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Introduction: COVID-19 pandemic negatively influenced the entire life globally including various aspects of patients' care. Its effect on medical research production is not known. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on medical research reporting trend. Methods: Advanced search on PubMed was performed over 2011- August, 2021. Monthly comparison was done for the years 2019, 2020, and 2021. Kruskal Wallis test was used to compare continuous distributions. Results: The total publication count showed constant increment over the study period. Faster rise was noticed on 2020 (15.7%). A steady growth in publications over the years and through the pandemic was also seen in seven studied countries with variable, both in total and also after exclusion of COVID-19 related papers. Italy and India have the highest proportions of COVID-19 related publications in comparison to the total papers in 2020, but USA has the highest quantity. Statistically significant differences exist between the first eight months of the last three years with and without counting COVID-19 related publications (p-values=0.0003907 and 0.001084, respectively). Conclusion: Our results reflect that investigators world-wide succeeded to reconfigure their work style and utilize the spared time induced by the lockdown to enrich the medical research platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The higher education efficiency evaluation model using the data envelopment analysis method has interested many researchers. This paper uses bibliometric analysis on publications extracted from the Scopus database to provide a comprehensive overview of research publications on the measurement of higher education efficiency based on data envelopment analysis: its growth rate, major collaboration networks, the most important and popular research topic. A total of 169 related publications were collected and analyzed from 1988 to 2021. The analysis results show that: Publications published every year have increased sharply in the last six years; The quality of publications is relatively high as publications tend to be published in journals with high-ranking indexes; Countries with the most influence in studies on this topic are: Italy, China, Spain, the USA, and the United Kingdom; Authors with the most influence in this research direction are Agasisti T., Abbott M., Doucouliagos C., Avkiran N.K., and Johnes J.; The research cooperation among countries and among affiliations is not strong. Finally, the paper has provided recommendations for future studies based on the findings.

This paper presents a compilation of personal reflections from 66 contributors on the impact of, and responses to, COVID-19 in accounting education in 45 different countries around the world. It reveals a commonality of issues, and a variability in responses, many positive outcomes, including the creation of opportunities to realign learning and teaching strategies away from the comfort of traditional formats, but many more that are negative, primarily relating to the impact on faculty and student health and well-being, and the accompanying stress. It identifies issues that need to be addressed in the recovery and redesign stages of the management of this crisis, and it sets a new research agenda for studies in accounting education.

Purpose: Free and open-source software (FOSS) has been used worldwide because of the advantages of user control, cost-saving, flexibility, openness, freedom, more security and better stability. The purpose of this study is to explore the status quo of educational application of FOSS and the trends from international perspectives and its implications for higher education in Hong Kong. Design/methodology/approach: The method of cluster analysis was used in this study. The Web of Science database was used as the data source and all relevant literature for the year 2010-2020 on the theme of "FOSS" was collected for analysis. The information visualization software CiteSpace was used for citation visualization analysis, revealing the research results of FOSS worldwide, including hot spots and development trends. Findings: This paper found that FOSS has become an important research area and is playing an important role in the reform and development of education. Meanwhile, the development and application of FOSS have regional imbalances and strong differentiation, including the educational sector. The paper also found that although FOSS has entered the stage of interdisciplinary development, the research and development of FOSS in the field of education is insufficient, which poses a huge challenge to decision-makers, teachers and students. Originality/value: Implications for higher education in Hong Kong including: attach importance to and vigorously promote FOSS research and practice to benefit more teachers and students; teachers and students need to be trained for acquiring the awareness and skills of FOSS applications and formulate different strategies; the government should provide greater support to formulate and implement a short and middle-term development plan to facilitate the application of FOSS; and Hong Kong higher education institutions may strengthen exchanges and cooperation with counterparts around the world to jointly promote the development of FOSS. It is hoped that the findings will provide a reference for the study and application of FOSS in higher education in Hong Kong.

In this study, the variables having impact on the student motivation have been analyzed based on the articles, conference papers, master's theses and doctoral dissertations published in the years 2000-2017. A total of 165 research papers were selected for the research material and the data were collected through qualitative research techniques through document review and content analysis. According to the research results, the most important factors affecting student motivation are the fields of teacher, teachers' classroom management skills and their teaching methods. In this research, factors having less influence on the student motivation are parental communication, student characteristics and study fields. In addition, relational search type was used more than others, mostly students were selected as the study group and most researches were conducted in USA and Turkey.

Purpose: This paper aims to systematically review the university social responsibility (USR) implementation from the empirical studies, which published during the period from 2004 to 2020. Design/methodology/approach: The bibliometric method has been employed to review prior empirical research on higher education social responsibility topics. Findings: These synthesis results confirmed that USR initiatives as an excellent tool to attain sustainability and enhance university performance worldwide. Universities in developed nations underline paying more attention to the core values in the long-term; meanwhile, their counterparts in transitional countries to pay more attention to short-term activities by focusing on stakeholders. Research limitations/implications: The notable limitation is that in terms of the number of empirical papers employed as the data to analyze in this manuscript. Practical implications: This paper's findings have described the USR implementations and how well to define USR adoption from the empirical studies globally. Thus, it has theoretical implications in enriching the USR knowledge and providing useful guidance for universities, then recommend new research directions in the future for other scholars. Originality/value: This research is an initial attempt to systematize studies on USR implementation in universities between developed countries and developing nations.

This article maps the scientific production and the contents associated with the sustainable development goals and their integration with universities during the past 21 years. Although many of the topics related to sustainable development goals (SDGs) have been addressed in different studies for decades, it is since 2015 onwards that they gained greater prominence due to the inclusion of higher education as an important actor in the fulfillment of the 2030 agenda and the United Nations SDGs. For the purpose of this paper, a bibliometric analysis of 871 papers, 535 documents in Scopus, and 336 in Web of Science (WoS) from 1998 to 2019 was performed, and the Bibliometrix analysis tool was used. The objective of this mapping is to answer the following research question: Is the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals and Universities a field of study? An analysis of the network of collaborators and trend topics in Scopus and WoS allows us to identify the concurrence and relationships of some keywords, such as sustainable development, sustainability and planning, and some background words, such as humans and global health. In another analysis, the word "higher education" is related to change. This article suggests that the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals in Universities is becoming a field of study under exploration, with a peak of production in 2016 and that has remained stable in the last three years, but thanks to the leading role assigned to Universities, intellectual production should increase in the following years.

For over two decades now, the application of Citizen Science to Education has been evolving, and fundamental topics, such as the drivers of motivation to participate in Citizen Science projects, are still under discussion. Some recent developments, though, like the use of Artificial Intelligence to support data collection and validation, seem to point to a clear-cut divergence from the mainstream research path. The objective of this paper is to summarise the development trajectory of research on Citizen Science in Education so far, and then shed light on its future development, to help researchers direct their efforts towards the most promising open questions in this field. We achieved these objectives by using the lens of the Affordance-Actualisation theory and the Main Path Analysis method.

While many reviews of job stress and the stressor-strain relationship have been conducted, such reviews typically focus exclusively on quantitative data. In the current paper, we review qualitative studies on occupational stress that met two criteria: (1) the studies employed qualitative methods; (2) the stressors, strains and/or coping strategies were grouped into identifiable, higher-order categories. Results indicated that the nature of the stressors experienced varied by (a) occupation, (b) country, (c) seniority and (d) gender. The review further revealed that organizational constraints, work overload and interpersonal conflict were relatively universal stressors. Anger and annoyance were the most frequently reported psychological strains in the United States and the United Kingdom, while Chinese workers exhibited tension and anxiety and Indian workers exhibited acceptance. Coping strategies also varied by gender, occupation and country. Research on gender differences suggested that, compared to men, women tended to report more interpersonal stressors. Differences in the ways in which the two types of methodologies are applied, as well as their relative strengths and weaknesses, underline the value of qualitative approaches to the study of occupational stress, especially when used in conjunction with quantitative methods in mixed-methods studies. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to determine the examination of the researches about the use of technology by fine arts teachers. The study was conducted according to the content and citation analysis model. In this context, Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection indexes were included. In the document scanning in the WOS environment, the keywords 'Fine arts', 'Teachers' and 'Technology' were searched. In total, 169 documents were examined and analysed one by one. They were analysed according to year, document type, WOS content category, country, source title, organisation and citation, authors, publication language and categories. As a result of this research, the first study was conducted in 2004, while the most studies were conducted in 2016. It was concluded that the published studies had the most Proceedings papers as the document type. The area where the studies of fine arts teachers on the use of technology are mostly carried out is Education Educational Research, according to the Web of Science content category. The most researched title in the distribution according to the Source Title field is 'International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conferences on Social Sciences and Arts.' The university with the most studies is Kazan Federal University. The 19 authors who conducted the studies have a large number of studies in this field. It was concluded that other authors had only one study in the field. Again, when we look at the distribution of the countries and documents according to the language of writing, the country with the most studies is China and the language of the documents is English. The area continues to evolve.

Preschool education is an education process that prepares children for primary education, provides the training and upbringing conditions in the home and also aims to remove the inequalities in terms of language and society in the early period. The audit is to evaluate learning and all the factors that affect learning and also prepare the environment and conditions for effective learning. The purpose of this research was to develop a comprehensive point of view for preschool education audit in the world and our country. Document analysis that is one of the qualitative research methods were utilized in this paper as the method. The documents related to the systems in France, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Russia, China, Israel, America, Saudi Arabia, Japan, India Jordan, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, Kosovo and Turkey were researched out within the scope of this study.

Seamless learning has a significance that has been increasing in recent years, and an increasing number of studies on the subject in the literature draws attention. This study aimed to examine the research on seamless learning between 1996 and 2020 with the bibliometric analysis method. The Scopus database was used in the collection of the data. After various screening processes, a total of 389 publications were included in the analysis. Descriptive analysis and bibliometric analysis were used in the analysis of the data. The distribution of publications by years, types of publications, sources, and languages were analyzed in the research. Additionally, visual maps were created with analyses of co-author, cocitation, and co-word. At the end of the study, it was seen that there has been an increase in the number of publications from the past to the present, articles and papers were predominant, and that most of the studies were carried out in English. As a result of bibliometric analysis, it was concluded that the most efficient countries in seamless learning were the United Kingdom, the United States, and Singapore. Also, it has been determined that the National Institute of Education, Center for International Education and Exchange, and Kyushu University institutions are dominant. The most frequently mentioned authors cited in studies in many different fields are M. Sharples, L.-H. Wong, and H. Ogata. According to the co-word analysis, the keywords seamless learning, mobile learning, ubiquitous learning, and mobile-assisted language learning stand out in the field of seamless learning.

Purpose: This paper aims to present a comprehensive review of the present state and trends of smart education research. It addresses the need to have a systematic review of smart education to depict its research landscape in view of the growing volume of related publications. Design/methodology/approach: A bibliometric analysis of publications on smart education published in 2011 to 2020 was conducted, covering their patterns and trends in terms of collaboration, key publications, major topics and trends. A total of 1,317 publications with 29,317 cited references were collected from the Web of Science and Scopus for the bibliometric analysis. Findings: Research on smart education has been widely published in various sources. The most frequently cited references are all theoretical or discussion articles. Researchers in the USA, China, South Korea, India and Russia have been most active in research collaborations. However, international collaborations have remained infrequent except for those involving the USA. The research on smart education broadly covered smart technologies as well as teaching and learning. The emerging topics have addressed areas such as the Internet of Things, big data, flipped learning and gamification. Originality/value: This study depicts the intellectual landscape of smart education research, and illustrated the evolution and emerging trends in the field. The results highlight its latest developments and research needs, and suggest future work related to research collaborations on a larger scale and more studies on smart pedagogies.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study the possibilities and potential barriers on the path of internationalization of the educational services market through development of the system of remote education. Design/methodology/approach: In order to determine the influence of development of the system of remote education on the process of internationalization of the educational services market, the authors use the method of regression analysis. A regression curve is built, containing the model of paired linear regression and the value of determination coefficient. The research object is the market of higher educational services -- as it is subject to internationalization and distribution of remote education. The research is performed based on the 2017 data by the example of countries from various regions of the world that show different rates and levels of socio-economic development but that achieved the largest success in development of the system of remote education -- the USA, the UK, Brazil, China, South Korea, Italy, Germany, India, Malaysia, Australia, South Africa and Russia. Due to the absence of the official international statistics on the issue of internationalization of the educational services market, the proprietary method is used for determining its level. Findings: It is concluded that remote education has a slight influence on the process of internationalization of the educational services market in the countries of the world, though it has large potential in the sphere of stimulation of internationalization of the educational services market, as it allows providing educational services of equal quality and equal cost for domestic and foreign students. Originality/value: The developed and presented model of managing the development of the remote education system of a modern university in the interests of stimulating internationalization of the educational services market allows overcoming these barriers and opening the existing potential of remote education in the sphere of stimulation of internationalization of the educational services market.

Based on life history narratives of 57 women in India and interviews with 21 practitioners, we document the neglect, abuse, and instrumental deprivation of women’s rights through the process of transnational abandonment. While gendered local sociocultural milieus and economic norms contribute to these harms, they are crucially enabled and sustained by transnational formal-legal frameworks. Widening the explanatory lens for understanding domestic violence beyond the family and community, we argue that in a globalized world, (inter)state policies serve to construct these women as a subordinate category of citizens—“disposable women”—who can be abused and abandoned with impunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim is to enhance the knowledge regarding how the public assess and rate volunteerism. We begin by first developing the model for understanding the potential use of the net-cost concept in eliciting the public's subjective perceptions on the extent to which certain activities are perceived as volunteerism. Four hypotheses relevant to the use of the net-cost concept are developed. We developed a questionnaire consisting of 50 case scenarios and applied it in Canada, India, Italy, Netherlands, and Georgia and Philadelphia in the United States, each with a sample of 450 adults or more. With one exception, our net-cost hypotheses are supported, suggesting that the public perception of volunteering is strongly linked with the costs and benefits that accrue to the individual from the volunteering activity, and that this result holds true across different cultures. Finally, we suggest directions for future research that can shed further light on the relationship between net cost and public good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, industry relevance and connectedness have evolved into a key requirement for students and their parents, who increasingly perceive employability upon graduation as a critical factor in the degree selection process. Simultaneously, professional bodies emphasise the need for high levels of industry engagement as a condition for accreditation, which in turn further impacts on the "marketability" of a specific degree. However, many of the skills emphasised by potential employers and industry reference groups are more closely aligned with generic graduate attributes, rather than discipline specific knowledge and skills. This increasingly includes an emphasis on cultural awareness, excellent communication skills and the ability to work in dispersed, often even virtual teams. This observation is arguably particularly relevant within the business (degree) context, where workforces become increasingly multicultural, as traditional borders and limitations make way for transnational opportunities. This paper discusses the benefits and challenges associated with a third year student project that set out to combine the need for discipline specific knowledge, with the acquisition of versatile, culturally sensitive business skills. Students participating in the aptly titled "communications challenge" competed against their peers as part of multicultural teams, representing twelve countries, across five continents. The authors conclude that experiential learning opportunities like this global, real life client project may not necessarily be popular amongst the wider student cohort. Furthermore, the acquisition of discipline specific knowledge may be limited when compared to "traditional" teaching deliveries. However, projects like this provide a number of benefits, in particular in the context of capstone units that set out to prepare students for a diverse career in an increasingly global, multicultural and complex environment.

While higher education is regarded a high priority for economic development in many countries, public budgets often fall short to support desired levels of expansion in higher education. This leads to cost-sharing: students and their families are required to contribute more to the costs of higher education. This paper explores worldwide trends to cope with this issue based on the following questions: Is it fair to ask for larger contributions from students? What are the global patterns and forms of higher private shares in the costs of higher education? And what is the impact of cost-sharing on higher education access and equity? (Contains 4 tables and 2 footnotes.)

Background: Aflatoxins are fungal metabolites associated with contaminated food products. Intake of aflatoxin-contaminated food results in serious health hazards and even death. Therefore, the aim of this study is to evaluate the global scientific output of research of aflatoxin by using bibliometric techniques. Methods: This bibliometric study was conducted using Scopus database and classified the retrieved publications were classified from different aspects, including the countries/region of focus, journals, authors, institutes, citations, and content analysis to discover any hot and emerging topics. In addition, the bibliometric analysis of the international collaborative network and hot research topics were generated by VOSviewer© software version 1.6.10. The publication period was restricted in the search for two decades (1998–2017). Results: The search engine of the Scopus database found 9845 documents published in the field of aflatoxin. The USA is the top publishing source in the world (22.85%), followed by China (11.85%), India (9.32%), and Italy (5.25%). In earlier years, researchers focused on terms related to the topics of "sources and biosynthesis of aflatoxin", "health effects by aflatoxin", and "detoxification and treatment of aflatoxin". However, in recent years, researchers pay more attention to the topic of detection and quantification of aflatoxin. Conclusions: The quantity of research in global aflatoxin has substantially increased over the past two decades. The evaluation of the historical status and development trend in aflatoxin scientific research can guide future research, and ultimately provide the basis for improving management procedures for governmental decisions, healthcare, industries, and educational institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents news of the professional activities and job changes of the members of "The Personal and Guidance Journal." Some of the members are Harold Howes, Walter B. Barbe, Mark P. Yolles and Linda Snyder. Harold Howes is assisting with a developing student personnel office at Allahabad University, India, and organizing seminars there on the subject of student personnel services. Walter B. Barbe, Chairman of the Department of Special Education at Kent State University, Ohio, has assumed the associate editorship of "Highlights for Children," a juvenile periodical. Mark P. Yolles, formerly director of guidance in Washingtonville, New York, has been appointed guidance director for the Overseas School of Rome, a private American school serving 700 students in Rome, Italy. Linda Snyder was appointed Assistant Dean of Women of Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, Illinois, where she will have responsibility for counseling and advisory services for resident women students and will direct the women's residence halls. Margaret Ruth Smith has left Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, after 24 years of service and is acting as an Educational Consultant in Atlanta, Georgia.

This paper studies the interplay between social distancing and the spread of the COVID-19 disease-a global pandemic that has affected most of the world's population. Our goals are to (1) to observe the correlation between the strictness of social distancing policies and the spread of disease and (2) to determine the optimal adoption level of social distancing policies. The earliest instances of the virus were found in China, and the virus has reached the United States with devastating consequences. Other countries severely affected by the pandemic are Brazil, Russia, the United Kingdom, Spain, India, Italy, and France. Although it is impossible to stop it, it is possible to slow down its spread to reduce its impact on the society and economy. Governments around the world have deployed various policies to reduce the virus spread in response to the pandemic. To assess the effectiveness of these policies, the system's dynamics of the society needs to be analyzed, which is generally not possible with mathematical linear equations or Monte Carlo methods because human society is a complex adaptive system with continuous feedback loops. Because of the challenges with the other methods, we chose agent-based methods to conduct our study. Moreover, recent agent-based modeling studies for the COVID-19 pandemic show significant promise in assisting decision-makers in managing the crisis by applying policies such as social distancing, disease testing, contact tracing, home isolation, emergency hospitalization, and travel prevention to reduce infection rates. Based on modeling studies conducted in Imperial College, increasing levels of interventions could slow the spread of disease and infection. We ran the model with six different percentages of social distancing while keeping the other parameters constant. The results show that social distancing affects the spread of COVID-19 significantly, in turn decreasing the spread of disease and infection rates when implemented at higher levels. We also validated these results by using the behavior space tool with ten experiments with varying social distancing levels. We conclude that applying and increasing social distancing policy levels leads to a significant reduction in infection spread and the number of deaths. Both experiments show that infection rates are reduced drastically when social distancing intervention is implemented between 80% to 100%.

COVID-19 has brought the world to a standstill with a wave of destruction in country after country with tremendous loss of lives and livelihood in advanced to developing nations. Whole world is staring at the prospect of repeated lockdowns with another wave of COVID-19 predicted to hit the world in September of 2020. The second wave is assumed to be even more destructive with severe impact across much of the world. The only way to defeat this pandemic is to quickly develop a safe and effective vaccine against this raging menace and initiate a global vaccination drive. Our study is an attempt to deploy various computational methods to identify B-cell and T-cell epitopes from the spike surface glycoprotein of SARS-COV-2 which have the novel potential for vaccine development against COVID-19. For this we have taken 8 unique strains with one each from India, China, France, USA, Italy, Australia, Iran and Pakistan. The strain data was extracted from NCBI Database. By analyzing the immune parameters like surface accessibility, antigenicity, variability, conservancy, flexibility, hydrophilicity, allergenicity and toxicity of the conserved sequences of spike glycoprotein using various databases and bioinformatics tools, we identified two potential novel linear (SGTNGTKRFDN and ASVYAWNRK) and one structural B-cell epitope as well as two T-cell epitopes (RLFRKSNLK and IPTNFTISV) which can be used as epitope-based peptide vaccines. Docking simulation assay revealed that above T-cell epitopes have minimum free binding energy and showed strong hydrogen bond interaction which strengthened its potential as being a T-cell epitope for the epitope-based novel vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. This study allows us to claim that B-cell and T-cell epitopes mentioned above provide potential pathways for developing an exploratory vaccine against spike surface glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 with high confidence for the identified strains. We will need to confirm our findings with biological assays., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, a large number of COVID-19-related papers have been published. However, concerns about the risk of expedited science have been raised. We aimed at reviewing and categorizing COVID-19-related medical research and to critically appraise peer-reviewed original articles., Methods: The data sources were Pubmed, Cochrane COVID-19 register study, arXiv, medRxiv and bioRxiv, from 01/11/2019 to 01/05/2020. Peer-reviewed and preprints publications related to COVID-19 were included, written in English or Chinese. No limitations were placed on study design. Reviewers screened and categorized studies according to i) publication type, ii) country of publication, and iii) topics covered. Original articles were critically appraised using validated quality assessment tools., Results: Among the 11,452 publications identified, 10,516 met the inclusion criteria, among which 7468 (71.0%) were peer-reviewed articles. Among these, 4190 publications (56.1%) did not include any data or analytics (comprising expert opinion pieces). Overall, the most represented topics were infectious disease (n = 2326, 22.1%), epidemiology (n = 1802, 17.1%), and global health (n = 1602, 15.2%). The top five publishing countries were China (25.8%), United States (22.3%), United Kingdom (8.8%), Italy (8.1%) and India (3.4%). The dynamic of publication showed that the exponential growth of COVID-19 peer-reviewed articles was mainly driven by publications without original data (mean 261.5 articles ± 51.1 per week) as compared with original articles (mean of 69.3 ± 22.3 articles per week). Original articles including patient data accounted for 713 (9.5%) of peer-reviewed studies. A total of 576 original articles (80.8%) showed intermediate to high risk of bias. Last, except for simulation studies that mainly used large-scale open data, the median number of patients enrolled was of 102 (IQR = 37-337)., Conclusions: Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of research is composed by publications without original data. Peer-reviewed original articles with data showed a high risk of bias and included a limited number of patients. Together, these findings underscore the urgent need to strike a balance between the velocity and quality of research, and to cautiously consider medical information and clinical applicability in a pressing, pandemic context. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: https://osf.io/5zjyx/.

What we have tried to do in this paper is to question the universality of Infantile Autism as implied by the various definitions which have been provided. Our research of the literature has convinced us that infantile autism appears to be an illness of Western Civilization, and appears in countries of high technology, where the nuclear family dominates. We indicated that no research studies were located in the U.S.A. on Hispanics, in spite of their large number. Furthermore, it was found to be quite rare among Black families. We also saw that the illness seems to be quite infrequent in Latin American countries, Africa, and India, while the rate is high in Japan, but only in westernized families. Tinbergen (1974) likewise feels that infantile autism is "actually on the increase in a number of Western and westernized societies". Two major variables which are interconnected seem to be responsible for the confusion in the findings. One of them is the problem of diagnosis. It would seem that many researchers have extended the definition of infantile autism to include other seriously afflicted children, including those who are brain-damaged. This is no surprise, since such conflicts exist as Ritvo (1981) estimating that there are 300,000 autistic children in the U.S., while a report by the National Institute for Handicapped Research estimates the number of autistic children to be 71,000 (1981). Another aspect of the findings which has been contradictory is that some investigators have found that parents of autistic children tend to be of higher S.E.S., particularly in European studies, while some studies in the U.S.A. did not find such a difference among the parents of autistic and non-autistic children. We have provided some illustrations to indicate that studies which have found no differences were not dealing exclusively with autistic children as defined by Kanner, and often used childhood schizophrenia and autism interchangeably. Cantwell, Baker, and Rutter (1978) have pointed out that this persistent difference of superior S.E.S. of parents of autistic children is an embarrassing finding which is very hard to explain if one holds that the disease is organically determined. In conclusion to his review of the literature on the universality of adult schizophrenia, Torrey (1973) wrote the following: "Studies must be done soon or it will be too late to do them at all. But, until the universal prevalence of schizophrenia becomes an open question, this task is unlikely to be undertaken". The writer of this paper is of the same opinion.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)