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More than 1,100 research leaders from 77 countries told Nature about where and how they recruit scientists — and who makes the cut. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale evaluation permeates the UK university system, but some countries are rejecting harsh judgements and emphasizing strategic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The focus on quantitative indicators–number of publications and grants, journal impact factors, Hirsch-index–has become pervasive in research management, funding systems, and research and publication practices (SES). Accountability through performance measurement has become the gold standard to increase productivity and (cost-) efficiency in academia. Scientific careers are strongly shaped by the push to produce more in a veritable 'publish or perish' culture. To this end, we investigated the perspectives of biomedical researchers on responsible assessment criteria that foster responsible conduct of research. Methods: We performed a qualitative focus group study among 3 University medical centers in the Netherlands. In these centers, we performed 2 randomly selected groups of early career researchers (PhD and postdoc level & senior researchers (associate and full professors) from these 3 institutions and explored how relational responsibilities relate to responsible conduct of research and inquired how potential (formal) assessment criteria could correspond with these responsibilities. Results: In this study we highlighted what is considered responsible research among junior and senior researchers in the Netherlands and how this can be assessed in formal assessment criteria. The participants reflected on responsible research and highlighted several academic responsibilities (such as supervision, collaboration and teaching) that are often overlooked and that are considered a crucial prerequisite for responsible research. As these responsibilities pertain to intercollegiate relations, we henceforth refer to them as relational. After our systematic analysis of these relational responsibilities, participants suggested some ideas to improve current assessment criteria. We focused on how these duties can be reflected in multidimensional, concrete and sustainable assessment criteria. Focus group participants emphasized the importance of assessing team science (both individual as collective), suggested the use of a narrative in researcher assessment and valued the use of 360 degrees assessment of researchers. Participants believed that these alternative assessments, centered on relational responsibilities, could help in fostering responsible research practices. However, participants stressed that unclarity about the new assessment criteria would only cause more publication stress and insecurity about evaluation of their performance. Conclusion: Our study suggests that relational responsibilities should ideally play a more prominent role in future assessment criteria as they correspond with and aspire the practice of responsible research. Our participants gave several suggestions how to make these skills quantifiable and assessable in future assessment criteria. However, the development of these criteria is still in its infancy, implementation can cause uncertainties among those assessed and consequently, future research should focus on how to make these criteria more tangible, concrete and applicable in daily practice to make them applicable to measure and assess responsible research practices in institutions. Trial registration: Open Science Framework https://osf.io/9tjda/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increase in the popularity of field research and its digitization meant that the vast majority is carried out in teams. This means that collecting empirical data in the field requires coordination for the correctness of its effectiveness. The article presents the evaluation meeting as a tool for managing field research carried out on a team. The text presents the current challenges of field research and discusses the range of areas requiring coordination. The paper presented how the field research coordinator should organize and conduct the evaluation meeting. The range of problems that can be solved through the evaluation meeting was also presented, indicating its benefits and limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to join the global ecosystem depend on greater diversity and a more open culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research highlights that rural populations have been historically underrepresented/excluded from clinical research. The primary objective of this study was to describe the inclusion of rural populations within our research enterprise using Clinical Research Management System demographic information at a large academic medical center in the Southeast. This was a cross‐sectional study using participant demographic information for all protocols entered into our Clinical Research Management System between May 2018 and March 2021. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the representation of rural and non‐rural participants and demographic breakdown by age, sex, race, and ethnicity for our entire enterprise and at the state level. We also compared Material Community Deprivation Index levels between urban and rural participants. Results indicated that 19% of the research population was classified as rural and 81% as non‐rural for our entire sample, and 17.5% rural and 82.5% urban for our state‐level sample. There were significant differences in race, sex, and age between rural and non‐rural participants and Material Community Deprivation Indices between rural and non‐rural participants. Lessons learned and recommendations for increasing the inclusion of rural populations in research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an age of geopolitical tensions, researchers need to be realistic and think beyond fundamental science to chart a safe path for collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe's transportation infrastructure including bridges requires optimised maintenance plans and adequate monitoring throughout its life cycle to ensure safety and serviceability. The deployment of new technologies can help this goal, providing numerous advantages compared to existing and established inspection and monitoring methods. This deployment can be facilitated by adequate policies and focused research and innovation, taking also into account the European ambitions for safe, secure, and future-proof transportation infrastructure. Considering the above, the objective of this study is threefold. First, it provides an overview of recent policy initiatives in Europe that facilitate the adoption of new and emerging technologies in bridge inspection and monitoring, as well as maintenance in general. Second, it identifies and reviews R&I projects relevant to bridges, including the budgetary expenditure, from the Horizon 2020 European Research Framework Programme which was recently concluded. Finally, it systematically reviews technologies and solutions developed by the identified projects, assessing also their technology readiness. What emerges is substantial research, which includes solutions and technologies (e.g., use of air or ground drones, artificial intelligence, digital twins) that have the potential to reshape the bridge inspection and monitoring state of play in Europe and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital age is characterized by rapid development, growth, innovation, and disruption. Organizations must adapt to the new digital landscape to remain competitive. Digital transformation involves more than just implementing new technologies. A digital transformation strategy is a plan for organizations to utilize IT technologies and methods to create new value and drive growth. The development and implementation of such a strategy have become central concerns for many organizations in research management. In this article, we discuss the technological potentials and challenges of digital transformation and propose a decision-making model using transformation technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review study investigates the role of Learning Management Systems (LMS) in education within the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). Higher education institutions, particularly universities, must adapt their contents, activities, and methods to function more efficiently in a digital context. LMS is a tool for creating, distributing, tracking, and managing educational and training materials. IoT, a transformative technology, significantly impacts various aspects of human life, including security, healthcare, recycling, and environmental monitoring. This paper addresses the significance of IoT technology in education, particularly in enhancing the efficiency of teaching and learning. The framework for an IoT-enhanced LMS is part of a three-year research project at the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One UK institute has produced a dozen Nobel laureates and biomedical breakthroughs across the board. How does Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology do it? Our study found out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A text generation based multidisciplinary problem identification method is proposed, which does not rely on a large amount of data annotation. The proposed method first identifies the research objective types and disciplinary labels of papers using a text classification technique; second, it generates abstractive titles for each paper based on abstract and research objective types using a generative pre-trained language model; third, it extracts problem phrases from generated titles according to regular expression rules; fourth, it creates problem relation networks and identifies the same problems by exploiting a weighted community detection algorithm; finally, it identifies multidisciplinary problems based on the disciplinary labels of papers. Experiments in the "Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality" field show that the proposed method can effectively identify multidisciplinary research problems. The disciplinary distribution of the identified problems is consistent with our understanding of multidisciplinary collaboration in the field. It is necessary to use the proposed method in other multidisciplinary fields to validate its effectiveness. Multidisciplinary problem identification helps to gather multidisciplinary forces to solve complex real-world problems for the governments, fund valuable multidisciplinary problems for research management authorities, and borrow ideas from other disciplines for researchers. This approach proposes a novel multidisciplinary problem identification method based on text generation, which identifies multidisciplinary problems based on generative abstractive titles of papers without data annotation required by standard sequence labeling techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study identifies and discusses strategies for enhancing the efficiency of technology transferring from university to the industrial sector, concerning activities carried out by Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs). The study answers two research questions: (i) What barriers hamper academic research transferring to industry? (ii) What are the inbound and outbound strategies for transferring academic research results to industry? Our findings show that the main barriers that hamper technology transfer are related to organisational, technical, human, and cultural factors comprising the academic and industrial environments. Regarding strategies, our findings reveal a comprehensive list of inbound and outbound strategies that might be implemented to cope with the ambidextrous nature of the TTOs and increase technology transfer. Finally, we discuss our findings and the relationship between the main barriers and the boundary-spanning strategies to support a more effective Technology Transfer process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changing relationships between government and the higher education system have created a wide range of new tasks within universities. Many have been adopted by an emerging workforce known alternately as professional, non-academic, or support staff. Its rapid growth has sparked a debate about 'administrative bloat'. We aim to move beyond this negative, dismissive framing by reviewing the literature to explore whether and how professional staff influence academic knowledge development. While this specific question has received little scholarly attention, we found relevant research in 54 documents from a diffuse group of journals and authors. Our review makes two specific contributions. First, we examine the competencies and relationships of professional staff and their influence on conditions and processes in universities. We find that professional staff increasingly have a private sector background, but that the implications of such a background for competencies remain opaque. Furthermore, their relationships with university leadership and academics as well as actors beyond the home organization place them in strategic positions in their networks. We claim that their involvement in strategy development and implementation, daily management, and academic practices demonstrate a potential to influence knowledge development. Second, we propose a research agenda to understand this influence. The agenda is built around the institutional logics of professional staff, the institutional work that they engage in to promote these logics, and the resulting influence on knowledge development. We hypothesize that professional staff stimulate convergence in knowledge production and strengthen the higher education system's external legitimacy as a producer of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Academic writing for publication (AWforP) has recently come to the fore because of the critical importance of scholarly publication to academia. A review of the scientific literature on AWforP found that it is underdeveloped and lacks comprehensive frameworks and models for AWforP challenges, AWforP strategies, or both. Purpose. To contribute to bridging these gaps, this article aims to summarize and map the AWforP challenges and AWforP strategies identified in the scholarly empirical literature. Method. A systematic Scopus/WoS literature review was used for data collection, identifying 15 relevant sources (n, sample size). Data were analyzed and summarized by deduction and meta-analysis based on chi-square heterogeneity test and meta-regression, then mapped by induction and K-means clustering. Results. First, 31 challenges to AWforP and 36 strategies for AWforP were detected. Second, an original classification of AWforP challenges was introduced. The taxonomy of academic writing strategies was expanded with AWforP strategies. Third, AWforP challenges/strategies were ranked based on their frequency of mention in the sample. Semantic difficulties were the most prevalent challenge, and attending academic writing courses was the most advised strategy. Fourth, through meta-analysis, the sample was found to be moderately statistically heterogeneous (I2=60.97%), and the summary effect size was positive and statistically significant. Fifth, the sampled sources were mapped into five clusters based on the country of researchers studied (SSE=10.511). Conclusion. This article conceptualizes empirical research on AWforP challenges and AWforP strategies by identifying, comprehensively systematizing, summarizing, and mapping them. Implementing the proposed taxonomy of AWforP challenges/strategies under the identified cluster specifics in strategic research planning and control practices would improve researchers’ publication activity and research management effectiveness at the university and national levels.

Artificial intelligence could help speedily summarize research. But it comes with risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today’s digitized world, digital competences are required to facilitate the transition to the Internet. For professorship, these competences go beyond knowledge of a particular subject. They focus on the skills needed to transmit that knowledge to students. A quantitative approach study was applied. The design was non-experimental and descriptive. The population and sample correspond to the 70 teachers who worked in the Faculty of Humanistic and Social Sciences during the first semester of 2023. The instrument for data collection was a teaching self-assessment. The competencies in digital citizenship showed the highest levels of teacher mastery with a value of 5. The competencies in pedagogy and professional development showed a value of 4. 93% of UTM-CHS teachers stated they had participated in training activities on the use of ICT in education. In conclusion, university faculty in Ecuador must have a stronger digital academic background; they must establish better pedagogical and professional development skills, research capacity, knowledge of educational technologies, intercultural skills and leadership skills. To ensure a high-quality learning environment all three areas must be at the same level of outcomes. For that, university professional development leads to establishing good pedagogy. Then pedagogy is strengthened through digital citizenship.

Research Infrastructures (RI) and Core Facilities (CF) are strong drivers for generating research results and, thus, knowledge at European Universities. In this paper, we provide insight into different features of RI and CF, their organisational structure and governance, funding mechanisms, critical factors for success, and challenges and opportunities associated with implementing and operating these research support structures. Our results are based on a comparative analysis across six European universities from the 4EU + University Alliance. Due to the lack of a clear definition of RI and CF, we provide a variety of indicators and criteria attributed to such facilities and highlight differences between CF and RI in terms of goals and objectives. If establishing Core Facilities is seen as a response to the evolving needs and challenges of researchers, a centralised management and collaborative governance model can provide a practical solution. We explore the legal framework, organisation, access, users and charge rate models at Core Facilities. We also identify several challenges in setting up and maintaining Core Facilities. Special attention is directed towards staff challenges, including introducing the staff category of ‘scientific technical experts’. Finally, we present a Core Facility Manifesto and share our conclusions.

Profound changes due to Open-Access (OA) publications lead to organizational changes in universities and libraries. This study examines Israeli librarians' perceptions regarding their role and the academic library's role in promoting OA-publications, including the barriers, challenges, needs, and requirements necessary to promote OA publishing. Lack of a budget for OA-agreements, no cooperation from university management, and researchers' unfamiliarity with OA were among the most prominent barriers. Librarians see great importance in their role of advising researchers regarding OA. However, they insist on a regulated OA-policy at the national and institutional levels to strengthen their status as change-leaders of the OA-movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African universities have been tasked by their governments to develop and build research capacity, performance, and output, which puts a focus on university research management. Paying attention to research management is very important for any country trying to improve its research performance. However, university research management is an area that has been neglected. This study focused on finding out factors research managers perceive to be hindering university research management. The qualitative methodology was used. The study population comprised 25 research managers from two English-taught Cameroonian universities. This study found that factors research managers perceive to be hindering research management include conflict between research managers and researchers, politics, and corruption in research management, inadequate skilful research managers, limited research facilities, inadequate salaries, and lack of extrinsic motivation. This implies that less attention has been paid to research management in universities. Implications are given to improve research management practices in universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will a growth in postdoctoral positions across Africa cause bottlenecks, replicating the career-progression challenges faced by scientists elsewhere? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's digitized world, digital competences are required to facilitate the transition to the Internet. For professorship, these competences go beyond knowledge of a particular subject. They focus on the skills needed to transmit that knowledge to students. A quantitative approach study was applied. The design was non-experimental and descriptive. The population and sample correspond to the 70 teachers who worked in the Faculty of Humanistic and Social Sciences during the first semester of 2023. The instrument for data collection was a teaching self-assessment. The competencies in digital citizenship showed the highest levels of teacher mastery with a value of 5. The competencies in pedagogy and professional development showed a value of 4. 93% of UTM-CHS teachers stated they had participated in training activities on the use of ICT in education. In conclusion, university faculty in Ecuador must have a stronger digital academic background; they must establish better pedagogical and professional development skills, research capacity, knowledge of educational technologies, intercultural skills and leadership skills. To ensure a high-quality learning environment all three areas must be at the same level of outcomes. For that, university professional development leads to establishing good pedagogy. Then pedagogy is strengthened through digital citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How universities, respected for their position at the apex of learning, employ competency frameworks in order to increase learning impacts is acknowledged by the authors as a researchable problem. The respective natures of universities and professional work, the latter, which is often intensely integral to universities, means that universities have to take on board managerial as well philosophical means of learning. This article explores how staff at six universities employ a Professional Competency Framework for Research Management and Administration (PCF-RMA) to bring about organizational learning. Participants provide qualitative data which are condensed into six narrated cases to show how a PCF-RMA, created through action research, enters into the university systems and translates into individual and organizational systems thinking towards applied outcomes. Using the theoretical lenses of Senge's five disciplines and core competencies for competitive advantage, we argue that systems thinking is not essentially about the system as an abstracted entity, but about sensitized individuals who actively 'think through' using the PCF-RMA to improve their own work and career prospects, while also improving the work of the research support offices for university research purposes. In short, systems and funding impacts. As such, the PCF-RMA, while initially carried through individuals, has a systems opportunity to change not only individuals but also set up a trajectory for generative holistic changes as articulated within organizational learning theories. The study recommends future research to employ a diverse and broadened scope in the domains of theory, context, and methodology. Aside from prompting ongoing research, this study offers an opportunity to demonstrate increased research impact, an area which stakeholders of research, including the funders, increasingly emphasize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The University of Lagos is one of Nigeria’s premiere Universities, established in 1962 with core values emphasizing commitment to quality academic learning and character, integrity, continuous improvement of staff professionalism and competence, as well as a strong commitment to cutting-edge research. In 2012, the University established the Research and Innovation Office, which was subsequently restructured into two offices: the Research Management Office, and the Innovation and Technology Transfer Office, for more efficient functioning. Over the years, the Office has provided enormous support to over 1,700 academic faculty and researchers for cutting-edge research built on a multi-disciplinary approach. This paper provides a detailed discussion of the strategies employed by the Research Management Office to promote multi-disciplinary research from inception to date, the results of efforts to promote collaboration across the currently existing wealth of diversity in academic and research disciplines among researchers in over 12 faculties of the University, the successes recorded, and the challenges faced. The paper further makes recommendations for the advancement of these strategies, and suggestions for pragmatic solutions to challenges experienced while drawing practical and applicable lessons from international best practices for supporting multi-disciplinary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Policy-making based on research evidence is a management approach that is based on moving from the completely intuitive and unconscious spectrum to the scientific spectrum and considering all organizational capacities. Most of this scientific evidence has been obtained through academic institutions and research centers. Many countries of the world establish many scientific institutions and associations and employ a wide range of researchers to analyze and evaluate the results of academic research to align their decisions and programs with the latest research and scientific findings. Therefore, this research aimed to examine how to link the decisions and policies of the National Library and Archive of Iran (NLAI) with scientific and research evidence, to identify possible obstacles and solutions to overcome them. Method: The current survey was conducted with an analytical approach. The main tool for data collection was a semi-structured interview designed via a questionnaire with open and closed questions. The research community and sample size were purposefully selected from among the employees of NLAI so that they have at least 15 years of work experience and a master's degree or higher. 164 people agreed and answered the questions. To measure validity, the questionnaire was provided to 5 librarians and experts in the field of evidence-based policy and management. To measure the reliability, 35 questionnaires were distributed and collected among the studied population, and then the reliability of the questionnaire was measured using Cronbach's alpha test. Kolmogorov-Smirnov (k-s), univariate t, and Friedman tests were used in the analyses. Findings: The employees believed that the use of data and research findings for decision-making and planning in specialized departments of the organization is necessary (4.25 on a scale of 5). To solve the work problems, they have faced so far, many employees (4 out of 5) have found the need to use scientific data and research evidence can improve their efficiency in performing specialized activities. On the other hand, they believed that scientific and research evidence is used less than average for decisions and planning at the macro-organizational level. Conclusion: NLAI planners and managers who want to avoid failure in decisions and programs should pay more attention to the use of scientific and research evidence. In this way, they can improve their knowledge and awareness of the consequences of uncertainty and risk reduction in the work field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management and organization researchers are being called to conduct research that is more caring, yet the concept of care and how to practice it within the profession is undertheorized. Adopting a feminist epistemology and methodology, we develop the concept of care by weaving the personal, ethical, and political into the research process. First, we reflect critically on how aspects of care—attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness (Tronto, Moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care, Routledge, 1993; Tronto, Caring democracy: markets, equality, and justice, New York University Press, 2013)—unfolded in our personal research experiences, and secondly, we conduct a review of articles published in management and organization studies and analyse expressed or concealed conceptions of care in scholars' accounts of research purpose and ethics. We find three ethical sensibilities at the heart of enacting care: encountering the 'other', interpreting roles and responsibilities, and deliberating needs and resources. We contribute to a feminist research ethics by highlighting issues related to care that are concealed in dominant ethos guiding management and organization research. Further, we develop methodological insights for implementing an ethic of care as an alternative ethical standpoint in business research ethics. Finally, we provide suggestions for how to embed more care within research ethics practices in academic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A collective of researchers in South Korea, working on the genetics of immune diseases, share the lessons they’ve learnt about harnessing regional knowledge to support large-scale research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have tried a bunch of strategies to get more negative results into the literature. Nature asks whether they are working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National statistics systems should recognize the researchers whose ideas drive artificial-intelligence applications, not just machines and factory outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Townsville Hospital and Health Service (THHS) strategic revision as a “research-based” institution, Brown et al have investigated the impact of THHS research, and its key drivers, based on 15 stakeholder interviews and two quantitative indicators. This commentary argues that the quantitative analyses and findings would have benefitted from applying evaluative bibliometrics, hopefully, conducted by experienced bibliometricians. We present the potential of bibliometrics for assessing the scholarly impact of research, as well as a few examples of its application to the case of THHS, for informing research policies and strategies.

This paper gives a definition of the Industrial Internet and expounds on the academic connotation of the future Industrial Internet. From this foundation, we outline the development and current status of the Industrial Internet in China and globally. Moreover, we detail the avant-garde paradigms encompassed within the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)'s "Future Industrial Internet Fundamental Theory and Key Technologies" research plan and its corresponding management strategies. This research initiative endeavors to enhance interdisciplinary collaborations, aiming for a synergistic alignment of industry, academia, research, and practical implementations. The primary focus of the research plan is on the pivotal scientific challenges inherent to the future industrial internet. It is poised to traverse the "first mile ", encompassing foundational research and pioneering innovations specific to the industrial internet, and seamlessly bridges to the "last mile ", ensuring the effective commercialization of scientific and technological breakthroughs into tangible industrial market applications. The anticipated contributions from this initiative are projected to solidify both the theoretical and practical scaffolding essential for the cultivation of a globally competitive industrial internet infrastructure in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific research carried out worldwide increases chances for innovative ideas and applications through digital transformations for real-time functional ease. The fundamental Internet of Things (IoT) based scientific solutions are precise over the different scientific approaches in diverse application areas. This article introduces a Fuzzy-derivative Mode Management Method (FDM3) for improving the performance of researchaided scientific systems. The aim of optimal and best-afford solution extraction for complex research environments is satisfied using 3 levels of fuzzy derivatives. The first two levels are precise in classifying the best and worst-fit solutions using variation derivatives. The fuzzification for existing and improved solutions using the research parameters is performed in identifying a less varying third derivative. This third derivative normalizes the maximum best solution as a part of the optimal solution; the solution is defuzzified using performance parameters. In this process, the performance is varied across multiple low-to-high or vice versa mappings. This low or high factor is estimated from the previous output (maximum) generated over the varying fuzzifier output. The proposed method's performance is analyzed using the metrics efficiency, fuzzification rate, derivation analysis, and time complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research management instruments (RMIs) are organizational mechanisms that shape scientific work and influence the trajectory of scientific fields within universities. This qualitative study examines 80 RMIs implemented by eight research-oriented universities in Chile between 1998 and 2021. The findings reveal that these institutions employ policies prioritizing competition as the primary means of accessing funding and opportunities, contributing to the concentration of resources among established researchers participating in international circuits. Consequently, RMIs establish hierarchies within the research community based on individual merit, disregarding the material conditions that may hinder productivity for certain actors. Furthermore, these instruments discourage participation in national and regional scientific communication networks. By highlighting the impact of RMIs, this research enhances our understanding of the organizational mechanisms that shape scientific work in Chilean universities, offering insights into the challenges and opportunities researchers face in the country's higher education system. Future studies should explore alternative participation circuits within Chilean universities and compare experiences across Latin American regions to understand how local institutions align with global evaluation criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. The main issue is the absence of a screening test available in clinical practice; the identification of noninvasive biomarkers is thus an urgent clinical necessity. Currently, low-dose computed tomography (LD-CT) demonstrates a 20% reduction in lung cancer mortality. However, it is not particularly suitable for clinical practice because of its costs, radiation, and false-positive rate. Several studies have therefore focused on research into biomarkers in body fluids. Despite the power of certain molecules to distinguish lung cancer patients from healthy subjects, no biomarker has yet been shown to significantly and reliably influence clinical decisions or to be translated from the laboratory to clinical practice. In this paper, we provide an overview of the peer-reviewed biomedical literature published in the last 10 years on the research regarding biomarkers for the early diagnosis of lung cancer via a comprehensive analysis of the reviews published this past year. Our main objective is to highlight the limitations and strengths of studies on predictive lung cancer biomarkers to stimulate further investigation for early diagnosis. Finally, we discuss future perspectives on managing clinical trials for biomarker research and their integration into clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the exponential increase of interdisciplinary research, identifying accurate disciplines of scientific documents has become increasingly important in various research management tasks. Interdisciplinary classification, which classifies documents into multiple disciplines, is essential for multidisciplinary research development. Due to the scarcity of labeled multidiscipline data, existing scientific document classification methods can't solve the interdisciplinary issue. Most of them also have the problem of explainability with curtly providing classification results. This study proposes an explainable transfer-learning-based classification method for interdisciplinary documents. First, we trained a single-discipline classification model using existing labeled single-discipline documents. Then, we transfer the knowledge learned from single-discipline classification to interdisciplinary classification to address the scarcity of labeled interdisciplinary data. We also added discipline co-occurrence information into our proposed model. Finally, we obtained our final model by training the transferred model with interdisciplinary data. In addition, keyword-based explanations for classifying texts are provided by employing layer-wise relevance propagation. Experiments on real-life NSFC data show the effectiveness of the proposed method, which can promote interdisciplinary development by constructing an efficient and fair classification for interdisciplinary review systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Research Interdisciplinary School (IRIS) program is a training for young researchers with a biomedical background who are interested in acquiring the methodological knowledge and experience in preparing a study protocol for a project. The IRIS program is an outcome-oriented problem-solving workshop designed to promote team collaboration. The paper describes the process of moving from the training project proposal into a real-life research project. It compares the initial proposal and its assumptions with the reality of writing a research protocol and management of the study. It also reflects on the obstacles met at each stage of the project (protocol preparation / team recruitment / data collection and analysis / manuscript writing) and strategies to overcome difficulties regarding conducting the study inspired by the training project proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the effectiveness of international efforts to build the capacities of national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES) in Africa and proposes actions to improve the performance of these systems. Analysis draws on agricultural research expenditure data in Africa, Asia and Latin America and key informant interviews of 26 senior representatives of international and African research organisations. We conclude that donors and international partners have increased the supply of professional African scientists while contributing relatively little to the institutional capacities of African NARES. We propose a transition to what we call a twenty-first century African-led agricultural research system and identify actions to manifest it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large part of research management is spending time in thinking why and how you do it and how you can accomplish it. They are more important than what you do because when you plan and conduct research, the contribution to the field and world should come first over what you can do. One of the concerns I conceive for Japanese researchers nowadays is “glocalization”, which I define as an introverted behavior of someone while everything else going extraverted. It is literally a localization exclusively happening in Japan during globalization. This trend may not be favorable for active research. Well-thought-out research strategy is necessary for growing researchers both at the individual and team-levels. For an effective branding and mission accomplishment, researchers should know which type of research they focus on, mode 1 or 2 research. Researchers usually undertake successful research via one of the three standpoints, survivors, experts, and innovators. Research teams require an excellent leader who is determined and capable of doing things that are important but have no due date. Great leaders always go out of the comfort zone and inspire team members with their well-defined, top-down strategy starting from a vision, followed by a long-term goal, short-term goal, and project goal. Research management is an essential area of scholarly activity where creativity, courage, and resiliency are required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]