scholarly journals THIRTY YEARS OF CHANGE IN THE PUBLICATION PROCESS

Author(s):  
David WEAKLIEM

This essay considers changes in the publication process in sociology journals over the last thirty years. Decisions of accept or conditional accept on the first submission have almost disappeared, and the use of revise and resubmit decisions has expanded to cover a wide range of papers. Other important changes have been an increase in the typical number of reviewers and a less active role for editors. The changes have resulted in an improvement of the quality of published papers, but have also had some negative consequences. One is a slowdown in the process. Another is a dominance of one kind of publication — the full-scale research paper — and a decline of other types, including comments, research notes, and essays. The paper concludes by discussing some changes that might encourage a wider variety of publication types and facilitate commentary and debate on published papers

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Paola Gnerre ◽  
Domenico Montemurro ◽  
Andrea P. Rossi ◽  
Costantino Troise ◽  
Carlo Palermo ◽  
...  

The Italian Parliament has excluded hospital physicians from the application of the European Work Time Directive (EWTD), which imposes a maximum workweek of 48 h and compulsory resting periods. This resulted in extended and excessive work time for the category. This paper is aimed at evaluating the impact of this legislation gap, by assessing the presence of excessive work-related stress and risk for burnout syndrome among Italian physicians working in public hospitals. This observational study is based on an on-line survey conducted on a sample of 1925 Italian doctors (covering a wide range of age, work experience and contractual positions) from October 2014 to February 2015. The questionnaire included 30 questions concerning their personal and professional life (<em>e.g</em>., assessment of workloads, number of uncomfortable or extra shifts, unused days-off, <em>etc</em>.). On the basis of the results, it can be inferred that the average Italian doctor working in public hospitals is under considerable stress at work with negative consequences on his health. He is exposed to high risk of suffering from sleep disorders and cardiovascular diseases (due to the lack of time for private practice and eating regular meals). Overall, his perception is that his job worsens his quality of life. This study shows the relevance of the risk of burnout among Italian physicians employed in public hospitals due to severe workload and work conditions. The resulting impact on the quality of care and the significant cost involved - both in human and economic terms - calls for significant emergency measures by the Italian health work organization. An important increase and prolonged working time is associated with a worsening of the objective cognitive performance and an increase of clinical risk, but also to an increased risk of diseases for operators and of the burnout syndrome. Our survey shows that lack of application of the EWTD has adverse effects on the quality of life and performance of Italian doctors. Failure to respond by all Italian doctors is the greatest limitation of our survey.


Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Paula Herrero-Diz ◽  
Clara López-Rufino

The work of libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, as facilitators of reliable information on health issues, has shown that these entities can play an active role as verification agents in the fight against disinformation (false information that is intended to mislead), focusing on media and informational literacy. To help citizens, these entities have developed a wide range of actions that range from online seminars, to learning how to evaluate the quality of a source, to video tutorials or the creation of repositories with resources of various natures. To identify the most common media literacy practices in the face of fake news (news that conveys or incorporates false, fabricated, or deliberately misleading information), this exploratory study designed an ad hoc analysis sheet, validated by the inter-judge method, which allowed one to classify the practices of N = 216 libraries from all over the world. The results reveal that the libraries most involved in this task are those belonging to public universities. Among the actions carried out to counteract misinformation, open-access materials that favor self-learning stand out. These resources, aimed primarily at university students and adults in general, are aimed at acquiring skills related to fact-checking and critical thinking. Therefore, libraries vindicate their role as components of the literacy triad, together with professors and communication professionals.


Author(s):  
E. Shedova ◽  
A. Lopukhov

Cycloheximide and 6‐dimethylaminopurine (6‐DMAP) are widely used in protocols of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) for inhibition of maturation promoting factor (MPF) activity in SCNT-oocytes in the post-activation period of their culture. Nevertheless, you should remember that these agents have a wide range of activity and can conflict with other cell processes. Therefore, a definition of the optimal period of culture of SCNT-oocytes with the previously mentioned inhibitors may help to prevent the undesirable negative consequences. In this research the effects of cycloheximide (10 µg/ml) and 6‐DMAP (2mM) treatments duration (3.0, 4.0 or 5.0 h) on the reprogramming of somatic nuclear was estimated by the cleavage and blastocyst rates, and by the total cell number and a level of apoptotic cell in the obtained cloned blastocysts. The cleavage rate did not differ between the experimental groups, varying from 63.7 to 77.0 %. Also, there was not found an effect of treatment duration of the investigated factors on the development of activated SCNT-oocytes before blastocyst stage. For 3-hr treatment, the blastocyst rate was 19.6 ± 1.8%. The prolonged up to 4 and 5 hours duration did not change this rate. Meanwhile, we found out the effect of culture duration with сycloheximide and 6‐DMAP on quality of cloned embryos. In case of 3-hr treatment, the total cell number in cloned blastocyst was 58.8 ± 2.4. With prolongation of duration up to 4 hours the result was growing up to 76.6 ± 1.4 (p<0.05), but prolongation up to 5 hours reduced the total cell number in blastocyst as compared to that in 4-hr group (p<0.05). The apoptosis rate had no difference between the treated groups and had its variety between 5.4 to 7.0 %. Our date indicate that efficiency of bovine cloned embryo production depends on duration of 6-DMAP and cycloheximide treatment of the SCNT-oocytes in the post-activated period of their culture. The optimal duration according to the described protocol of SCNT for the best quality of embryos is 4 hours.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 247-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Coote ◽  
Laura Comber ◽  
Gillian Quinn ◽  
Carme Santoyo-Medina ◽  
Alon Kalron ◽  
...  

Abstract Falls are highly prevalent in people with multiple sclerosis (MS) and result in a range of negative consequences, such as injury, activity curtailment, reduced quality of life, and increased need for care and time off work. This narrative review aims to summarize key literature and to discuss future work needed in the area of fall prevention for people with MS. The incidence of falls in people with MS is estimated to be more than 50%, similar to that in adults older than 80 years. The consequences of falls are considerable because rate of injury is high, and fear of falling and low self-efficacy are significant problems that lead to activity curtailment. A wide range of physiological, personal, and environmental factors have been highlighted as potential risk factors and predictors of falls. Falls are individual and multifactorial, and, hence, approaches to interventions will likely need to adopt a multifactorial approach. However, the literature to date has largely focused on exercise-based interventions, with newer, more comprehensive interventions that use both education and exercise showing promising results. Several gaps in knowledge of falls in MS remain, in particular the lack of standardized definitions and outcome measures, to enable data pooling and comparison. Moving forward, the involvement of people with MS in the design and evaluation of programs is essential, as are approaches to intervention development that consider implementation from the outset.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-41
Author(s):  
VLADIMIR NIKONOV ◽  
◽  
ANTON ZOBOV ◽  

The construction and selection of a suitable bijective function, that is, substitution, is now becoming an important applied task, particularly for building block encryption systems. Many articles have suggested using different approaches to determining the quality of substitution, but most of them are highly computationally complex. The solution of this problem will significantly expand the range of methods for constructing and analyzing scheme in information protection systems. The purpose of research is to find easily measurable characteristics of substitutions, allowing to evaluate their quality, and also measures of the proximity of a particular substitutions to a random one, or its distance from it. For this purpose, several characteristics were proposed in this work: difference and polynomial, and their mathematical expectation was found, as well as variance for the difference characteristic. This allows us to make a conclusion about its quality by comparing the result of calculating the characteristic for a particular substitution with the calculated mathematical expectation. From a computational point of view, the thesises of the article are of exceptional interest due to the simplicity of the algorithm for quantifying the quality of bijective function substitutions. By its nature, the operation of calculating the difference characteristic carries out a simple summation of integer terms in a fixed and small range. Such an operation, both in the modern and in the prospective element base, is embedded in the logic of a wide range of functional elements, especially when implementing computational actions in the optical range, or on other carriers related to the field of nanotechnology.


2005 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
András Simonovits

According to the dominant view, the quality of individual scientific papers can be evaluated by the standard of the journal in which they are published. This paper attempts to demonstrate the limits of this view in the field of economics. According to our main findings, a publication frequently serves as a signal of high professional standards rather than as a source of information; referees and editors frequently reject good papers and accept bad ones; citation indices only partially balance the distortions deriving from the selection process; there are essential “entry costs” to the publication process. Moreover, financial interests of publishers may contradict scientific interests. As long as leading economists do not give voice to their dissatisfaction, there is no hope for any reform of the selection process.


2019 ◽  
pp. 462-471
Author(s):  
Lyudmila Shirokova

The historical polyethnicity of the Slovak society and the connected problems of the interrelations of cultures, ethics, interpersonal relations, are reflected in the works of modern Slovak prose. They are represented most clearly in the novels of middle generation writers P. Rankov, S. Lavrík, P. Krištúfek. They dwell upon the dramatical events of the 20 th century. They cover wide range problems, from the fruitful coexistence of various ethnic groups and their representatives to national contradictions and racial repressions. The artistic quality of the mentioned works, their composition, the way of narrating, the type of the main character, can be highly evaluated. For example, in a novel by P. Rankov the plot, in spite of its linearity, is a chain of episodes in the span of 30 years from the life of the main characters. It reflects not only their fates, but also the historical and political changes of the world they live in. The main female character of a S. Lavrík ’s novel narrates about everyday life and tragedies in the lives of the dwellers of a Slovak town in the Slovak Republic during the war. P. Krištúfek in his novel focuses on several decades from the life of a Slovak-Jewish family and dwellers of a Slovak provincial society with types and relations specific for this milieu.


Author(s):  
Katherine V. Whittington

Abstract The electronics supply chain is being increasingly infiltrated by non-authentic, counterfeit electronic parts, whose use poses a great risk to the integrity and quality of critical hardware. There is a wide range of counterfeit parts such as leads and body molds. The failure analyst has many tools that can be used to investigate counterfeit parts. The key is to follow an investigative path that makes sense for each scenario. External visual inspection is called for whenever the source of supply is questionable. Other methods include use of solvents, 3D measurement, X-ray fluorescence, C-mode scanning acoustic microscopy, thermal cycle testing, burn-in technique, and electrical testing. Awareness, vigilance, and effective investigations are the best defense against the threat of counterfeit parts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (10(79)) ◽  
pp. 12-18
Author(s):  
G. Bubyreva

The existing legislation determines the education as "an integral and focused process of teaching and upbringing, which represents a socially important value and shall be implemented so as to meet the interests of the individual, the family, the society and the state". However, even in this part, the meaning of the notion ‘socially significant benefit is not specified and allows for a wide range of interpretation [2]. Yet the more inconcrete is the answer to the question – "who and how should determine the interests of the individual, the family and even the state?" The national doctrine of education in the Russian Federation, which determined the goals of teaching and upbringing, the ways to attain them by means of the state policy regulating the field of education, the target achievements of the development of the educational system for the period up to 2025, approved by the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of October 4, 2000 #751, was abrogated by the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of March 29, 2014 #245 [7]. The new doctrine has not been developed so far. The RAE Academician A.B. Khutorsky believes that the absence of the national doctrine of education presents a threat to national security and a violation of the right of citizens to quality education. Accordingly, the teacher has to solve the problem of achieving the harmony of interests of the individual, the family, the society and the government on their own, which, however, judging by the officially published results, is the task that exceeds the abilities of the participants of the educational process.  The particular concern about the results of the patriotic upbringing served as a basis for the legislative initiative of the RF President V. V. Putin, who introduced the project of an amendment to the Law of RF "About Education of the Russian Federation" to the State Duma in 2020, regarding the quality of patriotic upbringing [3]. Patriotism, considered by the President of RF V. V. Putin as the only possible idea to unite the nation is "THE FEELING OF LOVE OF THE MOTHERLAND" and the readiness for every sacrifice and heroic deed for the sake of the interests of your Motherland. However, the practicing educators experience shortfalls in efficient methodologies of patriotic upbringing, which should let them bring up citizens, loving their Motherland more than themselves. The article is dedicated to solution to this problem based on the Value-sense paradigm of upbringing educational dynasty of the Kurbatovs [15].


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (9) ◽  
pp. 952-956
Author(s):  
M. V. Malyshkina ◽  
M. V. Miroslavskaya

Aim. The presented study aims to develop the methodology for assessing the quality of management of organizational transformation processes. Tasks. To achieve the set aim, the authors solve the following problems: determine the essence and content of socio-economic transformation, formulate quality assurance principles for the management of transformation processes, draw attention to the problem of selecting a unified quality criterion for the management of organizational transformation processes. Methods. This study uses general scientific methods of cognition, including analysis and synthesis. It also applies a systems approach to identify the major problems of assessing the quality of management of transformation processes, including the problem of selecting a unified quality criterion for the management of transformation processes and formulating the principles of ensuring the quality of management of transformation processes. Results. The global problem of managing transformation processes in the economic system consists in the complexity of the managed processes, which increases due to the multidimensionality, mutual influence, and the resulting uncertainty of interactions between the elements of the system. It is concluded that the methodology for assessing the quality of management of transformation processes is based on the principle of integrating separate measures to improve the quality of management of system elements into a single system of management actions and the principle of ensuring that management actions are primarily aimed at preventing possible negative consequences of the transformation of economic systems, i.e. reducing the potential impact of unfavorable events and their consequences. To assess the effectiveness of targeted management actions and productive actions aimed at organizing, controlling, and guiding the transformation process, the authors actualize the problem of selecting an adequate quality criterion for the management of transformation processes in economic systems and put forward a hypothesis about a possible unified criterion of management quality. Conclusions. The principle of integrating separate measures to improve the quality of management of system elements and the principle of ensuring that management actions are aimed at preventing possible negative consequences lie at the core of the methodology for assessing the quality of management of transformation processes in economic systems. The quality assessment methodology should be developed in the direction of finding a unified quality criterion for managing transformation processes in economic systems.


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