in a portfolio of 20 outputs are required for promotion to professor. Multivariate analysis provides evidence that publication requirements in terms of ABS ranked journal papers have increased over time, an effect attributed to the government research assessment exercise. There is no evidence that requirements differ for: internal versus external promotion, male versus female candidates; accounting versus finance professors, research intensity of institution peer group; or government research ranking of unit. There is also no evidence of a substitution effect in relation to increased recent publication history, quantity of non-ABS outputs or sole-authorship, all of which show a significant complementary effect. It is noted that there is very limited overlap in the UK and US publication journal sets, suggesting underlying geographically-based paradigm differences. The benchmarks provided in this study are informative in a range of decision settings: recruitment; those considering making an application for promotion to a chair and those involved in promotion panels; cross-disciplinary comparisons; and resource allocation. The evidence presented also contributes to the emerging policy debates concerning the aging demographic profile of accounting faculty, the management of academic labour and the Research Excellence Framework.

A made-to-measure indicator for cross-disciplinary bibliometric ranking of researchers performance

This paper presents and discusses a new bibliometric indicator of research performance, designed with the fundamental concern of enabling cross-disciplinary comparisons. The indicator, called x-index, compares a researcher's output to a reference set of research output from top researchers, identified in the journals where the researcher has published. It reflects publication quantity and quality, uses a moderately sized data set, and works with a more refined definition of scientific fields. x-index was developed to rank researchers in a scientific excellence award in the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. The data set collected for the 2009 edition of the award is used to study the indicator's features and design choices, and provides the basis for a discussion of its advantages and limitations.

Percentile-Based Journal Impact Factors: A Neglected Collection Development Metric.

Various normalization techniques to transform journal impact factors (JIFs) into a standard scale or range of values have been reported a number of times in the literature, but have seldom been part of collection development librarians' tool kits. In this paper, JIFs as reported in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database are converted to percentiles (0%-100%) using Microsoft Excel's PERCENTRANK function. This permits a more intuitive evaluation of journal ranking within JCR subject categories and broader disciplines. The top journal by impact factor in any category is set to 100% while the lowest impact factor journal is set to 0% with all other journals on the list scaled according to their rank. Percentile-based impact factors (PIFs) also allow valid cross-disciplinary comparisons of impact factors, something not possible using JIFs. Finally, since a given journal title is often assigned to multiple subject categories, the relative impact of the same journal title can be compared and evaluated across each of those categories. This paper argues that PIFs should become a standard component of journal collection evaluation projects. The history, use, and misuse of impact factors are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anatolian Interfaces: Hittites, Greeks and their Neighbours. Proceedings of an International Conference on Cross-Cultural Interaction, September 17-19, 2004, Emory University, Atlanta, GA (review)

Reviewed by: Anatolian Interfaces: Hittites, Greeks and their Neighbours. Proceedings of an International Conference on Cross-Cultural Interaction, September 17-19, 2004, Emory University, Atlanta, GA Annette Teffeteller Billie Jean Collins, Mary R. Bachvarova, and Ian C. Rutherford, eds. Anatolian Interfaces: Hittites, Greeks and their Neighbours. Proceedings of an International Conference on Cross-Cultural Interaction, September 17-19, 2004, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008. Pp. x+213; 2 maps, 8 figs. (3 tables, 5 B&W illustrations). US $90.00, GB 45 (hardback). ISBN-13: 978-1-84217-270-4. It is now more than a decade since Calvert Watkins observed that classicists did not "seem to be trampling each other in their haste to get at the Hittite texts," and were thus, he implied, denying themselves the opportunity to explore the "linguistic and thematic connections between speakers from these geographically contiguous regions [of Greece and Anatolia], who were certainly in contact at various times and in various places in the second millennium B.C. and later."1 This book might start the stampede. It offers a wealth of material for Hellenists, insight and information on a wide range of topics: the evolution of epic, Homeric formulas, Mycenaean Hittite diplomatic correspondence, Lesbos as a Hittite possession, the purple-dye industry in the Late Bronze Age, girls' choruses, the Hellenistic devotees of Kybele, the homeland of the wandering Luwians, isoglosses between Greek and Anatolian languages, Lydian loanwords in Greek, and much more. A brief introduction by the editors succinctly provides the geographical, historical, and cultural context for the studies to come in the volume and identifies general issues to be addressed.2 Eric Cline then leads off with the Anatolian topos (literal and figurative) of concern to all classicists: Troy. He sees Troy as a multicultural [End Page 281] "contested periphery," claimed and fought for in the Late Bronze Age by Mycenaeans to the west and Hittites to the east, and in the modern world "positioned on the periphery between academic and popular scholarship (11–12)." The "contest" between Troy's recent excavator, the late Manfred Korfmann and his Tübingen colleague and media-focused detractor Frank Kolb is briefly visited, and the relegation of Troy and the Trojan War to "the fringe of serious academia," thanks to the general public's association of Troy with topics such as Atlantis and Noah's Ark, lamented. Cline closes with the hope that future cross-disciplinary comparisons with other, similarly contested peripheral areas will help us to better understand Late Bronze Age Troy and the Troad. One might also note with satisfaction that the recent and (one hopes) increasing "cross-cultural" interaction in scholarship between classicists and Anatolianists—attested to by the volume under review here, and the conference which gave rise to it—offers ever more promising results in revealing the history and culture of this peripheral but pivotal region. In a letter sent in the late 14th or early 13th century BC to the Hittite king by Manapa-Tarhunta, king of the Seha River Land in western Anatolia, we learn that there has been a raid on the Land of Lazpa (Greek Lesbos) and that among those taken prisoner is a group of ŞĀRIPŪTU-men who are in the service of the Hittite king. Their appeal to their captors is recorded: "We are tributaries (arkammanaliuš) and we came o[ve]r the sea. Let us [render] our tribute (arkamman)! Šigauna may have committed a crime, but we have done nothing." Eventually, following an intervention by (apparently) the king of Mira, "the ŞĀRIPŪTU-men of the gods who (belong) to His Majesty" were released. Itamar Singer accepts a recent interpretation (made in another context) of ŞĀRIPŪTU-men as "purple-dyers" and takes us through a detailed and completely fascinating account of the purple-dye industry and its terminology in the ancient Near East, Anatolia, and the Aegean, ending back in Lazpa, where the "tribute" to be rendered by the Hittite king's ŞĀRIPŪTU-men is now seen to be purple wool, an expensive and prestigious "tribute" almost certainly intended as a dedication to "some important deity of Lazpa … perhaps an early hypostasis of Aphrodite...

The Economics of Thrombolysis

See related article, pages 1952–1955. Stroke leads to significant long-term disability with important ongoing human and economic costs. Although the clinical and economic benefits of thrombolysis have been demonstrated in previous analyses,1 efficacious large volume stroke care requires systematic organization and commitment on the part of healthcare payers. Canada benefits from a universal single-payer system which faces increasing cost pressures attributable to an ageing population and increasing costs of healthcare technology. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that healthcare spending could double as a proportion of GDP in this country by 2050.2 The Canadian Institutes of Health Information note that Canadian jurisdictions spent 38.7% of all expenditures on health care in 2005 to 2006.3 Development and maintenance of stroke care systems will require well executed economic analyses to influence policy makers. In this regard, stroke is an ideal condition to treat from an economic perspective because its incidence is strongly age-linked …

Rome and the Comparative Study of Tributary Empires

This paper seeks to bring the separate fields of Roman, Mughal and to some extent, Chinese and Ottoman studies into dialogue. It argues that archaic or tributary empires have much in common and could usefully be made the subject of cross-disciplinary comparisons. Dis cussion is centred on exploring problems in our understanding of patrimonial authority and of the complex trading systems arising in connection with these empires. The paper argues that these phenomena need to be lifted out of the modernisation perspective which they are habitually treated within.