Members Of Scientific Community Research Articles

Mapping of validated apathy scales onto the apathy diagnostic criteria for neurocognitive disorders

AbstractBackgroundDiagnostic criteria for apathy (DCA) in neurocognitive disorders were developed in 2021. As next steps, we assessed whether commonly‐used validated apathy scales map onto the DCA and identified which scales map best.MethodUsing a modified Delphi process, mapping of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory‐Clinician (NPI‐C) Apathy domain and the Apathy Evaluation Scale (AES) onto the DCA were assessed by surveying apathy experts. For each item on the scales, experts were asked to evaluate the degree of correspondence to the DCA globally, and the 3 DCA dimensions [diminished initiative, interest, and emotion]. Respondents voted “not at all” (scored as 0), “weakly” (scored as 1), or “strongly” (scored as 2). For each item, if the mean score was <0.5, the item was considered not mapped, for scores >1.5, the item was considered mapped, and items with scores 0.5‐1.5 were discussed further in a virtual consensus meeting. The surveys were then sent to other scientific community members, and the interrater reliability between the two groups was assessed using Cohen’s kappa.ResultThe surveys were completed by 12 experts. For NPI‐C apathy, 10/11 (90.9%) questions mapped primarily onto one dimension of the DCA: 2 onto “Initiative”, 6 onto “Interest”, and 2 onto “Emotion”. Of NPI‐C Apathy domain items, 9/11 (81.8%) mapped globally onto the DCA. For the AES, 7/18 (38.9%) questions mapped onto different dimensions of the DCA: 4 onto “Initiative”, 2 onto “Interest”, and 1 onto “Emotion”; 6/18 (33.3%) items mapped globally onto the DCA. The mean mapping scores of NPI‐C were significantly higher than those of the AES (t (27) = 2.25, p = 0.032) indicating better performance of NPI‐C in this exercise. These findings were confirmed in a consensus discussion. There was substantial agreement (kappa = 0.621) between the experts and the community group regarding mapping of NPI‐C but only moderate agreement (kappa = 0.553) regarding mapping of AES on the DCA.ConclusionMore questions from the NPI‐C Apathy domain mapped strongly and uniquely both globally, and onto the 3 dimensions of the DCA, compared with the AES. Future research using the DCA, NPI‐C Apathy domain, and AES in clinical and research settings are needed to confirm these results.

Identifying bottlenecks in the life cycle of plants living on cliffs and rocky slopes: Lack of knowledge hinders conservation actions

Long term survival of plant populations relies on successful reproductive cycle to obtain generation turnover. Focusing on plant species of conservation concern, we brought together a group of plant conservationists from different countries to assess whether the already available information on plant reproductive biology and autecology is adequate for identifying which phases of single species life cycle might act as bottleneck.We compiled a list of 80 plant species of conservation concern living on European cliffs and rocky slopes, for which biological and autecological information was collected from scientific literature, technical reports, and expert knowledge.Results have shown that the available information on species reproductive biology and autecology is inadequate to identify bottlenecks in the life cycle of many species and to provide insights for the practical conservation of many more. Available knowledge is mainly referred to the flowering phase, less on seed production and much less on seedling establishment and on cloning. Meanwhile and noteworthy, flowering resulted to be the less critical phase for the fulfilment of the species life cycle.Overall, with this perspective article we aim to encourage a constructive debate among the scientific community members and policymakers to set up novel concerted strategies for the conservation of plant species of conservation concern. The challenge of the discussion is the implementation of the current approach with new biological and ecological information to be exclusively targeted at identifying the constraints that limit the generation turnover and furnishing specific indications for active management.

The Epilepsy Ontology: a community-based ontology tailored for semantic interoperability and text mining.

Epilepsy is a multifaceted complex disorder that requires a precise understanding of the classification, diagnosis, treatment and disease mechanism governing it. Although scattered resources are available on epilepsy, comprehensive and structured knowledge is missing. In contemplation to promote multidisciplinary knowledge exchange and facilitate advancement in clinical management, especially in pre-clinical research, a disease-specific ontology is necessary. The presented ontology is designed to enable better interconnection between scientific community members in the epilepsy domain. The Epilepsy Ontology (EPIO) is an assembly of structured knowledge on various aspects of epilepsy, developed according to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry principles. Concepts and definitions are collected from the latest International League against Epilepsy (ILAE) classification, domain-specific ontologies and scientific literature. This ontology consists of 1879 classes and 28 151 axioms (2171 declaration axioms, 2219 logical axioms) from several aspects of epilepsy. This ontology is intended to be used for data management and text mining purposes. The current release of the ontology is publicly available under a Creative Commons 4.0 License and shared via http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/epso.owl and is a community-based effort assembling various facets of the complex disease. The ontology is also deposited in BioPortal at https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/EPIO. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics Advances online.

Self-Supervised Knowledge Assimilation for Expert-Layman Text Style Transfer

Expert-layman text style transfer technologies have the potential to improve communication between members of scientific communities and the general public. High-quality information produced by experts is often filled with difficult jargon laypeople struggle to understand. This is a particularly notable issue in the medical domain, where layman are often confused by medical text online. At present, two bottlenecks interfere with the goal of building high-quality medical expert-layman style transfer systems: a dearth of pretrained medical-domain language models spanning both expert and layman terminologies and a lack of parallel corpora for training the transfer task itself. To mitigate the first issue, we propose a novel language model (LM) pretraining task, Knowledge Base Assimilation, to synthesize pretraining data from the edges of a graph of expert- and layman-style medical terminology terms into an LM during self-supervised learning. To mitigate the second issue, we build a large-scale parallel corpus in the medical expert-layman domain using a margin-based criterion. Our experiments show that transformer-based models pretrained on knowledge base assimilation and other well-established pretraining tasks fine-tuning on our new parallel corpus leads to considerable improvement against expert-layman transfer benchmarks, gaining an average relative improvement of our human evaluation, the Overall Success Rate (OSR), by 106%.

ETRANSAFE: Building a sustainable framework to share reproducible drug safety knowledge with the public domain

Integrative drug safety research in translational health informatics has rapidly evolved and included data that are drawn in from many resources, combining diverse data that are either reused from (curated) repositories, or newly generated at source. Each resource is mandated by different sets of metadata rules that are imposed on the incoming data. Combination of the data cannot be readily achieved without interference of data stewardship and the top-down policy guidelines that supervise and inform the process for data combination to aid meaningful interpretation and analysis of such data. The eTRANSAFE Consortium's effort to drive integrative drug safety research at a large scale hereby present the lessons learnt and the proposal of solution at the guidelines in practice at this Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) project. Recommendations in these guidelines were compiled from feedback received from key stakeholders in regulatory agencies, EFPIA companies, and academic partners. The research reproducibility guidelines presented in this study lay the foundation for a comprehensive data sharing and knowledge management plans accounting for research data management in the drug safety space - FAIR data sharing guidelines, and the model verification guidelines as generic deliverables that best practices that can be reused by other scientific community members at large. FAIR data sharing is a dynamic landscape that rapidly evolves with fast-paced technology advancements. The research reproducibility in drug safety guidelines introduced in this study provides a reusable framework that can be adopted by other research communities that aim to integrate public and private data in biomedical research space.

ETRANSAFE: Building a sustainable framework to share reproducible drug safety knowledge with the public domain.

Integrative drug safety research in translational health informatics has rapidly evolved and included data that are drawn in from many resources, combining diverse data that are either reused from (curated) repositories, or newly generated at source. Each resource is mandated by different sets of metadata rules that are imposed on the incoming data. Combination of the data cannot be readily achieved without interference of data stewardship and the top-down policy guidelines that supervise and inform the process for data combination to aid meaningful interpretation and analysis of such data. The eTRANSAFE Consortium's effort to drive integrative drug safety research at a large scale hereby present the lessons learnt and the proposal of solution at the guidelines in practice at this Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) project. Recommendations in these guidelines were compiled from feedback received from key stakeholders in regulatory agencies, EFPIA companies, and academic partners. The research reproducibility guidelines presented in this study lay the foundation for a comprehensive data sharing and knowledge management plans accounting for research data management in the drug safety space - FAIR data sharing guidelines, and the model verification guidelines as generic deliverables that best practices that can be reused by other scientific community members at large. FAIR data sharing is a dynamic landscape that rapidly evolves with fast-paced technology advancements. The research reproducibility in drug safety guidelines introduced in this study provides a reusable framework that can be adopted by other research communities that aim to integrate public and private data in biomedical research space.

Understanding Research Data Repositories as Infrastructures

AbstractThis study discusses the properties of research data repositories and explores metadata about 2,646 entries in the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org) to identify the characteristics attributed to infrastructures they exhibit. The results reveal how research data repositories function as information infrastructure for scientific community members and contribute to the small body of literature that examines data repositories through a socio‐technical lens.

Towards an Inclusive Agenda of Open Science for Communication Research: A Latin American approach

Abstract There is growing consensus among the scientific community members about the urgency of debating ways to promote Open Science (OS). However, the notion of OS itself has been highly controversial, encompassing different meanings and values. Two distinct conceptions have emerged: the first highlights principles such as acceleration, efficiency, and reproducibility; the second perspective is grounded in participation, social justice, and democratization of knowledge. Both models accomplish distinct goals while facing specific limits and challenges to improve scientific production. Even though the first conception has become more celebrated among some top-ranked journals, we question approaches that standardize scientific practices, neglect global diversity, and undermine the importance of local contexts. By discussing the pioneering role that researchers and journals in Latin America have played toward a pluralistic interpretation of OS, this article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of scientific production in the Global South.

Functional mechanisms of united territorial communities as paradigms of communities

In this article, the authors propose an idea based on the interpretation of the functional mechanisms of united territorial communities considering Kuhn's interpretation of the scientific communities’ paradigms in the way that community paradigms should be interpreted as general theoretical assumptions and laws and means of their implementation which the scientific community members use. This forms and develops paradigms with its activities. That is, each community has its own paradigms, which include the established system and customs, as well as recorded standards, condemnations, dogmas, historical experience, as well as the actual situation and common goals. According to the author, a territorial community is a human association that is associated with self-organizing territories, a sequence of timely states called processes. It follows that the territorial community is a process. The paradigmatic stages of development of united territorial communities as a process that has a beginning, evolution and termination or end point are proposed. Differences between territorial, scientific or religious communities are determined, where the author states that the main difference is in paradigms and direction of their goals. It is stated what changes and crises in paradigms mean. Thus, changes are not independent events, but long episodes with regular repetitive structures. Crises – crises are the stage of change that follows discovery. As long as the methods (or tools) of the paradigm are able to solve certain problems or issues, the community develops effectively. Also in the article, the author takes the position that territorial communities are processes that cannot be controlled by elected or hired leaders, but which are controlled (influenced) by community paradigms, which, in turn, are constantly changing. Based on the position of the author and the context of territorial communities, the paradigm can be explained as follows: the paradigm is a "certain way of seeing the world", which was once accepted by many scientists, creates a community of these scientists; or a religious community of believers; or a territorial community from people living in a certain area. the paradigms of territorial communities determine the important objects with which the community cooperates and the related problems, and / or the issues that are identified, and the methods by which the identified problems and / or issues are resolved.

Трайбы и транспарентность: перспективы цифровых механизмов самоорганизации в российской науке

В работе рассматриваются возможности применения в России новых цифровых инструментов самоорганизации ученых и управления наукой. С учетом международной практики авторы выработали четыре экспериментальные модели децентрализованного самоуправления и группового принятия решений в науке, предположительно применимые для имплементации принципов цифрового управления (e-governance) в отечественной академической среде, и предложили их к обсуждению российским ученым в формате фокус-групп. Основным результатом обсуждения стала концептуализация системы отношений между членами научного сообщества в России при помощи социально-антропологической метафоры трайба. Авторы приходят к выводу, что предпосылками любых форм цифровизации отечественной науки должно стать как понимание партизанских практик ученых, так и установление в отношениях науки, общества и государства базового уровня видимости (понимания, кто что делает), подотчетности и делиберативности (обсуждаемости решений).
 Благодарность. Исследование выполнено при финансовой поддержке РФФИ и АНО ЭИСИ в рамках научного проекта №19-011-31522 («Цифровые механизмы управления и самоорганизации научного сообщества как необходимые условия научно-технологического прорыва»). Авторы благодарят Михаила Соколова (Европейский университет в Санкт-Петербурге) и анонимного рецензента журнала за ценные замечания по тексту статьи.

DE OBSERVACIONES A ESTUDIOS. TÍTULOS DE LOS ARTÍCULOS CIENTÍFICOS ESPAÑOLES ENTRE 1799 Y 1920

En el presente artículo, se analizan algunas características de los artículos publicados por las instituciones científicas españolas entre 1799 y 1920. En concreto, se analizan las palabras descriptivas del tipo de texto presentes en los títulos, por ejemplo, estudio, memoria, análisis, ensayo, etc. La presencia de este tipo de «etiquetas» en los títulos es un rasgo común de muchos de los artículos publicados entre las fechas señaladas. Creemos que, por una parte, estas etiquetas reflejan la conciencia de los miembros de la comunidad científica sobre las convenciones de escritura científica. Por otra parte, ofrecen pistas sobre la evolución de las prácticas científicas a lo largo de este periodo.

Fodis: Software for Protein Unfolding Analysis

The folding dynamics of proteins at the single-molecule level has been studied with single-molecule force spectroscopy experiments for 20 years, but a common standardized method for the analysis of the collected data and for sharing among the scientific community members is still not available. We have developed a new open-source tool—Fodis—for the analysis of the force-distance curves obtained in single-molecule force spectroscopy experiments, providing almost automatic processing, analysis, and classification of the obtained data. Our method provides also a classification of the possible unfolding pathways and the structural heterogeneity present during the unfolding of proteins.

Ten Years Journey of Journal of Dow University of Health Sciences

A dream and a vision saw the light of dawn in 2007 in the form of the first published issue of Journal of Dow University of Health Sciences (JDUHS). The journey began with an aim to provide a platform to scientific community where they could share their findings in the form excellent publications. A decade later, it seems appropriate to reflect on how the journal has developed and progressed. Moreover, the editorial on this occasion provides an excellent opportunity to publically acknowledge and appreciate the participation of members of scientific community who significantly contributed in the regular publication of this journal. It all began when the Vice Chancellor of Dow University of Health Sciences envisioned to starts a journal which provide an open platform for every medical and scientific scholar to disseminate their findings relevant to our major medical and health related problems. It was a tedious task for me as a Managing Editor at first, but with the mentorship of an experienced and devoted senior Parton-in-Chief and an efficient Editorial Board, it became a highly learning activity

La estructura del sistema científico de México a finales del siglo XX: una visión a nivel de instituciones

En este artículo se analiza el sistema científico mexicano consideraron la colaboración y el reconocimiento en la identificación de comunidades científicas institucionales, para lo cual se construyeron redes a nivel de instituciones usando la información sobre producción científica de México indizada en la base de datos Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection de 1981 a 2003. Se usaron tres técnicas para analizar el sistema científico: 1) subredes de máxima colaboración, 2) subredes de máximo reconocimiento, 3) Visualización de semejanzas para determinar la estructura del sistema científico. El análisis se hizo considerando los 22 campos temáticos en conjunto y también en forma individual. Se observó que las universidades e instituciones de educación superior fueron la base de las comunidades científicas en las redes institucionales en cada uno de los 22 campos, destacando el papel central de la UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL AUTÓNOMA DE MÉXICO (UNAM). En promedio: las comunidades en cada campo estuvieron conformadas por 12 instituciones y en total se identificaron 50 instituciones en el análisis de los 22 campos. En la estructura científica nacional se observa la relevancia del campo en Medicina Clínica, donde la Secretaría de Salud fue la institución con mayor producción.

The Failure of Academic Boycotts

Academic boycotts are, in the view of this author, problematic in almost any context. Moreover, they have failed to achieve any significant political objectives beyond media attention. In the specific case of Israel-Palestine, the media coverage of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement (BDS) proposals is far greater than the limited, almost insignificant, impact on the nature of academic and scientific collaboration between Israeli universities and the broader global academic community. The academic boycott attempts remain, at this stage, little more than proposals to members of a small number of scientific communities and guilds to cease all forms of collaboration with Israeli scientists and scholars, regardless of their political positions on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the status of the Occupation. The boycott cannot be enforced upon the members of these scientific communities and guilds, the majority of whom continue to undertake full scientific collaboration with their Israeli colleagues and research partners. The small number of proboycotters who do not participate in scientific meetings and conferences that take place in Israel, or who do not invite Israeli colleagues to participate in conferences arranged elsewhere, are far outnumbered by the many members of the international scientific community who do participate, and are more than ready to take their vacant place around the conference table or in the lecture theatre. Scientific congresses, in all fields of academic endeavor, have continued to thrive against the background of calls for a boycott and if there have been some absent participants for political reasons, it has not been noticeable. A glance at the long list of academic meetings and seminars that have taken place at Israeli universities during the past two years, or those that are planned for the coming academic year, is clear evidence of this; if there have been individuals who have decided not to participate because of their desire to practice boycott, it has passed without notice or impact upon the conference itself. Unlike the case of South Africa, where there was an almost blanket boycott in all political, economic, and social realms, this is not the case with Israel. In both Western Europe and North America, where most of the boycott proposals emanate, the major universities and, in some cases, the governments themselves, have made it adequately clear that, regardless of their own personal positions concerning the Israel-Palestine impasse, they do not support selective or discriminatory academic boycotts and, in some cases, this has even led to a strengthening of scientific ties where none existed previously. In a letter issued by the European Union Science and Research Authority, in response to a request by some scholars to boycott projects with Israel, the union expressed their views that academic boycotts were discriminatory. Since the EU will not fund any university or research consortium that practices policies of discrimination, the EU letter made it clear that they would have to rethink the funding of any such institutions, or individual scholars, that blatantly practiced boycott. This is perceived, by university principals and provosts, as being much more harmful to their own research and funding objectives than lending support to calls for a boycott, and they constantly make the point that the members of the University and College Union (UCU) speak for themselves as individuals, and do not speak in the name of the universities, who are opposed to any such action. The universities, as such, view the UCU as an organization that should exclusively focus on issues pertaining to employment, tenure, and wages and that should not involve the universities in issues relating to foreign policy and insist that any member of faculty who does declare his/her intent to practice boycott, does so on the basis of his individuality and not as a faculty member representing, or speaking on behalf of, the university to which he/she is affiliated. …

Domperidone, Parkinson disease and sudden cardiac death: Mice and men show the way

Domperidone, Parkinson disease and sudden cardiac death: Mice and men show the way

Problems of (Self-) education Substantiated by Scientific Research

Problems of (Self-) education Substantiated by Scientific Research

Social imaginary and dilemmas of policy practice: The food safety arena in Japan

Through the string of food safety scares that has rocked Japanese society since the early 2000s, conflicts between the traditional notion of socially acceptable risk and the idea of a science-based risk analysis approach have surfaced in the food safety arena. Elites, including government officials and those members of scientific communities who support the science-based risk analysis approach, have become responsible for communicating seemingly contradictory ideas such as “food in Japan is safe” and “there is no such thing as zero risk with food.” This communication logjam has resulted in confusion and created public distrust of both government and scientific experts. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to examine the struggles and challenges faced by government officials in explaining and practicing policies that pertain to highly controversial food safety issues. The primary data used for illuminating the discourses is the official minutes of governmental committees including the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Committee and the Consumer Commission.

“What's That You Say?”

Though I am sympathetic to the program of research that John Hibbing advances, I raise four issues with the claims he presents. I argue that political science has not been slow to adopt an interest in biology. I argue that like all perspectives on how to advance knowledge, neurobiology must win its place by generating demonstrable results central to our understanding of politics. In agreeing with Hibbing that some hold misperceptions, I note that this is hardly uncommon, even if it is unwelcome in a scientific community. And, finally, I note that narratives of explanation often serve a variety of masters. While those derived from science are meant to restrict the consideration of competing narratives to those that are testable with empirical data, even members of scientific communities find that other claimants have some sway. Among the non-scientific purposes that narratives serve are: achieving simplicity; sustaining communities of mutual agreement; and advancing indulgent doctrines of ennoblement.

Representing and Mapping Research Competencies within a Scientific Community

Competence is a concept widely recognized as a strategic asset for each organization, especially in areas characterized by intensive use of knowledge, such as scientific communities. Each scientific community aims to produce new knowledge in a particular domain, facilitating knowledge sharing between organizational members with recognized expertise. However, in such a context, scholars are often not aware of other researchers who are working on similar projects, and thus collaboration frequently occurs among a small number of people working in the same group. This work aims to overcome these limitations, proposing an approach oriented to the construction of a scientific community's competence map that can be used as a means of highlighting capabilities within the community and suggesting new collaborations between researchers. Traditional approaches in building competence maps are based on tools such as questionnaires or assessment sessions. In recent years, novel approaches based on document content analysis are taking place. However, they do not face up to the problem of defining research competencies within a scientific community and surveying them by analysing the scientific production of community members. In this paper we propose an original approach aimed to map scientific competencies, related to research approaches, scientific method phases and field of inquiring, onto scientific community members, by using a weighted multi-hypergraph model. Moreover, by assuming that competencies of a researcher can be detected through an analysis of his scientific research papers, we propose a methodological framework to build the map of a many-to-many relationship between researchers and research competencies by means of a collaborative semi-manual mapping process.