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It's well understood that medical device manufacturers must comply with stringent quality standards, and they require a quality management system (QMS) to register their products and bring them to market. [...]

This study quantitatively analyzes the patterns and impact of collaboration at author and country levels in China's social sciences from 1998 to 2017. Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) are combined as data sources to show a comprehensive picture of collaboration in China's social sciences, and to compare the differences in the way Chinese social scientists work when publishing nationally and internationally. Results show that there are huge differences in patterns and impact of collaboration between China's national and international publications in social sciences. Specifically, non-collaboration dominates in China's CSSCI papers while collaboration dominates in China's SSCI papers; two-authored is the main form of collaboration in China's CSSCI papers but the teamwork of three or more authors is the main form in China's SSCI papers; few of China's CSSCI papers are published in international collaboration but Sino-foreign cooperation is very common in China's SSCI papers; collaboration benefits citations of China's SSCI papers in all disciplines but international collaboration doesn't work well for citations of China's CSSCI papers. Besides, similarities between China's national and international publications can also be observed, e.g., disciplines more cooperative in China's CSSCI papers are also those more cooperative in China's SSCI papers; the top ten countries collaborate with China in CSSCI and SSCI are the same, and the USA accounts for about half of Sino-foreign collaborations in both CSSCI and SSCI. Finally, the usage of bibliometric databases and possible reasons for collaboration differences are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to explore the implementation of scorecards and dashboards in assessing internationalization activities in universities. The methodology of this concept paper is referencing secondary data comprising established academic databases from Scopus, Web of Science (WOS), and Google Scholar, focusing on aspects related to the benefits, monitoring, and effectiveness of scorecards and dashboards in evaluating an internationalization process or activity carried out by a university. The improvement of a university's reputation and ranking should be based on several key factors such as academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty/student ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty ratio, and international student ratio. These are the same criteria considered by institutions such as Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE), which rank and rate universities and institutions of higher education around the world. This study found that implementing scorecards and dashboards in evaluating a university to improve its reputation and ranking is indeed effective. This is due to various factors, including the benefits, effectiveness, and accurate measurement offered by the scorecards and dashboards and their widespread use in universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

December 1994 saw the Russian military launch an assault on Grozny, capital of the obscure Caucasian autonomous republic of Chechnya, in an effort to put an end to its pretensions to national independence. Three years earlier, in 1991, a renegade Chechen general in the Russian Army, Djokar Dudayev, had acceded to the pleadings of Chechen “elders” who wished to take the territory out of the Russian Federation-Russia. By mid-1996, what had quite unexpectedly become a very bloody operation, and a political hot potato in Moscow, remained uncompleted. In spite of a declaration of cease-fire by President Yeltsin and the killing of Dudayev, Chechen “freedom fighters” based in the mountains and villages continued to wage an Afghan-style struggle against the “occupiers” from Moscow. After some 30,000 deaths, most of them civilian, there was no end in sight.Is the war in Chechnya sui generis, as some would claim? Or is it symptomatic of a broader class of wars? As of late 1995, according to the Kennedy School’s Project on Internal Conflict (Harvard University), some 35 major armed intra-state struggles were underway around the world. In a number of ways, Chechnya is unique, but it can also be seen as an archetype for similar conflicts taking place, or pending, around the world.Why the apparent increase in ethnic conflict in the early 1990s? What, if anything, might the United States and the rest of the world do in the future to prevent such carnage from becoming an accepted feature of global politics? Absent satisfactory explanations of these crises, the chances are better than even that, within the next few years, the United States and its allies will find themselves confronted by a similar “no-win” situation in any one of the dozens of places where very little provocation will trigger new episodes of ethnic cleansing.We offer an account of the causes of ethnic and sectarian conflict that is applicable to a growing number of countries and regions. In brief: What we have come to call “ethnic and sectarian conflict” is neither ethnic nor sectarian per se. Rather, it is about struggles over the levers of power and wealth within societies and countries in which ethnicity and religion provide the cultural and historical resources for mobilizing popular support for particular elites. These countries are almost always caught in the throes of economic and political transformations, brought on by external factors and forces. These erode or destroy old social, political and economic relations—old ways of doing things—and conflicts follow. The outcomes of such struggles are not pre-determined—ethnic cleansing is not dictated by some kind of historical materialism. There are possibilities for intervention before violence erupts.

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This article addresses the revernacularization or reduction of the use-value of the standard Croatian language within the scientific and academic system. A bibliometric analysis of 1,152 academic papers was conducted on the sample of the selected Croatian journals in sociology and philology (Croatian studies). A longitudinal approach was used, analyzing all issues of the included journals in the periods 1996 to 1999, 2006 to 2009, and 2016 to 2019. Unlike in the 1990s, the selected journals were in later periods exposed to internationalization by being included in relevant international databases for scientific research. This article aims to investigate whether and how this process has affected the revernacularization of the Croatian language. The results show a similar absolute number of papers written in Croatian within the periods analyzed, and also a decrease in their relative number (share). In the period from 2016, a marked increase in the number of papers written in English was observed, as well as in the number of foreign authors. Such papers mostly do not address the topics of Croatian society. The results indicate an intensified internationalization of the analyzed journals, but not revernacularization. The mentioned trend can, nevertheless, lead to revernacularization with increasing international recognition of the journals, the continued promotion of publication in foreign languages, and a more rigorous policy of academic advancement in Croatia. In this sense, this study considers the need for preserving the standard Croatian language within the academic system, bringing both into a relationship with the widely promoted model of endogenous social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on our experience requesting access to police organisations in Ghana and Niger, this article explores the organisation and operation of two West African bureaucracies. It focuses on the administrative modes and the state agents' routines in their dealing with civil actors. Exceptional and risk carrying requests such as ours concerning a permission to conduct participant observation in police organisations create insecurity on the part of the bureaucrats concerned. Although rarely expressed in field reports and often discounted as a series of fortunate coincidences, we consider the researcher's access (or refusal) a crucial and illuminating moment of fieldwork. In our case, both technical bureaucratic operations and informal networks played a central role in our own approach as well as in the state agents' work routines and reflections on their daily occupation. Following an emic description, we call these two modes of procedure "ground work" and "paper work". The oscillating between the two reflects an inevitable interlacing of bureaucratic and informal operations, characteristic for bureaucratic organisations worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single-author papers are the lowest relative contributors to the research output of international open access journals BioInvasions Records (BIR), Aquatic Invasions (AI) and Management of Biological Invasions (MBI), accounting for 5% or less of published papers. In contrast, papers by four or more authors are the highest contributors, accounting for over half of the research output for the three journals. Papers by two or three authors are intermediate between these extremes, accounting for 15-23% of research ouputs. The relative contributions of research papers by single-authors to the output of AI and MBI has also significantly declined over time, while concurrently those by four or more authors has significantly increased. Although not significant, a similar pattern is also evident in BIR. Considering invasion ecology research, factors such as increasing globalisation, the increasing use of transboundary data-sets for invasive species and the proliferation of collaborative multidisciplinary author teams with multiple skill-sets, may be driving single-author papers to extinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is based on a Keynote Lecture at the 2022 Colloquium of the Society for Educational Studies. It analyses the articles published in four leading journals in 2021 and compares these with the same journals 20 years earlier. Key findings include a considerable increase in authorship and multiple authorship and a very strong international dimension to authorship in current UK-based journals. Two-thirds of the papers were empirical, and by far the most common type of research design was qualitative interview studies, often of a very small-scale nature. Aspects of the teaching profession were the most common form of content, and there was also a focus on social class and multi-cultural issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]