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The publication of scholarly papers in professional journals certifies new contributions to knowledge, as well as the skills of the authors who have subjected their work to a process of critical review. The peer review process, designed to attract quality research with the use of objective practices, cannot avoid the infusion of particularistic judgments. This study examines how more than 600 manuscripts submitted to Social Problems were processed by its editor and associate editor. It traces the influences of manuscript, author, and reviewer characteristics as papers are judged, initially by the editor, subsequently by expert reviewers, and, once again, by the editor. The reviewers' recommendations, although often reflecting disagreement, outweigh all the other measured factors that may affect the editor's decisions. The editors, however, remain obligated to formulate credible accounts of the decision process, especially when a final disposition departs from the recommendation made by expert reviewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we compare the reception of Spanish sociology by domestic and international audiences using citation counts as an indicator of audience interest. We compare papers highly cited in a national language database with those highly cited in the Web of Science. We find differences that might prove worrying within a national research evaluation system that emphasizes publishing in high impact factor, Web of Science indexed journals. We suggest that in the social sciences, such an emphasis may induce not simply more research excellence, but also narrower research agendas with long-term consequences for the Spanish sociology community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) or local ecological knowledge (LEK) has only recently gained traction as "legitimate" science in Western academic discourse. Such approaches to inclusivity continue to face institutional, sociocultural, and equity barriers to being fully accepted in academic discourse in comparison to Western-based frameworks. Postcolonial studies have attempted to rectify this Western-domination in characterizing diverse forms of bird--human relationships. However, the integration of multiple cosmologies (worldviews) and ontologies (realities) in research or management creates challenges that we discuss. We elucidate commonalities and antithetical positions between Western-derived bird knowledge and management with that of TEK or LEK in both local and global contexts. We combine ecological/ornithological studies with key terms, theories, and methods from the social sciences to integrate the approaches and facilitate understanding. For example, we follow a "theory synthesis" approach in this conceptual paper to question epistemological and ontological assumptions of bird knowledge and how we acquire it to question, "how do we move from a decolonial approach (discussions and acknowledgement) to decolonization (action)?" This paper is a product of ongoing discourse among global researchers of an academic ethno-ornithology research lab based in the United Kingdom, who partner with global collaborators. The 3 case studies draw from ongoing research in Southeast Asia, South America, and decolonializing policy efforts in New Zealand. We analyzed these case studies using a postcolonial theoretical lens to provide insights into how Western scientists can embrace TEK and LEK and actively work to decolonize ethno-ornithology and ornithology in theory and practice. Further, we discuss perceived core tenets to equity and inclusion in community-based TEK and LEK conservation projects from the Global South. Diversity, equity, inclusivity, and justice in bird--human relations and knowledge were identified as targets for systemic change within the academic institutions of Western scientists. By recognizing, discussing, and embracing non-Western cosmologies and ontologies, non-Indigenous scientists can help influence the decolonization of ethno-ornithology, ornithology, and bird--human relations through respectful, participatory, equitable, culturally considerate, and "non-extractive" community-based initiatives in partnership with local groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the population of all university professors (N = 13,479) in the province of Quebec, Canada, this article analyses the concentration of funding, papers and citations at the level of individual researchers. It shows that each of these distributions is different, citations being the most concentrated followed by funding, papers published and, finally, number of funded projects. Concentration measures also vary between disciplines; social sciences and humanities generally being the most concentrated. The article also shows that the correspondence between the elites defined by each of these measures is limited. In fact, only 3.2% of the researchers are in the top 10% for all indicators, while about 20% are in the top 10% for at least one of the indicators. The article concludes with a discussion of the causes of these observed differences and formulates a few hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers comment on Sidney G. Winter's essay "Toward a neo-Schumpeterian theory of the firm." The author recalls speaking with Winter as he was writing the essay as he described some of the problems with the standard theory of the firm in economics. According to the author, the writing of the essay was a major turning point in Winter's thinking about evolutionary economic theory and the challenges and opportunities for it. He describes the intellectual environment of the RAND Corporation in which Winter wrote the essay as one that encouraged the exploration and development of new analytic techniques and new ways of looking at things.

Reports on the most highly cited in the "Journals of Gerontology Series," from 2000 to 2002. Improvement in the impact factor of the periodical; Most cited articles in 2001; Most cited articles in other gerontology journals.

The article offers information on the use of mediation and moderation for the analysis and related statistical modeling. Topics discussed include information on the understanding of the psychological methods; discussions on the strategies for testing mediation and moderation in pediatric psychology research studies; and the information on the methods for testing mediated-moderation and moderated-mediation.

The article explains the role of policy-making for the promotion of population health. Topics covered include some of the medieval and renaissance approaches to policing disease outbreaks, the implication of the current challenges faced by the public health community in relation to the anti-vaxxers and the objective of the field of health political science.

Publishing in top-ranking journals in the social sciences and international relations requires writing with clarity. Accurately described and transparent methods sections ensure high-quality academic writing. The methodology section of empirical papers should explain the exact steps taken by the authors when operationalizing concepts and testing hypotheses to facilitate replication. This also allows for monitoring quality, challenging findings, and promoting good scientific practices. The quality of methodology sections is the result of the interaction between academic cultures of data sharing, effective application of rules, and good-quality research data management (RDM). This article evaluates the impact of standards on replicability. We present an empirical analysis of a set of sixty-six articles published during the period 1984-2013 that use data from all waves of the European Values Survey. We find differences demonstrating the impact of good RDM and data policies on good scientific practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including social sciences, taxation, and employment.

Applying 'standard' publication and citation measures to the social sciences is fast becoming an outmoded practice, yet we have still to develop credible quantitative alternatives to inform research evaluation exercises. This paper reports the outcomes of a comparative pilot study of five Australian economics departments which tested data produced using novel bibliometric, esteem, and 'user engagement' measures. The results were presented to a group of expert peers drawn from the economics groups studied. There was support for developing some novel bibliometric indicators and 'user engagement' measures, but esteem indicators were roundly rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community work and empowerment are contested concepts that have been co-opted for political purposes. With the rising focus in welfare provision for older adults in light of the ageing population worldwide, there is a need to understand the current forms of empowerment in community work with older adults. This review plugs the research gap by reviewing studies of community work with older adults in the social work field. An electronic search of studies published between 2009 and 2019 on three major databases for social science research was conducted. Eleven papers were included in the review and compared through a coding frame. The conceptualization of empowerment, the theoretical framework, approach to community intervention and the nature of the intervention was examined. Most of the reviewed interventions involved social planning where the participation of older adults was enlisted to address a problem identified by professionals, but there was little theoretical overlap in the studies. The findings underscore gaps present in the theoretical understanding of empowerment and how the well-being of older adults is advanced through community work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analytical point of departure in this paper is the ongoing debate, initiated by Ulrich Beck, on methodological nationalism within the social sciences. Based on a comprehensive study of research collaboration and mobility of researchers this paper discusses possible traces of methodological nationalism in comparative studies of research performance. These studies are often carried out as country comparisons with no or little focus on the growing transnationality of what is measured. However, research is a transnational activity and must be understood as such. Researchers increasingly collaborate with researchers in other countries. The national research institutions are increasingly transnationalised due to the growing mobility of researchers. Based on an examination of all the papers registered in the Thompson Reuter's Web of Science database we follow the development in research collaboration in the period 1980-2014 for 17 leading research countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of researchers have argued that ranking techniques are more appropriate than rating methods for the measurement of values in surveys. The form-resistant correlation hypothesis proposes that observed associations among values and between values and other variables should remain invariant across measurement methods. However, some recent research on parental values for child qualities suggests that ratings and rankings produce different correlational results. The present study tests the hypothesis that discrepancies between rating and ranking results are due to the fact that, when responding to rating questions, some respondents avoid making difficult choices between valued qualities by rating all the qualities as highly and equally desirable. Consistent with this hypothesis, when nondifferentiating respondents are removed from the analyzed sample, the substantive results of analyses of rating data resemble the results typically obtained using ranking data. This suggests that ranking may be the superior method for measuring values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent study published in The Lancet predicts a remarkable drop in population numbers following a peak that will be reached by 2064. A unique feature of the upcoming population drop is that it will be almost exclusively caused by decreased reproduction, rather than factors that increase rates of mortality. The reasons for decreased reproduction are also unique, as, unlike previous centuries, limited reproduction today is hardly due to a shortage in resources. In other words, the predicted population drop is almost exclusively due to changes in reproductive behavior and reproductive physiology. Today, global changes in reproductive behavior are mostly explained by social sciences in a framework of demographic transition hypotheses, while changes in reproductive physiology are usually attributed to effects of endocrine-disrupting pollutants. This review outlines a complementary/alternative hypothesis, which connects reproductive trends with population densities. Numerous wildlife and experimental studies of a broad range of animal species have demonstrated that reproductive behavior and reproductive physiology are negatively controlled via endocrine and neural signaling in response to increasing population densities. The causal chain of this control system, although not fully understood, includes suppression of every level of hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal cascade by hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, activated in response to increasing stress of social interactions. This paper discusses evidence in support of a hypothesis that current trends in reproductive physiology and behavior may be partly explained by increasing population densities. Better understanding of the causal chain involved in reproduction suppression by population density–related factors may help in developing interventions to treat infertility and other reproductive conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article inform on several proceedings to be held from July 5-November 26, 2019 across the globe on topics incluidng ethics, religion, and philosophy; interdisciplinary social science issues affecting law, and international relations; and social scientific study of religion.

Purpose: Various dimensions of healthcare service quality were used and discussed in literature across the globe. This study presents an updated meaningful review of the extensive research that has been conducted on measuring dimensions of healthcare service quality.Data Sources: Systematic review method in current study is based on PRISMA guidelines. We searched for literature using databases such as Google, Google Scholar, PubMed and Social Science, Citation Index.Study Selection: In this study, we screened 1921 identified papers using search terms/phrases. Snowball strategies were adopted to extract published articles from January 1997 till December 2016.Data Extraction: Two-hundred and fourteen papers were identified as relevant for data extraction; completed by two researchers, double checked by the other two to develop agreement in discrepancies. In total, 74 studies fulfilled our pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria for data analysis.Data Synthesis: Service quality is mainly measured as technical and functional, incorporating many sub-dimensions. We synthesized the information about dimensions of healthcare service quality with reference to developed and developing countries. 'Tangibility' is found to be the most common contributing factor whereas 'SERVQUAL' as the most commonly used model to measure healthcare service quality.Conclusion: There are core dimensions of healthcare service quality that are commonly found in all models used in current reviewed studies. We found a little difference in these core dimensions while focusing dimensions in both developed and developing countries, as mostly SERVQUAL is being used as the basic model to either generate a new one or to add further contextual dimensions. The current study ranked the contributing factors based on their frequency in literature. Based on these priorities, if factors are addressed irrespective of any context, may lead to contribute to improve healthcare quality and may provide an important information for evidence-informed decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is intended to begin a discussion about the need for a future text analysis software tool to model a number of aspects of text analysis as it is practised by critics who are not computing humanists, and that have been barely considered by most developers. It begins by putting this analysis in the context of Douglas Englebart's famous model of computer-human interaction expressed originally by his Augment system. It continues by examining a number of examples of how technology (ranging from 3 × 5 cards to topic maps) is currently used to support critical analyses, and points out that an important aspect of the critical process, which is recognized at least in part by the 3 × 5 card model but not by mainstream humanities computing methods, is the sense of critical analysis as a process rather than merely the presentation of a finished product. The paper finishes by examining some of the underlying concepts present in text-analysis tools used within the social sciences that attempt to deal with this temporal aspect of analysis, and proposes a need to examine the real practices of critics in the light of these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a distortion to allege that Paul Lazarsfeld's view of the media focused narrowly on campaigns' and their limited influence. Apart from the creative impulse of this work, which led to the incorporation of audience selectivity and interpersonal relations into the design of effects research, the fact is that most of his work on the media—and certainly his conception of their functions and effects—extends far beyond short-run changes of opinion and attitude. Moreover, his concept of ‘reinforcement’ is a major link to the central argument of critical theory that the media reinforce the status quo. Re-reading a paper of 1948 reveals Lazarsfeld's ‘map’ of media effects, which can serve as an agenda for media research—even today. A suggestion is made for adding additional dimensions to his map. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an introduction to an article titled "Toward a Neo-Schumpeterian Theory of the Firm," by Sidney G. Winter. The paper established the collaboration between Winter and Richard R. Nelson, who both worked for the RAND corporation at different times, and it was important for the early evolution of evolutionary ideas. RAND was an important factor in developments in post-war social sciences and issues related to "organizational dynamics." The areas of evolutionary theory, technological change and organizational routines benefitted from the Winter and Nelson collaboration.

Starting in the 2010s, researchers in the experimental social sciences rapidly began to adopt increasingly open and reproducible scientific practices. These practices include publicly sharing deidentified data when possible, sharing analytical code, and preregistering study protocols. Empirical evidence from the social sciences suggests such practices are feasible, can improve analytical reproducibility, and can reduce selective reporting. In academic epidemiology, adoption of open-science practices has been slower than in the social sciences (with some notable exceptions, such as registering clinical trials). Epidemiologic studies are often large, complex, conceived after data have already been collected, and difficult to replicate directly by collecting new data. These characteristics make it especially important to ensure their integrity and analytical reproducibility. Open-science practices can also pay immediate dividends to researchers' own work by clarifying scientific reasoning and encouraging well-documented, organized workflows. We consider how established epidemiologists and early-career researchers alike can help midwife a culture of open science in epidemiology through their research practices, mentorship, and editorial activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economics has evolved from a ‘domain-focused’ conception, i.e. the study of specific kinds of human activities, to a ‘scarcity-based’ conception, i.e. the study of a particular approach to all human choices. It thus enlarged its domain and narrowed its perspective: instrumental maximising. This paper maintains that economics should be domain focused, with a core of scarcity-based analysis of its domain, integrated into a broader analysis. It also holds that the scarcity-based analysis of realities falling outside the economic domain is not economics, but rather a social science broader in respect to the field but narrower in respect to the analysis, and thus partial in its conclusions. Section 2 introduces these versions of economics, Section 3 links them to specific conceptions of rationality, Section 4 provides arguments for the paper’s thesis and Section 5 deals with two related versions of maximisation and argues for adopting one of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The choice of specific weights for the variables included in composite indices is a most difficult topic that might involve deep ethical considerations. In face of such a daunting task, a group of decision-makers might be uncertain and prefer to allow for a certain degree of weights underspecification. However, allowing for larger sets of admissible weights might lead to increasingly different admissible rankings. In this paper we introduce an axiomatically characterized ranking distance function that is used to explore the pace at which the dissimilarity between different admissible rankings increases as the set of admissible weights that the decision-makers are willing to accept becomes gradually large. This can be very useful in many areas of the social sciences to assess the reliability and robustness of any ranking derived from the values of composite indices when the choice of a specific weighting scheme is controversial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual criminology has established itself as a site of criminological innovation. Its ascendance, though, highlights ways in which the 'ocularcentrism' of the social sciences is reproduced in criminology. We respond, arguing for attention to the totality of sensorial modalities. Outlining the possible contours of a criminology concerned with smell, taste, sound and touch—along with the visual—the paper describes moments in which the sensory intersects with various phenomena of crime, harm, justice and power. Noting the primacy of the sensorial in understanding environmental harm, we describe an explicitly sensory green criminology while also suggesting the ways that heightened criminological attention to the non-visual senses might uncover new sites and modes of knowledge and a more richly affective criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a new scientific framework (Science II) has been slowly emerging, rivaling the Descartes-Newtonian perspective (Science I) dominant for several hundred years. The Science II framework places a great deal of emphasis on evolution, dynamism, chance and/or pattern recognition. As both cause and effect of the new perspective, scholars in the physical, biological and social sciences are increasingly addressing common problems, borrowing insights from and interacting with each other. The epistemology of Science II has enormous potential for understanding problems of fundamental interest to socio-economists. The paper focuses on five useful concepts in the framework of Science II: self-organizing processes, complex networks, power-law distributions, the general binding problem and multi-level analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with the interplay of the induced value theory and the Hayek hypothesis, and subsequently suggests that we need to understand Vernon Smith's experimental method as not simply empirical, but encompassing a commitment to a special version of neoclassical demand theory. To this end, we compare his commitment to Harold Hotelling's important work on demand, an exemplar of what we dub the Mirowski-Hands thesis. By providing an overview of Smith's research up until the mid-1970s, we place this progenitor of experimental economics in a new light, revealing his special epistemic commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that Vergangenheit und Zukunft der Sozialwissenschaften (The Past and Future of the Social Sciences), a contribution not always well understood in the literature, is important to an understanding of Schumpeter's concept of development as applied to the field of the social sciences. To this end, it addresses three key questions. First, can the book be taken as a starting point to reconstruct a Schumpeterian theory of scientific development? Second, is Vergangenheit und Zukunft merely 'a brief outline of what first became the Epochen [ der Dogmen- und Methodengeschichte ] and finally the History of Economic Analysis ', as Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter wrote in her Editor's Introduction (July 1952) to the latter work (p. XXXII), or should it be read as a complement to Epochen and perhaps the History ? Third, is the eminent Japanese scholar Shionoya right to claim that Schumpeter's work pursued the ambitious goal of developing a 'comprehensive sociology'? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is strong, and growing, evidence documenting health inequities across the world. However, most governments do not prioritize policies to encourage action on the social determinants of health and health equity. Furthermore, despite evidence concerning the benefits of joined-up, intersectoral policy to promote health and health equity, it is rare for such policy approaches to be applied systematically. To examine the usefulness of political and social science theory in understanding the reasons for this disjuncture between evidence and practice, researchers and public servants gathered in Adelaide for an Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) Workshop. This paper draws together the learnings that emerged from the Workshop, including key messages about the usefulness of various theories as well as insights drawn from policy practice. Discussions during the Workshop highlighted that applying multiple theories is particularly helpful in directing attention to, and understanding, the influence of all stages of the policy process; from the construction and framing of policy problems, to the implementation of policy and evaluation of outcomes, including those outcomes that may be unintended. In addition, the Workshop emphasized the value of collaborations among public health researchers, political and social scientists and public servants to open up critical discussion about the intersections between theory, research evidence and practice. Such critique is vital to render visible the processes through which particular sources of knowledge may be privileged over others and to examine how political and bureaucratic environments shape policy proposals and implementation action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What considerations should inform the choice of methods in Refugee Studies? In a widely shared dictum of social science, the primary research question largely conditions the methods chosen to answer it. More problematic is whether the meta-purpose − the ultimate purpose and target audience of our research – conditions methodology. This paper analyses the methodological implications of different primary and meta purposes of research in Refugee Studies and shows how and where the two are linked. One prominent feature of forced migration is that it frequently takes place in a highly political environment. This has direct methodological consequences. For a number of reasons discussed here, forced migration research can be described as taking place in what sociologist would call situations of ‘heightened refl exivity’ where both findings and terrain are strongly infl uenced by the presence of the researcher. Drawing on Weber's ‘science as a vocation’ and Barbara Harrell-Bond's defence of ‘advocacy research’, the final section of the paper suggests some of the methodological and ethical consequences of this fact. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses Dow's concept of dualism and decomposes it into eight categories, one not explicitly identified by Dow. It is argued that Dow's original definition is underdeveloped and thereby lacking practical relevance. The paper presents a development of Dow's definition, which allows her to attack the splitting of polar categories. This significantly increases the relevance of Dow's definition of dualism and buttresses her criticisms of the mainstream. The paper also identifies 'heuristic dualism' in Dow's work. A distinction can be made between Dow's 'heuristic dualism', which is strictly an intermediate step in an argument, and the mainstream use of fixed dualistic categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an effort to inform the ongoing discussion about the purpose, purview, theoretical orientation, and viability of epidemiology, this paper considers the contemporary epistemological foundations of the discipline by analyzing article citations. Two principal questions are the following: 1) What research do American Journal of Epidemiology (AJE) authors rely on to support, inform, and frame their investigations? and 2) to what extent do such authors use social scientific and statistical citations? The data used appear to be superior to those used in previous efforts because they contain complete citations for all articles published, along with complete within-article citations, for all AJE articles published from January 1981 to December 2002. The most frequent AJE citations are statistically oriented works. About 9% of citations are to AJE articles, 15% are to a larger set of eight epidemiologic journals, 15% are to a select set of eight medical journals, 3% are to (bio)statistics journals, and just 0.2% are to social science journals. Trend analysis reveals little change during the 22-year study period. The principal implication is that AJE authors are overlooking a vast literature that could inform their understanding of how exposures emerge and are maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

That Coase's political convictions changed from an early socialism to a later neo-liberalism stands in apparent contrast to the theoretical consistency of his early ('The Nature of the Firm') and later ('The Problem of Social Cost') contributions to economics. Offering further evidence about his early views in particular, this paper takes a fresh look at Coase's views on competition and antitrust to show that he consistently stressed the role of what we shall call the principle of `institutional direction', and that this principle involves an important criticism of both neo-liberal and socialist views on regulation and state intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay documents the main currents of visual studies in communication. After a brief history of the emergence of the field, we review the record of published research in books and journals during the past 5 years, identifying major strains of theory, key issues, and topical categories. We then apply the strains of thought to classify papers presented at the ICA conferences, noting patterns and shifts across and within ICA divisions and interest groups. Based on these patterns, as well as on informal input from colleagues, we map the discipline formation of visual studies and identify trends in institutional development. We conclude by exploring future directions for the field now that the visual interest group has grown to become the Visual Studies Division of ICA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to show that the appropriation of ICTs is determined by a field's specific cultural identity. Knowledge is not a homogeneous whole, but a patchwork of heterogeneous fields. These fields are most visible as embodied in academic disciplines, which have distinct cultural identities shaped by intellectual and social considerations. Scholarly communication systems evolve over time within the context of these cultural identities. The paper discusses the cultural shaping of ICTs by drawing on an ongoing ethnographic study within corpus-based linguistics. The findings suggest that cultural elements such as 'task-uncertainty', 'mutual-dependency', heterogeneity, and institutional configurations will influence the appropriateness of a specific ICT infrastructure for a particular intellectual community. For example, fields that have a highly politicized and tightly controlled research culture will develop a coherent field-based strategy for the uptake and use of ICTs, whereas domains that are pluralistic and have a loosely organized research culture will appropriate ICTs in an ad-hoc localized manner. These findings demonstrate that overlooking cultural diversity in the development and implementation of ICT infrastructures and policies could prove detrimental for fields that do not map onto 'big science' conceptualizations of knowledge production. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that effective understanding similarity and difference in patterns of scholarly communication needs to take the fine-grain of specialist fields as the unit of analysis, rather than the course-grain of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years we have seen major advances in economic geography theory, but only limited empirical analysis. This paper focuses on a spatial econometric modelling approach, informed by recent theoretical advances, to simulate possible economic geographies of the European Union. In the paper I show that a policy-induced boost to demand in peripheral economies could increase manufacturing productivity growth rates and levels across all regions, including the EU core as a result of spillover effects across regions. On the other hand faster core growth also spills over to the periphery raising productivity growth and levels, but is associated with diminishing rather than increasing periphery employment levels and with increased inequality. The best strategy seems therefore to encourage higher periphery growth rates, but not so high that they are unsustainable and themselves the cause of increased regional inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we report on the application of Google Scholar (GS)-based metrics in the formal assessment of research programs. Involved were programs in the fields of Education, Pedagogical Sciences, and Anthropology in The Netherlands. Also, a comparative analysis has been conducted of the results based on GS and Web of Science (WoS). Studies critical of GS point at its reliability of data. We show how the reliability of the GS data for the bibliometric analysis of the assessment can be improved by excluding non-verifiable citing sources from the full secondorder GS citing data. The study of the background of these second-order sources demonstrates a broadening of the citing sources. The comparison of GS with WoS citations for the publications of the programs shows that it is promising to use GS for fields with lower degrees of coverage in WoS, in particular for fields that produce more diverse types of output than just research articles. Restrictions to the use of GS are the intensive manual data handling and cleaning, necessary for a feasible and proper data collection. We discuss wider implications of the findings for bibliometric analysis and for the practices and policies in research evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper formalizes the idea that improved monitoring helps coordination in long term relationships. Specifically, the pure-strategy sequential equilibrium payoff set is shown to expend (in the sense of set inclusion) in repeated games with imperfect monitoring, when the quality of the signal improves in Blackwell's sense. Furthermore, the directions of the expansion are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper three logit models of school continuation are presented. The Italian school system was divided into three separate school transitions: from primary education to lower secondary school, from lower to higher secondary school, and from higher secondary education to university. Data derive from the Italian Social Mobility Survey, carried out in 1985 on a sample of over 5,000 people, both male and female, employed and unemployed. They are used in this paper for a cohort analysis of trends over time of educational inequalities due to social origin and sex. The main conclusion of this study is that, apart from minor changes in the rapidly contracting sector of agriculture, there is no consistent sign of reduction of educational inequalities by social origin in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the hypothesized inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and conservatism on a wide range of so-called social issues. This relationship is important in itself as well as in some theories that link political dealignment to features of postindustrial society. We examine this relationship by looking at the net effects of education, occupation, income, and class (owner, supervisor, or worker) on nine issues. Our results suggest that the hypothesized relationship is absent for most dimensions of socioeconomic status and most social issues. The most consistent exception to this is that liberalism on social issues tends to increase with education, but even here the relationship varies considerably from issue to issue. The lack of a consistent relationship reflects both the diversity of the social issues and the fuzziness of the social/economic distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines transitional justice scholarship published in academic periodicals over a six-year period, 2003-2008, to identify the disciplines that contributed to the literature and the nature of scholarly questions they posed during a period of burgeoning scholarship. The article is the first to identify empirically which disciplines contributed to the scholarship and which were most influential among the social sciences and humanities. Law, political science, and sociology are the disciplines that dominated the field as reflected in academic journals. The most influential transitional justice articles in the social sciences and law suggested that readers were drawn to scholarly treatments that theorized the field or were analytical in nature. Scholars were wrestling with basic questions with regard to what transitional justice is and how it works. This historical perspective establishes a baseline from which to examine ongoing and future research and writing in transitional justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of evidence and expertise in policy-making has been of interest to public health professionals and political scientists alike. The public health community often sees its efforts as part of a linear knowledge transfer process and tends to blame itself for inadequate communication or translation of its arguments to policy-makers' language when its efforts fail. Political science, especially theories of the policy process, offer alternative perspectives to explain the success or failure of experts' preferred policy goals. This paper focuses on the concept of epistemic communities (groups of experts with a common policy goal derived from their shared knowledge) in policy-making, drawing on examples from the field of health technology assessment in Europe. By combining the parsimony and the central focus on experts of the linear knowledge transfer model with the recognition of complexity of political science, the epistemic communities concept provides a useful structure for the public health community to analyze its efforts to influence policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]