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The aim of this study was to examine the relationship of maternal interpersonal violence-related posttraumatic stress disorder (IPV-PTSD), associated neural activity in response to mother-child relational stimuli, and child psychopathology indicators at child ages 12–42 months and one year later. The study tested the hypothesis that decreased maternal neural activity in regions that subserve emotion regulation would be associated with child symptoms associated with emotional dysregulation at both time points. Functional magnetic resonance imaging of 42 mothers with or without violence-exposure and associated IPV-PTSD were assessed. Their child’s life-events and symptoms/behaviors indicative of high-risk subsequent PTSD diagnosis on a maternal-report questionnaire were measured one year later. Maternal IPV-PTSD severity was significantly associated with decreased ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activation in response to mother-child relational stimuli. Maternal IPV-PTSD severity and decreased vmPFC activation were then significantly associated with a child attachment disturbance at 12–42 months and symptoms/behaviors one year later, that were correlated with emotional dysregulation and risk for child PTSD. Maternal IPV-PTSD and child exposure to IPV were both predictive of child PTSD symptoms with maternal IPV-PTSD likely mediating the effects of child IPV exposure on child PTSD symptoms. These findings suggest that maternal IPV-PTSD severity and associated decreased vmPFC activity in response to mother-child relational stimuli are predictors of child psychopathology by age 12–42 months and one-year later. Significant findings in this paper may well be useful in understanding how maternal top-down cortico-limbic dysregulation promotes intergenerational transmission of IPV and related psychopathology and, thus should be targeted in treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies rely on cross-sectional retrospective reports from adult samples to collect information about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to examine relationships with adult outcomes. The problems associated with these reports have long been debated, with only a few studies determining their reliability and validity and fewer still reaching consensus on the matter. This paper uses repeat prospective and retrospective reports of adverse childhood experiences from two respondent sources in the South African Birth to Twenty Plus (Bt20+) cohort to explore agreement and concordance in the prospective reporting of ACEs by caregivers and respective children as adolescents and then as young adults. The findings demonstrate little overall agreement between prospective and retrospective accounts of childhood experiences, with 80% of kappa values below the moderate agreement cutoff (k = .41). The highest levels of agreement were found between prospective and retrospective reporting on parental and household death (kappas ranging from .519 to .944). Comparisons between prospective caregiver reports and retrospective young adult reports yielded high concordance rates on sexual and physical abuse and exposure to intimate partner violence (91.0%, 87.7% and 80.2%, respectively). The prevalence of reported ACEs varied with the age of the respondent, with adolescents reporting much higher rates of exposure to violence, physical and sexual abuse than are reported retrospectively or by caregivers. This variation may partly reflect actual changes in circumstances with maturation, but may be influenced by developmental stage and issues of memory, cognition and emotional state more than has been considered in previous analyses. More research, across disciplines, is needed to understand these processes and their effect on recall. Long-term prospective studies are critical for this purpose. In conclusion, methodological research that uses a range of information sources to establish the reliability and validity of both retrospective and prospective reports ‒ recognizing that the two approaches may fundamentally answer different questions ‒ should be encouraged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: There is a general inquisition regarding the monetary value of a research output, as a substantial amount of funding in modern academia is essentially awarded to good research presented in the form of journal articles, conferences papers, performances, compositions, exhibitions, books and book chapters etc., which, eventually leads to another question if the value varies across different disciplines. Answers to these questions will not only assist academics and researchers, but will also help higher education institutions (HEIs) make informed decisions in their administrative and research policies. Design and methodology: To examine both the questions, we applied the United Kingdom’s recently concluded national research assessment exercise known as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 as a case study. All the data for this study is sourced from the openly available publications which arose from the digital repositories of REF’s results and HEFCE’s funding allocations. Findings: A world leading output earns between £7504 and £14,639 per year within the REF cycle, whereas an internationally excellent output earns between £1876 and £3659, varying according to their area of research. Secondly, an investigation into the impact rating of 25315 journal articles submitted in five areas of research by UK HEIs and their awarded funding revealed a linear relationship between the percentage of quartile-one journal publications and percentage of 4* outputs in Clinical Medicine, Physics and Psychology/Psychiatry/Neuroscience UoAs, and no relationship was found in the Classics and Anthropology/Development Studies UoAs, due to the fact that most publications in the latter two disciplines are not journal articles. Practical implications: The findings provide an indication of the monetary value of a research output, from the perspectives of government funding for research, and also what makes a good output, i.e. whether a relationship exists between good quality output and the source of its publication. The findings may also influence future REF submission strategies in HEIs and ascertain that the impact rating of the journals is not necessarily a reflection of the quality of research in every discipline, and this may have a significant influence on the future of scholarly communications in general. Originality: According to the author’s knowledge, this is the first time an investigation has estimated the monetary value of a good research output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the demand for performance improvement and the existence of prior information, semi-supervised community detection with pairwise constraints becomes a hot topic. Most existing methods have been successfully encoding the must-link constraints, but neglect the opposite ones, i.e., the cannot-link constraints, which can force the exclusion between nodes. In this paper, we are interested in understanding the role of cannot-link constraints and effectively encoding pairwise constraints. Towards these goals, we define an integral generative process jointly considering the network topology, must-link and cannot-link constraints. We propose to characterize this process as a Multi-variance Mixed Gaussian Generative (MMGG) Model to address diverse degrees of confidences that exist in network topology and pairwise constraints and formulate it as a weighted nonnegative matrix factorization problem. The experiments on artificial and real-world networks not only illustrate the superiority of our proposed MMGG, but also, most importantly, reveal the roles of pairwise constraints. That is, though the must-link is more important than cannot-link when either of them is available, both must-link and cannot-link are equally important when both of them are available. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on discovering and exploring the importance of cannot-link constraints in semi-supervised community detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explored the characteristics and motivations of people who, having obtained their genetic or genomic data from Direct-To-Consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT) companies, voluntarily decide to share them on the publicly accessible web platform openSNP. The study is the first attempt to describe open data sharing activities undertaken by individuals without institutional oversight. In the paper we provide a detailed overview of the distribution of the demographic characteristics and motivations of people engaged in genetic or genomic open data sharing. The geographical distribution of the respondents showed the USA as dominant. There was no significant gender divide, the age distribution was broad, educational background varied and respondents with and without children were equally represented. Health, even though prominent, was not the respondents’ primary or only motivation to be tested. As to their motivations to openly share their data, 86.05% indicated wanting to learn about themselves as relevant, followed by contributing to the advancement of medical research (80.30%), improving the predictability of genetic testing (76.02%) and considering it fun to explore genotype and phenotype data (75.51%). Whereas most respondents were well aware of the privacy risks of their involvement in open genetic data sharing and considered the possibility of direct, personal repercussions troubling, they estimated the risk of this happening to be negligible. Our findings highlight the diversity of DTC-GT consumers who decide to openly share their data. Instead of focusing exclusively on health-related aspects of genetic testing and data sharing, our study emphasizes the importance of taking into account benefits and risks that stretch beyond the health spectrum. Our results thus lend further support to the call for a broader and multi-faceted conceptualization of genomic utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, various studies have been conducted on the prediction of crime occurrences. This predictive capability is intended to assist in crime prevention by facilitating effective implementation of police patrols. Previous studies have used data from multiple domains such as demographics, economics, and education. Their prediction models treat data from different domains equally. These methods have problems in crime occurrence prediction, such as difficulty in discovering highly nonlinear relationships, redundancies, and dependencies between multiple datasets. In order to enhance crime prediction models, we consider environmental context information, such as broken windows theory and crime prevention through environmental design. In this paper, we propose a feature-level data fusion method with environmental context based on a deep neural network (DNN). Our dataset consists of data collected from various online databases of crime statistics, demographic and meteorological data, and images in Chicago, Illinois. Prior to generating training data, we select crime-related data by conducting statistical analyses. Finally, we train our DNN, which consists of the following four kinds of layers: spatial, temporal, environmental context, and joint feature representation layers. Coupled with crucial data extracted from various domains, our fusion DNN is a product of an efficient decision-making process that statistically analyzes data redundancy. Experimental performance results show that our DNN model is more accurate in predicting crime occurrence than other prediction models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a prospective study to establish prediction models that map the refined Scoliosis Research Society 22-item (SRS-22r) onto EuroQoL-5 dimension 5-level (EQ-5D-5L) utility scores in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) patients. Comparison of treatment outcomes in AIS can be determined by cost-utility analysis. However, the mainstay spine-specific health-related quality of life outcome measure, the SRS-22r questionnaire does not provide utility assessment. In this study, AIS patients were prospectively recruited to complete both the EQ-5D-5L and SRS-22r questionnaires by trained interviewers. Ordinary least squares regression was undertaken to develop mapping models, which the validity and robustness were assessed by using the 10-fold cross-validation procedure. EQ-5D-5L utility scores were regressed on demographics, Cobb angle, curve types, treatment modalities, and five domains of the SRS-22r questionnaire. Three models were developed using stepwise selection method. EQ-5D-5L scores were regressed on 1) main effects of SRS-22r subscale scores, 2) as per 1 plus squared and interaction terms, and 3) as per 2 plus demographic and clinical characteristics. Model goodness-of-fit was assessed using R-square, adjusted R-square, and information criteria; whereas the predictive performance was evaluated using root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and the proportion of absolute error within the threshold of 0.05 and 0.10. A total of 227 AIS patients with mean age of 15.6 years were recruited. The EQ-5D-5L scores were predicted by four domains of SRS-22r (main effects of ‘Function’, ‘Pain’, ‘Appearance’ and ‘Mental Health’, and squared term of ‘Function’ and ‘Pain’), and Cobb angle in Model 3 with the best goodness-of-fit (R-square/adjusted R-square: 62.1%/60.9%). Three models demonstrated an acceptance predictive performance in error analysis applying 10-fold cross-validation to three models where RMSE and MAE were between 0.063–0.065 and between 0.039–0.044, respectively. Model 3 was therefore recommended out of three mapping models established in this paper. To our knowledge, this is the first study to map a spine-specific health-related quality of life measure onto EQ-5D-5L for AIS patients. With the consideration and incorporation of demographic and clinical characteristics, over 60% variance explained by mapping model 3 enabled the satisfactory prediction of EQ-5D-5L utility scores from existing SRS-22r data for health economic appraisal of different treatment options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thesis presented here is that biomedical research is based on the trusted exchange of services. That exchange would be conducted more efficiently if the trusted software platforms to exchange those services, if they exist, were more integrated. While simpler and narrower in scope than the services governing biomedical research, comparison to existing internet-based platforms, like Airbnb, can be informative. We illustrate how the analogy to internet-based platforms works and does not work and introduce The Commons, under active development at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and elsewhere, as an example of the move towards platforms for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science plays an important role in most aspects of society, and scientists face ethical decisions as a routine part of their work, but science education frequently omits or segregates content related to ethics and broader impacts of science. Undergraduate research experiences have the potential to bridge traditional divides in education and provide a holistic view of science. In practice, these experiences can be inconsistent and may not provide the optimal learning environment. We developed a course that combines seminar and independent research elements to support student learning during undergraduate research, makes ethical and societal impacts of science clear by relating them to the students’ own research projects, and develops students’ ethical decision-making skills. Here, we describe the course and provide resources for developing a similar course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLQ), developed in Australia in 2012 using a ‘validity-driven’ approach, has been rapidly adopted and is being applied in many countries and languages. It is a multidimensional measure comprising nine distinct domains that may be used for surveys, needs assessment, evaluation and outcomes assessment as well as for informing service improvement and the development of interventions. The aim of this paper is to describe the German translation of the HLQ and to present the results of the validation of the culturally adapted version. The HLQ comprises 44 items, which were translated and culturally adapted to the German context. This study uses data collected from a sample of 1,058 persons with chronic conditions. Statistical analyses include descriptive and confirmatory factor analyses. In one-factor congeneric models, all scales demonstrated good fit after few model adjustments. In a single, highly restrictive nine-factor model (no cross-loadings, no correlated errors) replication of the original English-language version was achieved with fit indices and psychometric properties similar to the original HLQ. Reliability for all scales was excellent, with a Cronbach’s Alpha of at least 0.77. High to very high correlations between some HLQ factors were observed, suggesting that higher order factors may be present. Our rigorous development and validation protocol, as well as strict adaptation processes, have generated a remarkable reproduction of the HLQ in German. The results of this validation provide evidence that the HLQ is robust and can be recommended for use in German-speaking populations. Trial Registration: German Clinical Trial Registration (DRKS): . Registered 23 March 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This paper investigates the personal, professional and institutional predictors of health institution personnel's attitudes regarding access to healthcare for refugee claimants in Canada. Methods: In Montreal, the staff of five hospitals and two primary care centres (n = 1772) completed an online questionnaire documenting demographics, occupation, exposure to refugee claimant patients, and attitudes regarding healthcare access for refugee claimants. We used structural equations modeling to investigate the associations between professional and institutional factors with latent functions of positive and negative attitudes toward refugee's access to healthcare. Results: Younger participants, social workers, participants from primary care centres, and from 1st migrant generation had the lowest scores of negative attitudes. Respondents who experienced contact with refugees had lower scores of negative attitudes (B = -14% standard deviation [SD]; 95% CI: -24, -4%). However, direct contact with refugees increased scores of negative attitudes in the institution with the most negative attitudes by 36% SD (95% CI: 1, 71%). Interpretation: Findings suggest that institutions influence individuals’ attitudes about refugee claimants’ access to health care and that, in an institutional context of negative attitudes, contact with refugees may further confirm negative perceptions about this vulnerable group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth alcohol consumption has been steadily declining in Australia, as in other countries; fewer young people are drinking and the age of initiation is increasing. However, young people, their parents and others in their communities continue to believe that adolescent (excessive) drinking is the norm. This perception, and the concurrent misperception that the majority of parents are happy to provide their underage children with alcohol, creates a perceived culture of acceptance of youth alcohol consumption. Young people believe that it is accepted, and even expected, that they will drink; and parents perceive that not providing their adolescent children with alcohol will lead to social exclusion. There is evidence that shifting social norms can have an immediate and lasting effect adolescents’ (and adults’) alcohol related attitudes and behaviors. This paper reports on a novel, community based social marketing intervention designed to correct misperceptions of alcohol related social norms in an Australian community. The project utilized a social marketing approach, informed by the full complement of Andreasen’s social marketing benchmarking criteria, and concurrently targeted adolescents, parents of adolescents and the broader community. Using extensive formative research and multiple evaluation techniques, the study demonstrates that shifts in community social norms are possible and suggests that this approach could be used more widely to support the positive trends in youth alcohol consumption and parental supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many US biomedical PhD programs receive more applications for admissions than they can accept each year, necessitating a selective admissions process. Typical selection criteria include standardized test scores, undergraduate grade point average, letters of recommendation, a resume and/or personal statement highlighting relevant research or professional experience, and feedback from interviews with training faculty. Admissions decisions are often founded on assumptions that these application components correlate with research success in graduate school, but these assumptions have not been rigorously tested. We sought to determine if any application components were predictive of student productivity measured by first-author student publications and time to degree completion. We collected productivity metrics for graduate students who entered the umbrella first-year biomedical PhD program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2008–2010 and analyzed components of their admissions applications. We found no correlations of test scores, grades, amount of previous research experience, or faculty interview ratings with high or low productivity among those applicants who were admitted and chose to matriculate at UNC. In contrast, ratings from recommendation letter writers were significantly stronger for students who published multiple first-author papers in graduate school than for those who published no first-author papers during the same timeframe. We conclude that the most commonly used standardized test (the general GRE) is a particularly ineffective predictive tool, but that qualitative assessments by previous mentors are more likely to identify students who will succeed in biomedical graduate research. Based on these results, we conclude that admissions committees should avoid over-reliance on any single component of the application and de-emphasize metrics that are minimally predictive of student productivity. We recommend continual tracking of desired training outcomes combined with retrospective analysis of admissions practices to guide both application requirements and holistic application review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, admissions committees for biomedical Ph.D. programs have heavily weighed GRE scores when considering applications for admission. The predictive validity of GRE scores on graduate student success is unclear, and there have been no recent investigations specifically on the relationship between general GRE scores and graduate student success in biomedical research. Data from Vanderbilt University Medical School’s biomedical umbrella program were used to test to what extent GRE scores can predict outcomes in graduate school training when controlling for other admissions information. Overall, the GRE did not prove useful in predicating who will graduate with a Ph.D., pass the qualifying exam, have a shorter time to defense, deliver more conference presentations, publish more first author papers, or obtain an individual grant or fellowship. GRE scores were found to be moderate predictors of first semester grades, and weak to moderate predictors of graduate GPA and some elements of a faculty evaluation. These findings suggest admissions committees of biomedical doctoral programs should consider minimizing their reliance on GRE scores to predict the important measures of progress in the program and student productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to validate the properties of the Italian version of the Baller Identity Measurement Scale (i.e., BIMS-IT), a self-report questionnaire based on the athletic and academic identities; and to investigate differences in psychosocial factors such as gender, age, type of sport, and competition level. The dimensionality of the BIMS-IT was explored by means of the exploratory factor analysis, considering the scale’s internal consistency too (Confirmatory Factor Analysis). Results related to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis supported a model of measurement composed of two correlated factors: the athletic and academic identities and affectivity related to identities. For both factors, differences emerged between age, and competition level sub groups. In particular, higher identity scores emerged for ≤ 24 years old student-athletes with respect to their age counterparts. National sub-elite student-athletes reported lower identity values than those of national elite and international levels. Results suggest that the Italian version of the BIMS-IT is psychometrically robust and could be adopted for empirical uses. The higher identity scores reported by younger and higher competition level participants suggest a correspondent higher involvement into the student-athlete role. However, BIMS-IT represents a distinct model with respect to the original American BIMS, determining the need of further research on the student-athletes’ identity to better clarify any socio-cultural contest effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Poor menstrual knowledge and access to sanitary products have been proposed as barriers to menstrual health and school attendance. In response, interventions targeting these needs have seen increasing implementation in public and private sectors. However, there has been limited assessment of their effectiveness. Objectives: Assess the impact of providing reusable sanitary pads and puberty education on girls’ school attendance and psychosocial wellbeing outcomes. Methods: A cluster quasi-randomised controlled trial was conducted across 8 schools, including 1124 girls, in rural Uganda. Schools were allocated to one of four conditions: the provision of puberty education alone; reusable sanitary pads alone; puberty education and reusable sanitary pads; and a control (no intervention). The primary outcome was school attendance. Secondary outcomes reflected psychosocial wellbeing. Results: At follow-up, school attendance had worsened for girls across all conditions. Per-protocol analysis revealed that this decline was significantly greater for those in the control condition d = 0.52 (95%CI 0.26–0.77), with those in control schools having a 17.1% (95%CI: 8.7–25.5) greater drop in attendance than those in any intervention school. There were no differences between the intervention conditions. High rates of school drop-out and transfer meant the trial suffered from substantial participant drop-out. Intention-to-treat analyses using two different imputation strategies were consistent with the main results, with mean differences of 5.2% attendance in best-case and 24.5% in worst-case imputations. Results were robust to adjustments for clustering. There was no impact of the interventions on girls’ self-reported shame or insecurity during menstruation. Conclusion: Results of the trial support the hypothesised positive impact of providing sanitary pads or puberty education for girls’ school attendance in a developing country context. Findings must be interpreted with caution in light of poor participant retention, intervention fidelity, and the attendance measures used. Trial Registration: Pan African Clinical Trials Registry [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Around the world, regulatory bodies have taken the lead in determining the competencies required to become a physician. As a first step in addressing this project, it was decided to develop a set of core competencies that were unique to China and that might serve as a basis for medical education. The purpose of this paper was to construct a competency model for clinical physicians in China. Methods: Data was collected using a cross-sectional survey of 6247 clinicians from seven administrative regions (31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government) in China. The total sample was randomly divided into two sub-samples, an initial sample (Sample 1) and a replication sample (Sample 2). Independent exploratory factor analysis was conducted in each sample and the results were compared to determine the stability. After that the confirmatory factor analysis was used to ascertain the competency model for physicians. The reliability, convergent and discriminant validity of competency-based instrument were also examined. Results: 76 items with 8 dimensions were identified, accounting for 68.41% of the construct’s total variance in the initial sample and 67.47% in the replication sample. For the two samples, the overall scale reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) was both 0.985 with dimensions from 0.905 to 0.954 for the initial sample and from 0.902 to 0.955 for the replication sample after deleting the items. In confirmatory factor analysis, the result showed that all items had acceptable goodness of fit index. RMSEA and SRMR were less than 0.08 (RMSEA = 0.046, SRMR = 0.040), while GFI, NFI, IFI, and CFI were higher than 0.9 (GFI = 0.905, NFI = 0.903, IFI = 0.909, CFI = 0.909), leading to acceptable construct validity. All construct reliability values of the factors were higher than 0.70, and all average variance extracted values exceeded 0.50. Thus, we considered the reliability and validity of the 8 dimensions were acceptable. Conclusions: The instrument was shown to be both valid and reliable for measuring clinical physicians’ competency in China. The results of the competency-based instrument can be used by ministry of health and administrators of hospitals to assess physicians’ competencies, encourage and guide them to modify their behaviors according to the evaluation criteria, and also cultivate physicians with strong clinical practice, innovation and independent scientific research ability. Through these measurements and understandings, the overall level of clinical physicians will be increased in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this paper is to understand the role of the family on the sexual experiences of adolescents from urban, disadvantaged settings in Baltimore and Johannesburg. Data were collected as part of the WAVE study, a global study of disadvantaged youth in five cities. Qualitative data were based on key informant interviews, a Photovoice exercise, community mapping, focus groups and in-depth interviews with adolescents. Quantitative data were gathered from an ACASI survey that was administered to approximately 450–500 adolescents per site. Results from the qualitative data revealed that while parents were viewed as important sources of information for sexual and reproductive health, they were often not present in the adolescents’ lives. This lack of parental presence was perceived to result in adolescents feeling an overall lack of adult support and guidance. The impact of parental presence and support on adolescent sexual experience was further examined from the quantitative data and revealed a complex picture. In both Baltimore and Johannesburg, female adolescents who were raised by other relatives were less likely to report having had sex compared to those raised by two biological parents, which was not observed for males. In Johannesburg, female adolescents who were paternal orphans were less likely to have had sex compared to non-orphans; the opposite was true among males. Finally, in both sites, female adolescents who had been exposed to violence were more likely to have had sex compared to those who had not; for males, there was no significant relationship. The study demonstrates the powerful influence of both context and gender for understanding the influences of the family on adolescent sexual behaviors. Programs aiming to reduce adolescent sexual risk behaviors the need to understand the complex influences on risk behaviors in different settings and in particular, the role of mothers and fathers. Prevention strategies need to also understand and incorporate gender-specific messages and interventions in order to address the high risk of sexual behaviors among adolescents in these settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objective: Conscientious objection to abortion, clinicians’ refusal to perform legal abortions because of their religious or moral beliefs, has been the subject of increasing debate among bioethicists, policymakers, and public health advocates in recent years. Conscientious objection policies are intended to balance reproductive rights and clinicians’ beliefs. However, in practice, clinician objection can act as a barrier to abortion access–impinging on reproductive rights, and increasing unsafe abortion and related morbidity and mortality. There is little information about conscientious objection from a medical or public health perspective. A quantitative instrument is needed to assess prevalence of conscientious objection and to provide insight on its practice. This paper describes the development of a survey instrument to measure conscientious objection to abortion provision. Methods: A literature review, and in-depth formative interviews with stakeholders in Colombia were used to develop a conceptual model of conscientious objection. This model led to the development of a survey, which was piloted, and then administered, in Ghana. Results: The model posits three domains of conscientious objection that form the basis for the survey instrument: 1) beliefs about abortion and conscientious objection; 2) actions related to conscientious objection and abortion; and 3) self-identification as a conscientious objector. Conclusions: The instrument is intended to be used to assess prevalence among clinicians trained to provide abortions, and to gain insight on how conscientious objection is practiced in a variety of settings. Its results can inform more effective and appropriate strategies to regulate conscientious objection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a dramatic rise in the scale and scope of collaborative global health research. A number of structural and scientific factors explain this growth and there has been much discussion of these in the literature. Little, if any, attention has been paid, however, to the factors identified by scientists and other research actors as important to successful research collaboration. This is surprising given that their decisions are likely to play a key role in the sustainability and effectiveness of global health research initiatives. In this paper, we report on qualitative research with leading scientists involved in major international research collaborations about their views on good and bad collaborations and the factors that inform their decision-making about joining and participating actively in research networks. We identify and discuss eight factors that researchers see as essential in judging the merits of active participation in global health research collaborations: opportunities for active involvement in cutting-edge, interesting science; effective leadership; competence of potential partners in and commitment to good scientific practice; capacity building; respect for the needs, interests and agendas of partners; opportunities for discussion and disagreement; trust and confidence; and, justice and fairness in collaboration. Our findings suggest that the sustainability and effectiveness of global health research collaborations has an important ethical or moral dimension for the research actors involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a crucial and fundamental issue to identify a small subset of influential spreaders that can control the spreading process in networks. In previous studies, a degree-based heuristic called DegreeDiscount has been shown to effectively identify multiple influential spreaders and has severed as a benchmark method. However, the basic assumption of DegreeDiscount is not adequate, because it treats all the nodes equally without any differences. To consider a general situation in real world networks, a novel heuristic method named GeneralizedDegreeDiscount is proposed in this paper as an effective extension of original method. In our method, the status of a node is defined as a probability of not being influenced by any of its neighbors, and an index generalized discounted degree of one node is presented to measure the expected number of nodes it can influence. Then the spreaders are selected sequentially upon its generalized discounted degree in current network. Empirical experiments are conducted on four real networks, and the results show that the spreaders identified by our approach are more influential than several benchmark methods. Finally, we analyze the relationship between our method and three common degree-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objective: Research collaborations in biomedical research have evolved over time. No studies have addressed research collaboration in network meta-analysis (NMA). In this study, we used social network analysis methods to characterize global collaboration patterns of published NMAs over the past decades. Methods: PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science and the Cochrane Library were searched (at 9th July, 2015) to include systematic reviews incorporating NMA. Two reviewers independently selected studies and cross-checked the standardized data. Data was analyzed using Ucinet 6.0 and SPSS 17.0. NetDraw software was used to draw social networks. Results: 771 NMAs published in 336 journals from 3459 authors and 1258 institutions in 49 countries through the period 1997–2015 were included. More than three-quarters (n = 625; 81.06%) of the NMAs were published in the last 5-years. The BMJ (4.93%), Current Medical Research and Opinion (4.67%) and PLOS One (4.02%) were the journals that published the greatest number of NMAs. The UK and the USA (followed by Canada, China, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany) headed the absolute global productivity ranking in number of NMAs. The top 20 authors and institutions with the highest publication rates were identified. Overall, 43 clusters of authors (four major groups: one with 37 members, one with 12 members, one with 11 members and one with 10 members) and 21 clusters of institutions (two major groups: one with 62 members and one with 20 members) were identified. The most prolific authors were affiliated with academic institutions and private consulting firms. 181 consulting firms and pharmaceutical industries (14.39% of institutions) were involved in 199 NMAs (25.81% of total publications). Although there were increases in international and inter-institution collaborations, the research collaboration by authors, institutions and countries were still weak and most collaboration groups were small sizes. Conclusion: Scientific production on NMA is increasing worldwide with research leadership of Western countries (most notably, the UK, the USA and Canada). More authors, institutions and nations are becoming involved in research collaborations, but frequently with limited international collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban authorities are continuously drawing up policies to promote cycling among commuters. However, these initiatives are counterproductive for the targeted objectives because they increase opportunities for bicycle theft. This paper explores Inner London as a case study to address place-specific risk factors for bicycle theft at the street-segment level while controlling for seasonal variation. The presence of certain public amenities (e.g., bicycle stands, railway stations, pawnshops) was evaluated against locations of bicycle theft between 2013 and 2016 and risk effects were estimated using negative binomial regression models. Results showed that a greater level of risk stemmed from land-use facilities than from area-based socioeconomic status. The presence of facilities such as train stations, vacant houses, pawnbrokers and payday lenders increased bicycle theft, but no evidence was found that linked police stations with crime levels. The findings have significant implications for urban crime prevention with respect to non-residential land use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on juvenile justice aims to identify profiles of risk and protective factors in juvenile offenders. This paper presents a study of profiles of risk factors that influence young offenders toward committing sanctionable antisocial behavior (S-ASB). Decision tree analysis is used as a multivariate approach to the phenomenon of repeated sanctionable antisocial behavior in juvenile offenders in Spain. The study sample was made up of the set of juveniles who were charged in a court case in the Juvenile Court of Almeria (Spain). The period of study of recidivism was two years from the baseline. The object of study is presented, through the implementation of a decision tree. Two profiles of risk and protective factors are found. Risk factors associated with higher rates of recidivism are antisocial peers, age at baseline S-ASB, problems in school and criminality in family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In this paper, we report findings regarding the prevalence of expressed distress and depressive conditions among women living in a rural region of Sichuan Province. As well, we know of no data among women in rural China that examine whether “depression,” as categorically defined in classifications such as the DSM, adequately captures the expressed distress and symptomatic complaints of women in rural China. Methods: A multistage sampling method was employed to recruit the target population. The Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) was used to measure distress symptoms, and MINI International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) was employed to determine the prevalence of diagnosable depression and other disorders. Results: Among 1898 rural women, 12.4% (236) scored ≥16 on the CES-D, indicative of distress, and a subset of 7.7% (146) had scores ≥21, highly suggestive of a clinically significant disorder. We found that 49.8% women with ≥16 CES-D score were identified as showing features consistent with a current major depressive episode (MDE) vs. 1.9% in a sample of randomly selected women with <16 CES-D score. Among respondents, 30 of 84 (35.7%) scoring 16–20 and 83 of 143 (58.0%) scoring ≥21 reported symptoms consistent with MDE. 25.1% of women with a positive CES-D score did not describe symptoms consistent with any DSM-IV disorder. Conclusions: We found a higher portion of women reporting significant distress than previously described. Among them, there was a clear gradient, such that 41.7% of women with moderate distress did not have a psychiatric diagnosis, and even among those with more severe symptoms, 15.4% did not manifest a DSM-specific psychiatric condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous researches support that graphs are relevant decision aids to tasks related to the interpretation of numerical information. Moreover, literature shows that different types of graphical information can help or harm the accuracy on decision making of accountants and financial analysts. We conducted a 4×2 mixed-design experiment to examine the effects of numerical information disclosure on financial analysts’ accuracy, and investigated the role of overconfidence in decision making. Results show that compared to text, column graph enhanced accuracy on decision making, followed by line graphs. No difference was found between table and textual disclosure. Overconfidence harmed accuracy, and both genders behaved overconfidently. Additionally, the type of disclosure (text, table, line graph and column graph) did not affect the overconfidence of individuals, providing evidence that overconfidence is a personal trait. This study makes three contributions. First, it provides evidence from a larger sample size (295) of financial analysts instead of a smaller sample size of students that graphs are relevant decision aids to tasks related to the interpretation of numerical information. Second, it uses the text as a baseline comparison to test how different ways of information disclosure (line and column graphs, and tables) can enhance understandability of information. Third, it brings an internal factor to this process: overconfidence, a personal trait that harms the decision-making process of individuals. At the end of this paper several research paths are highlighted to further study the effect of internal factors (personal traits) on financial analysts’ accuracy on decision making regarding numerical information presented in a graphical form. In addition, we offer suggestions concerning some practical implications for professional accountants, auditors, financial analysts and standard setters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to estimate peer influence in video gaming time among adolescents. Using a nationally representative sample of the U.S. school-aged adolescents in 2009–2010, we estimate a structural model that accounts for the potential biases in the estimate of the peer effect. Our peer group is exogenously assigned and includes one year older adolescents in the same school grade as the respondent. The peer measure is based on peers’ own reports of video gaming time. We find that an additional one hour of playing video games per week by older grade-mates results in .47 hours increase in video gaming time by male responders. We do not find significant peer effect among female responders. Effective policies aimed at influencing the time that adolescents spend video gaming should take these findings into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the factor structure and measurement invariance of the Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire (TEOSQ) across American and Chinese samples. Results based on the mean and covariance structure analyses supported configural invariance, metric invariance and scalar invariance across groups. Latent means analyses revealed that American sample had significantly higher mean scores on task and ego orientations than the Chinese sample. The findings suggest that the TEOSQ is a valid and reliable instrument in assessing achievement motivation across these two diverse populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Reducing social distance between hospital staff and patients and establishing clear lines of communication is a major challenge when providing in-patient care for people afflicted by Buruli ulcer (BU) and chronic ulcers. Research on hospitals as therapeutic communities is virtually non-existent in Africa and is currently being called for by medical anthropologists working in the field of health service and policy planning. This paper describes a pioneering attempt to establish a therapeutic community for patients suffering from BU and other chronic ulcers requiring long term hospital care in Benin. Methods: A six-month pilot project was undertaken with the objectives of establishing a therapeutic community and evaluating its impact on practitioner and patient relations. The project was designed and implemented by a team of social scientists working in concert with the current and previous director of a hospital serving patients suffering from advanced stage BU and other chronic ulcers. Qualitative research initially investigated patients’ understanding of their illness and its treatment, identified questions patients had about their hospitalization, and ascertained their level of social support. Newly designed question–answer health education sessions were developed. Following these hospital wide education sessions, open forums were held each week to provide an opportunity for patients and hospital staff to express concerns and render sources of discontent transparent. Patient group representatives then met with hospital staff to problem solve issues in a non-confrontational manner. Psychosocial support for individual patients was provided in a second intervention which took the form of drop-in counseling sessions with social scientists trained to serve as therapy facilitators and culture brokers. Results: Interviews with patients revealed that most patients had very little information about the identity of their illness and the duration of their treatment. This knowledge gap surprised clinic staff members, who assumed someone had provided this information. Individual counseling and weekly education sessions corrected this information gap and reduced patient concerns about their treatment and the status of their healing process. This led to positive changes in staff–patient interactions. There was widespread consensus among both patients and staff that the quality of communication had increased significantly. Open forums providing an opportunity for patients and staff to air grievances were likewise popular and patient representative meetings resulted in productive problem solving supported by the hospital administration. Some systemic problems, however, remained persistent challenges. Patients with ulcers unrelated to BU questioned why BU patients were receiving preferential treatment, given special medicines, and charged less for their care. The idea of subsidized treatment for one disease and not another was hard to justify, especially given that BU is not contagious. Conclusion: This pilot project illustrates the basic principles necessary for transforming long term residential hospitals into therapeutic communities. Although the focus of this case study was patients suffering from chronic ulcers, the model presented is relevant for other types of patients with cultural adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common policy approach to reducing childhood obesity aims to shape the environment in which children spend most of their time: neighborhoods and schools. This paper uses richly detailed data on the body mass index (BMI) of all New York City public school students in grades K-8 to assess the potential for place-based approaches to reduce child obesity. We document variation in the prevalence of obesity across NYC public schools and census tracts, and then estimate the extent to which this variation can be explained by differences in individual-level predictors (such as race and household income). Both unadjusted and adjusted variability across neighborhoods and schools suggest place-based policies have the potential to meaningfully reduce child obesity, but under most realistic scenarios the improvement would be modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principle of distributing health care according to medical need is being challenged by increasing costs. As a result, many countries have initiated a debate on the introduction of explicit priority regulations based on medical, economic and person-based criteria, or have already established such regulations. Previous research on individual attitudes towards setting health care priorities based on medical and economic criteria has revealed consistent results, whereas studies on the use of person-based criteria have generated controversial findings. This paper examines citizens’ attitudes towards three person-based priority criteria, patients’ smoking habits, age and being the parent of a young child. Using data from the ISSP Health Module (2011) in 28 countries, logistic regression analysis demonstrates that self-interest as well as socio-demographic predictors significantly influence respondents’ attitudes towards the use of person-based criteria for health care prioritization. This study contributes to resolving the controversial findings on person-based criteria by using a larger country sample and by controlling for country-level differences with fixed effects models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thanks to the work of politics and religion scholars, we now know a lot about the relationship between religion and voting in American presidential general elections. However, we know less about the influence of religion on individual vote choice in presidential primaries. This article fills that gap by exploring the relationship between religion and candidate preference in the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries. Using pre-Super Tuesday surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, I find that the Republican candidate who most explicitly appealed to religious voters (Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012) was the preferred candidate of Republican respondents who attended religious services at the highest levels, and that as attendance increased, so did the likelihood of preferring that candidate. I also find that identification as a born again Christian mattered to candidate preference. Specifically, born again Christians were more likely than non-born again Christians to prefer Huckabee to Mitt Romney, John McCain and Ron Paul in 2008, and Santorum to Romney in 2012. Although ideology was not the primary subject of this article, I find that ideology was also a statistically significant predictor of Republican candidate preference in both 2008 and 2012. This robust finding reinforces scholars’ prior work on the importance of ideology in explaining presidential primary vote choice. The overall findings of the paper provide evidence that religion variables can add to our understanding of why voters prefer one candidate over another in presidential primaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Materials and Methods: In this paper, we propose a theoretical model based upon previous studies about personal and social network dynamics of job performance. We provide empirical support for this model using real-world data within the context of the Australian radiology profession. An examination of radiologists’ professional network topology through structural-positional and relational dimensions and radiologists’ personal characteristics in terms of knowledge, experience and self-esteem is provided. Thirty one breast imaging radiologists completed a purpose designed questionnaire regarding their network characteristics and personal attributes. These radiologists also independently read a test set of 60 mammographic cases: 20 cases with cancer and 40 normal cases. A Jackknife free response operating characteristic (JAFROC) method was used to measure the performance of the radiologists’ in detecting breast cancers. Results: Correlational analyses showed that reader performance was positively correlated with the social network variables of degree centrality and effective size, but negatively correlated with constraint and hierarchy. For personal characteristics, the number of mammograms read per year and self-esteem (self-evaluation) positively correlated with reader performance. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that the combination of number of mammograms read per year and network’s effective size, hierarchy and tie strength was the best fitting model, explaining 63.4% of the variance in reader performance. The results from this study indicate the positive relationship between reading high volumes of cases by radiologists and expertise development, but also strongly emphasise the association between effective social/professional interactions and informal knowledge sharing with high performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increase in the exposure and predisposition of civilian populations to disasters has been recorded in the last decades. In major disasters, as demonstrated recently in Nepal (2015) and previously in Haiti (2010), external aid is vital, yet in the first hours after a disaster, communities must usually cope alone with the challenge of providing emergent lifesaving care. Communities therefore need to be prepared to handle emergency situations. Mapping the needs of the populations within their purview is a trying task for decision makers and community leaders. In this context, the elderly are traditionally treated as a susceptible population with special needs. The current study aimed to explore variations in the level of community resilience along the lifespan. The study was conducted in nine small to mid-size towns in Israel between August and November 2011 (N = 885). The Conjoint Community Resiliency Assessment Measure (CCRAM), a validated instrument for community resilience assessment, was used to examine the association between age and community resilience score. Statistical analysis included spline and logistic regression models that explored community resiliency over the lifespan in a way that allowed flexible modeling of the curve without prior constraints. This innovative statistical approach facilitated identification of the ages at which trend changes occurred. The study found a significant rise in community resiliency scores in the age groups of 61–75 years as compared with younger age bands, suggesting that older people in good health may contribute positively to building community resiliency for crisis. Rather than focusing on the growing medical needs and years of dependency associated with increased life expectancy and the resulting climb in the proportion of elders in the population, this paper proposes that active "young at heart" older people can be a valuable resource for their community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Patellofemoral pain is considered one of the most common forms of knee pain, affecting adults, adolescents, and physically active populations. Inconsistencies in reported incidence and prevalence exist and in relation to the allocation of healthcare and research funding, there is a clear need to accurately understand the epidemiology of patellofemoral pain. Methods: An electronic database search was conducted, as well as grey literature databases, from inception to June 2017. Two authors independently selected studies, extracted data and appraised methodological quality. If heterogeneous, data were analysed descriptively. Where studies were homogeneous, data were pooled through a meta-analysis. Results: 23 studies were included. Annual prevalence for patellofemoral pain in the general population was reported as 22.7%, and adolescents as 28.9%. Incidence rates in military recruits ranged from 9.7–571.4/1,000 person-years, amateur runners in the general population at 1080.5/1,000 person-years and adolescents amateur athletes 5.1%–14.9% over 1 season. One study reported point prevalence within military populations as 13.5%. The pooled estimate for point prevalence in adolescents was 7.2% (95% Confidence Interval: 6.3%–8.3%), and in female only adolescent athletes was 22.7% (95% Confidence Interval 17.4%–28.0%). Conclusion: This review demonstrates high incidence and prevalence levels for patellofemoral pain. Within the context of this, and poor long term prognosis and high disability levels, PFP should be an urgent research priority. PROSPERO registration: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depression, one of the most common psychiatric disorders, is two- to three-times more prevalent in people living with HIV (PLHIV) than in the general population in many settings as shown in western countries but remains neglected in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We aimed to summarize the available evidence on the prevalence of depression and associated factors according to the scales used and the treatment status in PLHIV in SSA. The pooled prevalence estimates of depression ranged between 9% and 32% in PLHIV on antiretroviral treatment (ART) and in untreated or mixed (treated/untreated) ones, with a substantial variability according to the measurement scale used and also for a given scale. Low socio-economic conditions in PLHIV on ART, female sex and immunosuppression in mixed/untreated PLHIV were frequently reported as associated factors but with no consensus. As depression could have deleterious consequences on the PLHIV life, it is critical to encourage its screening and management, integrating these dimensions in HIV care throughout SSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional co-location scoping intends to identify local regions where spatial features of interest are frequently located together. Most of the previous researches in this domain are conducted on a global scale and they assume that spatial objects are embedded in a 2-D space, but the movement in urban space is actually constrained by the street network. In this paper we refine the scope of co-location patterns to 1-D paths consisting of nodes and segments. Furthermore, since the relations between spatial events are usually inversely proportional to their separation distance, the proposed method introduces the “Distance Decay Effects” to improve the result. Specifically, our approach first subdivides the street edges into continuous small linear segments. Then a value representing the local distribution intensity of events is estimated for each linear segment using the distance-decay function. Each kind of geographic feature can lead to a tessellated network with density attribute, and the generated multiple networks for the pattern of interest will be finally combined into a composite network by calculating the co-location prevalence measure values, which are based on the density variation between different features. Our experiments verify that the proposed approach is effective in urban analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Globally, life expectancy together with multimorbidity and chronic diseases are increasing. This leads to a growing demand for care and hence for healthcare personnel and nurses. To meet this demand, healthcare workers from abroad are increasingly hired. The nurses’ workplace in general is characterized by physically and psychologically demanding tasks, while that of migrant and minority nurses is additionally characterized by discriminatory practices. The present knowledge about the health of migrant and minority nurses and the terminology in this context are diverse. Thus, the purpose of this review is to systematically identify and synthesize international publications that explicitly focus on migrant nurses’ health. Materials and methods: A systematic review of relevant studies was undertaken using the databases Medline, PsycINFO, CINAHL and Web of Science. The screening process was conducted in several phases. This review was conducted in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines while the methodological quality assessment of the included papers was performed with the Mixed Method Appraisal Tool (MMAT). Results: Out of 11,599 citations initially obtained, 14 empirical studies were included in the final synthesis. The methodological quality of the empirical studies and reviews was diverse. The majority of the studies were conducted in the US and the nurses under study migrated from countries like the Philippines, India, Europe, and Africa. Among migrant nurses of different origins, there are differences in their physiological responses to stress. Migrant nurses and native nurses differ in reporting work-related injuries. Discussion: Migrant and minority nurses are at high risk of work-related injuries and discrimination than native or majority nurses. However, mixed results were obtained, namely that the reported health of migrant nurses either improves over time or it decreases. This review revealed that discrimination is the leading cause of impaired health amongst migrant and minority nurses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chemistry labs can become a dangerous environment for students as the lab exercises involve hazardous chemicals, glassware, and equipment. Approximately one hundred thousand students take chemistry laboratory classes annually in Nepal. We conducted a survey on chemical lab safety issues across Nepal. In this paper, we assess the safety policy and equipment, protocols and procedures followed, and waste disposal in chemistry teaching labs. Significant population of the respondents believed that there is no monitoring of the lab safety in their lab (p<0.001). Even though many labs do not allow food and beverages inside lab and have first aid kits, they lack some basic safety equipment. There is no institutional mechanism to dispose lab waste and chemical waste is disposed haphazardly. Majority of the respondents believed that the safety training should be a part of educational training (p = 0.001) and they would benefit from short course and/or workshop on lab safety (p<0.001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This research paper aims to assess factors reported by parents associated with the successful transition of children with complex additional support requirements that have undergone a transition between school environments from 8 European Union member states. Methods: Quantitative data were collected from 306 parents within education systems from 8 EU member states (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and the UK). The data were derived from an online questionnaire and consisted of 41 questions. Information was collected on: parental involvement in their child’s transition, child involvement in transition, child autonomy, school ethos, professionals’ involvement in transition and integrated working, such as, joint assessment, cooperation and coordination between agencies. Survey questions that were designed on a Likert-scale were included in the Principal Components Analysis (PCA), additional survey questions, along with the results from the PCA, were used to build a logistic regression model. Results: Four principal components were identified accounting for 48.86% of the variability in the data. Principal component 1 (PC1), ‘child inclusive ethos,’ contains 16.17% of the variation. Principal component 2 (PC2), which represents child autonomy and involvement, is responsible for 8.52% of the total variation. Principal component 3 (PC3) contains questions relating to parental involvement and contributed to 12.26% of the overall variation. Principal component 4 (PC4), which involves transition planning and coordination, contributed to 11.91% of the overall variation. Finally, the principal components were included in a logistic regression to evaluate the relationship between inclusion and a successful transition, as well as whether other factors that may have influenced transition. All four principal components were significantly associated with a successful transition, with PC1 being having the most effect (OR: 4.04, CI: 2.43–7.18, p<0.0001). Discussion: To support a child with complex additional support requirements through transition from special school to mainstream, governments and professionals need to ensure children with additional support requirements and their parents are at the centre of all decisions that affect them. It is important that professionals recognise the educational, psychological, social and cultural contexts of a child with additional support requirements and their families which will provide a holistic approach and remove barriers for learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metrics derived from Twitter and other social media—often referred to as altmetrics—are increasingly used to estimate the broader social impacts of scholarship. Such efforts, however, may produce highly misleading results, as the entities that participate in conversations about science on these platforms are largely unknown. For instance, if altmetric activities are generated mainly by scientists, does it really capture broader social impacts of science? Here we present a systematic approach to identifying and analyzing scientists on Twitter. Our method can identify scientists across many disciplines, without relying on external bibliographic data, and be easily adapted to identify other stakeholder groups in science. We investigate the demographics, sharing behaviors, and interconnectivity of the identified scientists. We find that Twitter has been employed by scholars across the disciplinary spectrum, with an over-representation of social and computer and information scientists; under-representation of mathematical, physical, and life scientists; and a better representation of women compared to scholarly publishing. Analysis of the sharing of URLs reveals a distinct imprint of scholarly sites, yet only a small fraction of shared URLs are science-related. We find an assortative mixing with respect to disciplines in the networks between scientists, suggesting the maintenance of disciplinary walls in social media. Our work contributes to the literature both methodologically and conceptually—we provide new methods for disambiguating and identifying particular actors on social media and describing the behaviors of scientists, thus providing foundational information for the construction and use of indicators on the basis of social media metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two independent surveys of PhD students in STEM fields at the University of California, Berkeley, indicate that underrepresented minorities (URMs) publish at significantly lower rates than non-URM males, placing the former at a significant disadvantage as they compete for postdoctoral and faculty positions. Differences as a function of gender reveal a similar, though less consistent, pattern. A conspicuous exception is Berkeley’s College of Chemistry, where publication rates are tightly clustered as a function of ethnicity and gender, and where PhD students experience a highly structured program that includes early and systematic involvement in research, as well as clear expectations for publishing. Social science research supports the hypothesis that this more structured environment hastens the successful induction of diverse groups into the high-performance STEM academic track. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does scientific research affect the world around us? Being able to answer this question is of great importance in order to appropriately channel efforts and resources in science. The impact by scientists in academia is currently measured by citation based metrics such as h-index, i-index and citation counts. These academic metrics aim to represent the dissemination of knowledge among scientists rather than the impact of the research on the wider world. In this work we are interested in measuring scientific impact beyond academia, on the economy, society, health and legislation (comprehensive impact). Indeed scientists are asked to demonstrate evidence of such comprehensive impact by authoring case studies in the context of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). We first investigate the extent to which existing citation based metrics can be indicative of comprehensive impact. We have collected all recent REF impact case studies from 2014 and we have linked these to papers in citation networks that we constructed and derived from CiteSeerX, arXiv and PubMed Central using a number of text processing and information retrieval techniques. We have demonstrated that existing citation-based metrics for impact measurement do not correlate well with REF impact results. We also consider metrics of online attention surrounding scientific works, such as those provided by the Altmetric API. We argue that in order to be able to evaluate wider non-academic impact we need to mine information from a much wider set of resources, including social media posts, press releases, news articles and political debates stemming from academic work. We also provide our data as a free and reusable collection for further analysis, including the PubMed citation network and the correspondence between REF case studies, grant applications and the academic literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly between natural and social sciences, is perceived as crucial to solving the significant challenges facing humanity. However, despite the need for such collaboration being expressed more frequently and intensely, it remains unclear to what degree such collaboration actually takes place, what trends and developments there are and which actors are involved. Previous studies, often based on bibliometric analysis of large bodies of literature, partly observed an increase in interdisciplinary collaboration in general, but in particular, the collaboration among distant fields was less explored. Other more qualitative studies found that interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly between natural and social scientists was not well developed, and obstacles abounded. To shed some light on the actual status and developments of this collaboration, we performed an analysis based on a sample of articles on groundwater research. We first identified journals and articles therein that potentially combined natural and social science aspects of groundwater research. Next, we analysed the disciplinary composition of their authors’ teams, cited references, titles and keywords, making use of our detailed personal expertise in groundwater research and its interdisciplinary aspects. We combined several indicators developed from this analysis into a final classification of the degree of multidisciplinarity of each article. Covering the period between 1990 and 2014, we found that the overall percentage of multidisciplinary articles was in the low single-digit range, with only slight increases over the past decades. The interdisciplinarity of individuals plays a major role compared to interdisciplinarity involving two or more researchers. If collaboration with natural sciences takes place, social science is represented most often by economists. As a side result, we found that journals publishing multidisciplinary research had lower impact factors on average, and multidisciplinary papers were cited much less than mono-disciplinary ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modellers of complex biological or social systems are often faced with an invidious choice: to use simple models with few mechanisms that can be fully analysed, or to construct complicated models that include all the features which are thought relevant. The former ensures rigour, the latter relevance. We discuss a method that combines these two approaches, beginning with a complex model and then modelling the complicated model with simpler models. The resulting “chain” of models ensures some rigour and relevance. We illustrate this process on a complex model of voting intentions, constructing a reduced model which agrees well with the predictions of the full model. Experiments with variations of the simpler model yield additional insights which are hidden by the complexity of the full model. This approach facilitated collaboration between social scientists and physicists—the complex model was specified based on the social science literature, and the simpler model constrained to agree (in core aspects) with the complicated model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing the research of individual scholars is currently a matter of serious concern and worldwide debate. In order to gauge the long-term efficacy and efficiency of this practice, we carried out a limited survey of the operation and outcome of Mexico’s 30-year old National System of Investigators or SNI, the country’s main instrument for stimulating competitive research in science and technology. A statistical random sample of researchers listed in the area of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences—one of SNI’s first and better consolidated academic divisions comprising a wide range of research disciplines, from philosophy to pedagogy to archaeology to experimental brain research—was screened comparing individual ranks or "Levels of distinction" to actual compliance with the SNI’s own evaluation criteria, as reflected in major public databases of scholarly production. The same analysis was applied to members of a recent Review Committee, integrated by top-level researchers belonging to that general area of knowledge, who have been in charge of assessing and ranking their colleagues. Our results for both sets of scholars show wide disparity of individual productivity within the same SNI Level, according to all key indicators officially required (books issued by prestigious publishers, research articles appeared in indexed journals, and formation of new scientists), as well as in impact estimated by numbers of citations. Statistical calculation from the data indicates that 36% of members in the Review Committee and 53% of researchers in the random sample do not satisfy the official criteria requested for their appointed SNI Levels. The findings are discussed in terms of possible methodological errors in our study, of relevance for the SNI at large in relation to independent appraisals, of the cost-benefit balance of the organization as a research policy tool, and of possible alternatives for its thorough restructuring. As it currently stands SNI is not a model for efficient and effectual national systems of research assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Traffic offences have been considered an important predictor of crash involvement, and have often been used as a proxy safety variable for crashes. However the association between crashes and offences has never been meta-analysed and the population effect size never established. Research is yet to determine the extent to which this relationship may be spuriously inflated through systematic measurement error, with obvious implications for researchers endeavouring to accurately identify salient factors predictive of crashes. Methodology and Principal Findings: Studies yielding a correlation between crashes and traffic offences were collated and a meta-analysis of 144 effects drawn from 99 road safety studies conducted. Potential impact of factors such as age, time period, crash and offence rates, crash severity and data type, sourced from either self-report surveys or archival records, were considered and discussed. After weighting for sample size, an average correlation of r = .18 was observed over the mean time period of 3.2 years. Evidence emerged suggesting the strength of this correlation is decreasing over time. Stronger correlations between crashes and offences were generally found in studies involving younger drivers. Consistent with common method variance effects, a within country analysis found stronger effect sizes in self-reported data even controlling for crash mean. Significance: The effectiveness of traffic offences as a proxy for crashes may be limited. Inclusion of elements such as independently validated crash and offence histories or accurate measures of exposure to the road would facilitate a better understanding of the factors that influence crash involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) and suicidal behaviors, both important issues in adolescent health care, are frequently associated and possibly clinically related. Our objective was to explore the views of relations between nonsuicidal self-injury and suicidal behaviors during adolescence and young adulthood (11–25 years) expressed in the scientific (medical and psychological) literature. We adopted a textual approach to the process of synthesis to tell the story of the findings from the included studies. Our narrative systematic review of 64 articles found that they share the same risk factors. Integrated models envision nonsuicidal self-injury as a gateway enabling teens to acquire the capability for suicide. Because suicidal behavior short-circuits thought, it is difficult to conceive an intention to die during adolescents' acts of self-injury. Intention is constructed by the narrative of the act, influenced by numerous elements from the psychopathologic, cultural, religious, and philosophic context. Techniques of mentalizing-based treatments and work on the meaning that adolescents attribute to their behaviors might improve care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Despite growing interest in the value of human-animal interactions (HAI) to human mental and physical health the quality of the evidence on which postulated benefits from animals to human psychological health are based is often unclear. To date there exist no systematic reviews on the effects of HAI in educational settings specifically focussing on the perceived benefits to children of reading to dogs. With rising popularity and implementation of these programmes in schools, it is essential that the evidence base exploring the pedagogic value of these initiatives is well documented. Methods: Using PRISMA guidelines we systematically investigated the literature reporting the pedagogic effects of reading to dogs. Because research in this area is in the early stages of scientific enquiry we adopted broad inclusion criteria, accepting all reports which discussed measurable effects related to the topic that were written in English. Multiple online databases were searched during January-March 2015; grey literature searches were also conducted. The search results which met the inclusion criteria were evaluated, and discussed, in relation to the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine levels of evidence; 27 papers were classified as Level 5, 13 as Level 4, 7 as Level 2c and 1 as Level 2b. Conclusion: The evidence suggests that reading to a dog may have a beneficial effect on a number of behavioural processes which contribute to a positive effect on the environment in which reading is practiced, leading to improved reading performance. However, the evidence base on which these inferences are made is of low quality. There is a clear need for the use of higher quality research methodologies and the inclusion of appropriate controls in order to draw causal inferences on whether or how reading to dogs may benefit children’s reading practices. The mechanisms for any effect remain a matter of conjecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fertility in Ghana has declined steadily since 1980, however, a slight increase was observed between 2008 and 2014. While several factors may account for this pattern, research on the contribution of type of union is limited. This study examined differentials in the fertility of women in different types of union. Secondary data from 6,285 (weighted) ever-married women aged 15–49 years were analysed using compare means, t-test, analysis of variance, Poisson and binary logistic regression analyses. The findings indicate that, independent of other factors, fertility among remarried women is higher compared to first-time married women but this does not hold true when other factors are controlled for. Additionally, there was no significant difference in the fertility of remarried women who were in union and women who were in union in a first-time marriage. However, compared to remarried women who were currently in a union, fertility was significantly lower among remarried women who were not currently in union (β = -0.121, p<0.01) and women who have been married only once but were not currently in union (β = -0.212, p<0.001). Further analysis revealed that remarried women were significantly more likely to desire more children and less likely to use any method of contraception compared to first-time married women. There is the need for further research to better understand the fertility needs of remarried women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]