Individual Research Teams Research Articles

The future of data analysis is now: Integrating generative AI in neuroimaging methods development

Abstract In this perspective, we highlight how emerging artificial intelligence tools are likely to impact the experiences of researchers conducting computational fMRI analyses. While calls for the automatization of statistical procedures date back at least to the inception of “data science” as a field, generative artificial intelligence offers new opportunities to advance field practice. We highlight how these tools are poised to impact both new neuroimaging methods development in areas such as image quality control and in day-to-day practice when generating analysis code. We argue that considering generative artificial intelligence as a catalyst for computational neuroscience—rather than as unique tools in their own right—can substantially improve its positioning in the research ecosystem. In particular, we argue that generative artificial intelligence will reinforce the importance of existing open science initiatives, rather than supplanting them. Overall, we call for clearer metrics by which neuroimaging results—whether generated by individual research teams or by generative artificial intelligence technologies—can be meaningfully compared.

Why tools are as important as results and what to do about it

Highlights Addressing complex problems requires concepts, methods, processes and other tools that are still evolving and not yet firmly embedded in research practice. A new discipline—Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S)—provides a framework to connect existing fields of scholarship, as well as the efforts of individual research teams, to support better application of these tools. World Water Policy Journal could provide an outlet for publishing the detailed concepts, methods and other tools that its researchers develop and use. Integration and Implementation Insights (i2Insights) blog and repository could further disseminate those tools. This would have benefits for building researcher expertise and advancing the effectiveness of tackling water policy and practice challenges.

Scientific narrative as a factor of intensification of communicative relations of the «science — society» system

The article offers an analysis of communicative interaction in the modern academic field — among individual researchers, research teams and groups in conditions of high competition against the background of exponential growth of publication activity and digitalization of communications both within the professional community and taking into account the strengthening and transparency of interactions with the public. The author puts forward a working hypothesis, according to which it is the narrative attribute in the representation of the results of scientific research that can contain a reserve for evolutionary success within the framework of the systemic nature of communication and have a high potential for the formation of stable links between subsystems of science and other public actors, such as non-professional external observers.

Mental Health Nurses' and Allied Health Professionals' Individual Research Capacity and Organizational Research Culture: A Comparative Study.

Healthcare professionals have development needs related to their consumption, use, and practice of clinical research. Little is known about these issues in mental health services specifically. A survey of healthcare staff working in an NHS Mental Health and Disability Trust in England was conducted to describe research capacity and culture compared with previously reported samples, and to examine subgroup differences. An online questionnaire was utilized. The main measure was the Research Capacity and Culture tool comprising measures of individual's perceived research skills and of team and organizational research culture. Previous studies using the same measure were systematically identified, and pooled results, weighted by sample size, were calculated. Analyses were descriptive (current sample versus previous results) and inferential (comparisons between demographic and professional groups within the current sample). N = 293 people completed the survey. The median item scores were poorer than those of pooled samples from studies reporting median item scores on 39/51 (76.5%) occasions and poorer than those pooled samples of studies reporting mean item scores on 51/51 (100.0%) occasions. Individual capability for research was in the 'less than adequate' range more than in previous samples (71.4% vs. 42.9%). For team culture items, the proportions were 84.2% vs. 78.9%, while most responses about organizational culture were in the 'adequate' range (55.6% vs. 66.7%). Staff >20 years employment had poorer perceptions of team and organizational culture. Perceptions of individual research capacity and team and organizational culture were poor compared with previous studies, most of which were conducted in non-mental health settings. There is need for development of research capacity and culture in mental health services including opportunities to develop basic research skills through to strategic developments to promote clinical academic careers. There is considerable room for improvement in the way organizations support research and signpost opportunities.

'I felt part of the solution'. A qualitative study about the interface between lived experience advocates, professionals and organisations in the field of persistent pain.

To elicit perspectives of people with persistent pain about their experiences working with pain management professionals and services as patient advocates and to consider implications for current models of involving patients in service development and research. reflexive thematic analysis from a critical realist perspective. Online interviews were conducted individually with 10 participants who had acted as patient advocates in the field of persistent pain. Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. Data were analysed and organised into themes and are presented descriptively. The relationship between patient advocates and the organisations they help is conceptualised as 'an unequal partnership'. Participants described positive and affirming experiences with individual health professionals and research teams (Respect). This often occurred within a context of inflexible organisational policies that presented barriers to participation including a lack of financial compensation and expectation to work to inflexible deadlines. As a result, patient advocates could experience a lack of value attributed to their experiences and voices (unmet needs from institutions). People with personal experience of engaging with services for persistent pain are in a strong position to contribute to service improvement. Although this contribution is recognised as valuable, it appears to be devalued by organisational barriers. Organisational policies around payment may lead to a lack of representation of those experiencing higher levels of disadvantage. As a result, services and policy makers may be missing out on insights that could be important for service development.

Segmentation of structural defects in polymer composite computed tomography images with deep learning models

We investigate appliance of different deep learning models to the problem of semantic segmentation of structural defects in computed tomography images of fiber-reinforced polymer composite material. Specifically, we try to segment porosities and delaminations in a specimen using U-Net and DeepLabv3 neural networks. We find out that complex models struggle to generalize solutions on small data samples that are generally available to individual research teams, whereas smaller models are the right choice for approaching defect segmentation in CT images. Our experiments are based on our own laboratory data, collected with X-ray microtomography and labeled manually for the semantic segmentation task.

Framing Supradisciplinary Research for Intellectualized Cyber-Physical Systems: An Unfinished Story

Abstract Conceptualization and design of intellectualized, socialized, and personalized cyber-physical systems (CPSs) need integration of existing knowledge across the involved disciplines, as well as exploration and synthesis of novel knowledge beyond disciplinary boundaries. The latter needs a combined use of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research. Supradisciplinary research has emerged as a new doctrine of combining these research approaches from epistemological, methodological, and procedural perspectives. However, no methodology can be found in the literature that could facilitate the practical execution of supradisciplinary research programs. This position paper proposes a conceptual framework that can be used as a blueprint for operationalization of such undertakings. The framework rests on six generic pillars: (i) problematics, (ii) infrastructure, (iii) method, (iv) stakeholders, (v) operations, and (vi) knowledge. It specifies the major concerns that have to be taken into consideration in a systematic manner in developing executional scenarios for supradisciplinary research. The framework facilitates (i) management of research organization tasks, (ii) joint formation of shared research infrastructure, (ii) setting up concrete research program, (iii) academic partnering and public stakeholder involvement, (iv) process flow management and capacity/competence allocation, (v) a holistic knowledge synthesis, assessment, and consolidation, and (vi) development of tools supporting the preparation and execution of large-scale supradisciplinary research. In its current form, it does not cover the specific societal and personal issues of a successful organization of the inquiry at individual researchers, research teams, and research community levels. A community-based follow-up research may focus on the practical application and testing of the framework in concrete cases—a task that an individual researcher cannot address.

Meeting the Challenges to Economists of Pursuing Interdisciplinary Research on Human–Natural Systems

Interdisciplinary research on systems jointly determined by human and ecological dynamics is critical for understanding and addressing environmental and sustainability challenges. Such research requires collaboration between the natural and social sciences. However, the high costs and irreversible investments in specialized information structures contribute to a gap between researchers’ willingness to engage in interdisciplinary research and the social value of interdisciplinary research. These attributes reinforce disciplinary specialization and lock-in. We find that the institutions and organizations needed to guide interdisciplinary research in ways comparable to disciplinary research have yet to be adequately established. Research produces a public good whose quality is uncertain and difficult to measure even within disciplines. Asymmetric information between disciplines raises costs and lowers rewards for researchers, publications, universities, and research funders. It has also led to market segmentation where some outlets publish research with insufficient quality control for either the natural science or economics components. Our survey of researchers in economics and natural sciences finds evidence of researcher perceptions and incentives consistent with disciplinary-based asymmetries and incentive incompatibilities between economists and natural scientists. The paper concludes with recommendations for individual researchers, research teams, publication and peer review, universities, and research-funding agencies.

Запрос на перемены и инновационное развитие регионального пространства Юга России

Introduction. The relevance of the research related to the need to transition to an innovative strategy for the development of the southern Russian region is substantiated, and the task is set to determine the possibility of innovative development of the regional space of the South of Russia from the standpoint of the formed request for changes in the mass consciousness of the regional society. Methods. The empirical base of the study includes a number of sources of representative nature of the All-Russian and regional scale of the Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Law Faculty of the Russian Academy of Sciences, individual research teams and scientists in the field of studying regional processes occurring in the South of Russia, as well as the results of the author's expert survey (Republic of Crimea, N=43), which was attended by representatives of regional and local authorities; scientific and educational institutions; public organizations and NGOs; business community, entrepreneurship; religious organizations and the media. Results and their discussion. In the South of Russia, as in Russia as a whole, a request for change has been formed, which, on the one hand, taking into account the acute social problems facing the country, can be recognized as a request for innovation, however, the vector of the innovative request of the regional society, as well as the entire Russian people, is not focused on cardinal changes, but it is associated with a focus on stability and order. The basis of the latter is social justice, however, its provision in society is associated with strong power, i.e. the regional community does not yet see itself as a subject of innovative transformations. The demand for changes formed on the part of society is not combined with the state interests and goals of innovative development of regions, as well as socio-cultural and institutional resources and conditions for their implementation. In these conditions, the innovative development of the regional space of the South of Russia is fragmented, point-based and not focused on the entire South Russian region.

«Social» in Social Epistemology

The paper analyzes the main social contexts constituting social epistemology. It describes external so­cio-political contexts which define the framework and required procedures for open research, scientif­ic consensus and epistemic justice. However, the article argues for special importance of internal social contexts – those of knowledge production in research groups. The treatment of knowledge as a collective enterprise requires, in turn, discussion of a new set of problems: the ways and mechanisms of creating the collective subject of knowledge, ways of overcoming disagreements between individual researchers and research teams, explanation of scientific change and others. The «social turn» in epistemology calls for a careful study of these two types of interacting contexts – external and internal ones.

Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts Scientific Library in the System of Publications’ Scientometric Assessment

The aim of the article is to investigate ways to assess the effectiveness of scientific research, conduct a comprehensive analysis and characterise the publications of research and teaching staff of the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts. The research methodology is based on the application of a systematic approach and a number of methods: analytical, observation, comparison, and the method of theoretical generalisation. The classification method is to organise data by volume and quantity. The authors have revealed the transformation of the structure of scientific research through the dialectical method taking into account the development of scientometric indicators. The scientific novelty consists in processing and covering the results of publication activity of research and teaching staff of the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts in international scientometric databases. The article describes the work of the Scientific Library to provide access to full-text databases, user training, monitor publication activity, and identify scientific papers in international databases. Conclusions. The significance of publications as a scientometric indicator is that this indicator assesses the effectiveness of both individual scientists and research teams and facilities. Publications in academic journals indexed in Scopus and Web of Science contribute to the growth of the rating in the scientific community, guarantee the successful defence of scientific work, increase the chance of receiving grants, and contribute to an excellent start to publishing activities in world-class scientific journals, and so on. The creation and active work of the bibliometric and scientometric sector of the Scientific Library, which provides information and analytical support for the publication activity of higher education institutions, contributed to the increase in the level of publication activity, scientometric and bibliometric indicators of research and teaching staff of the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts.

A bibliometric analysis on emerging technology research and development

<p>Virtual Reality (VR) refers to simulated, computer-generated environments in which a person becomes part of a virtual world or is immersed within this environment and, whilst there, is able to manipulate objects or perform a series of actions. The advancement of this emerging technology requires the sharing of discoveries and knowledge by both individual researchers and research teams. The purpose of this study was to undertake a bibliometric analysis of articles pertaining to VR research and development. Methods: This study retrieved data from the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Science Citation Index Expanded sections of the Web of Science. The keyword "virtual reality" was used to search for full articles published between 1993 and 2017. The retrieved articles were analysed by year, country of origin, journal, institution, and citation number. In addition, the core journals were identified based on Bradford’s law of scattering. Results: The literature relating to VR contained 11,150 articles from 96 countries released between 1993 and 2017. The majority of articles originated from the USA, with 3,482 articles (31.23%), the UK, with 1,204 articles (10.80%), and Germany, with 886 articles (7.95%). The articles were published in 223 subjects detailed by the Journal Citation Report’s subject classification. Among the 223 subjects, the top 30 subject areas can be roughly categorised into computer science, psychology, and medical groups. On the other hand, the top three institutional publishers were University College London (UCL), the University of Toronto, and the University of Washington. The most frequently cited article, by Seymour et al., demonstrated VR training in an operating room, and was published in the Annals of Surgery in 2002, and, as of September 2018, has been cited 1,375 times. The core zone of the four-zone division contains 34 journals, and published 2,780 articles. Conclusions: The data indicate that VR articles have grown steadily over the period studied. The trend reveals that VR research is likely to fall at the growth stage, and so more research and development outputs may occur in the near future. In addition, this study has identified principle subject areas, core journals, prolific authors, and research institutions expected to contribute to VR research and development.</p> <p> </p>

Potential Roles for Science Librarians in Research Data Management: A Gap Analysis

As many sciences move to be more data-intensive, some science librarians are offering more research data services and perform research data management roles. Job analyses provide insight and context to the tasks employees actually do versus what their job descriptions depict or employers assume. Two separate job analyses studies investigated the roles and responsibilities of data services librarians and research integrity officers among the top 10 private and top 10 public higher education institutions. The focus of these interviews was research data management support roles. Comparing these two groups’ responses indicates that the role-based responsibilities for research data services are not always clear within institutions and are predominantly placed on individual researchers or research teams, but science librarians may provide some solutions to address this gap. This paper presents a model for the potential roles of science librarians in research data management.

A computational literature review of football performance analysis through probabilistic topic modeling

This research aims to illustrate the potential use of concepts, techniques, and mining process tools to improve the systematic review process. Thus, a review was performed on two online databases (Scopus and ISI Web of Science) from 2012 to 2019. A total of 9649 studies were identified, which were analyzed using probabilistic topic modeling procedures within a machine learning approach. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation method, chosen for modeling, required the following stages: 1) data cleansing, and 2) data modeling into topics for coherence and perplexity analysis. All research was conducted according to the standards of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses in a fully computerized way. The computational literature review is an integral part of a broader literature review process. The results presented met three criteria: (1) literature review for a research area, (2) analysis and classification of journals, and (3) analysis and classification of academic and individual research teams. The contribution of the article is to demonstrate how the publication network is formed in this particular field of research, and how the content of abstracts can be automatically analyzed to provide a set of research topics for quick understanding and application in future projects.

What Constitutes Authorship in the Social Sciences?

Authorship represents a highly discussed topic in nowadays academia. The share of co-authored papers has increased substantially in recent years allowing scientists to specialize and focus on specific tasks. Arising from this, social scientific literature has especially discussed author orders and the distribution of publication and citation credits among co-authors in depth. Yet only a small fraction of the authorship literature has also addressed the actual underlying question of what actually constitutes authorship. To identify social scientists' motives for assigning authorship, we conduct an empirical study surveying researchers around the globe. We find that social scientists tend to distribute research tasks among (individual) research team members. Nevertheless, they generally adhere to the universally applicable Vancouver criteria when distributing authorship. More specifically, participation in every research task with the exceptions of data work as well as reviewing and remarking increases scholars' chances to receive authorship. Based on our results, we advise journal editors to introduce authorship guidelines that incorporate the Vancouver criteria as they seem applicable to the social sciences. We further call upon research institutions to emphasize data skills in hiring and promotion processes as publication counts might not always depict these characteristics.

The Association between Researchers’ Conceptions of Research and Their Strategic Research Agendas

Abstract Purpose In studies of the research process, the association between how researchers conceptualize research and their strategic research agendas has been largely overlooked. This study aims to address this gap. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzes this relationship using a dataset of more than 8,500 researchers across all scientific fields and the globe. It studies the associations between the dimensions of two inventories: the Conceptions of Research Inventory (CoRI) and the Multi-Dimensional Research Agenda Inventory—Revised (MDRAI-R). Findings The findings show a relatively strong association between researchers’ conceptions of research and their research agendas. While all conceptions of research are positively related to scientific ambition, the findings are mixed regarding how the dimensions of the two inventories relate to one another, which is significant for those seeking to understand the knowledge production process better. Research limitations The study relies on self-reported data, which always carries a risk of response bias. Practical implications The findings provide a greater understanding of the inner workings of knowledge processes and indicate that the two inventories, whether used individually or in combination, may provide complementary analytical perspectives to research performance indicators. They may thus offer important insights for managers of research environments regarding how to assess the research culture, beliefs, and conceptualizations of individual researchers and research teams when designing strategies to promote specific institutional research focuses and strategies. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to associate research agendas and conceptions of research. It is based on a large sample of researchers working worldwide and in all fields of knowledge, which ensures that the findings have a reasonable degree of generalizability to the global population of researchers.

Методологические особенности проведения микросоциальных исследований в цифровую эпоху

Данная статья посвящена особенностям проведения социальных исследований в цифровую эпоху. В статье особенно подчеркивается неравенство возможностей институциональных и индивидуальных исследователей в процессе формирования выборок, отвечающих требованиям репрезентативности и нормальности распределения. В связи с этим на первое место для индивидуальных исследователей и небольших исследовательских коллективов выходят методы непараметрической статистики, позволяющей осуществлять работу с малой выборкой. Исследования, проводимые на такой выборке, носят название микросоциальных исследований. Также в статье особенно подчеркивается возможность использования современного программного обеспечения для обработки данных путем статистического и сетевого анализа. В данной работе рассматриваются возможности применения методов качественного анализа данных, которые приобрели особую популярность в первой четверти XXI века. Речь идет о методах конденсации смысла, дискурс-анализе, методе «обоснованной теории». Автор особенно подчеркивает необходимость формирования исследовательских компетенций, которые позволят корректно проводить как качественные, так и количественные исследования, еще при обучении в высшем учебном заведении. В связи с этим в статье приводится ряд методических рекомендаций по созданию учебных курсов по статистике и методологии исследований, которые могут быть полезны преподавателям и аналитикам. Ошибка ! Источник ссылки не найден.

Data Security in Practitioner-Academic Partnerships: An Agenda for Improvement

A large and growing body of social science research uses personal information from research subjects—often collected in collaboration with non-academic partners like private enterprise, governments, or NGOs. Consideration of the complex data security obligations and obstacles that come along with academic/practitioner collaboration, however, has been piecemeal, and actual security practices vary widely from project to project. Identifying and implementing “good practices” depends on the scruples and best judgment of individual research teams because discipline-wide best practices are insufficiently consolidated. This essay makes three preliminary contributions toward the development of best practices. First, it proposes a general set of imperatives/obligations against which data security practices can be measured, and then identifies the primary threats to fulfilling these obligations. Second, it elaborates on the particular threats to data security that come along with practitioner partnerships. Finally, it suggests a non-exhaustive range of data-security practices to address different threats, and demonstrates in appendices how three off-the-shelf tools can be used to ameliorate threats to data security, especially in collaborative projects.

Teaching a neural network modeling socio-economic development of the region

The article is devoted to the formation of an array of data for the construction of an artificial neural network, designed to search for relationships between social and economic parameters of the development of regions of the Russian Federation. The relevance of research in this area is confirmed both by a large number of studies in the field of regional comparativistics and by the limited methods used in this kind of research, often limited to descriptive methods and basic techniques of parametric statistics. Under these conditions, the expansion of the mathematical apparatus and the more active introduction of information technologies (including in the area of Big Data analysis and the construction of predictive models based on artificial neural networks) can be viable. At the same time, however, it should be noted that the resources of an individual research team may be (and most likely will be) insufficient to create their own software solution for the implementation of machine learning algorithms from scratch. The use of third-party cloud-based software platforms (primarily IBM and Google infrastructures) allows to bypass the problem of the research team’s lack of expensive material and technical base, however they impose a number of limitations dictated by the requirements of the existing machine learning algorithms and the specific architecture provided platforms This puts the research team in front of the need to prepare the accumulated data set for processing: reducing the dimension, checking the data for compliance with the platform requirements and eliminating potential problem areas: “data leaks”, “learning distortions” and others. The paper was reported to the section “Sociology of Digital Society: Structures, Processes, Governance” of the International Conference Session “Public Administration and Development of Russia: National Goals and Institutions”.

Are NIH-funded publications fulfilling the proposed research? An examination of concept-matchedness between NIH research grants and their supported publications

Abstract The conceptual connections between scientific grants and publications are important, yet often overlooked in quantitative studies of science. An analysis of such connections could offer important insights into how science is conducted by individual researchers and research teams under the social and economic conditions of science. This study aims to offer the first piece of evidence towards this endeavor by analyzing the ratio of keyword matchedness between accepted NIH research grants from 2008 to 2015 and their funded publications. By applying linear regression method, we identified and examined three identified predictors of the outcome: 1) the funding rate of an NIH research program in a specific year, 2) the year difference between grant and publication, and 3) the funding size of a grant. Our findings suggest that these three factors contribute to the outcome in different capacities. Moreover, all of them may have different performances in individual funding programs, which highlights the importance of understanding the differences among individual funding mechanisms.