HIV/AIDS Outreach: Curriculum Development and Skills Training to Health and Information Professionals

With funding from the National Library of Medicine HIV/AIDS Community Information Outreach Program (ACIOP), librarians at the University of Florida Health Sciences Libraries partnered with university and community groups to facilitate collaboration, develop new information resources, develop information-seeking skills, and raise general awareness surrounding HIV/AIDS risks, prevention, and treatment. This article describes the skills development elements of the project, including development and implementation of an HIV/AIDS information resource curriculum for health care providers, social services professionals, and public librarians within the project’s partner organizations.     

Insights into the diffusion of HIV/AIDS information in higher education institutions in South Africa

According to the UNAIDS [(1999). Young people and HIV/AIDS. UNAIDS Briefing Paper. Geneva: UNAIDS] report it is widely agreed that in the absence of a cure, only preventative measures brought about by education and customized information exchanges can mitigate the impacts of the disease. The purpose of the study was to review the framework, nature and scope of HIV/AIDS information communication strategies employed by higher education institutions in South Africa. Both qualitative and quantitative research design and methodologies were employed largely through survey, observation and document analysis. The findings reveal that firstly, HIV/AIDS information is provided through a variety of communication tools, channels and strategies. Secondly, in most instances, HIV/AIDS messages are not context appropriate and are unsuitable for academic constituencies most of whom are knowledgeable about the disease. Thirdly, there is a lack of synergy in dealing with HIV/AIDS in the higher education sector in South Africa. Other hidden issues involved in the communication of HIV/AIDS information have been highlighted. Lastly, an institutional framework appropriate for inter-institutional exchanges of HIV/AIDS information is suggested.     

Knowledge and Attitude of Women to HIV/AIDS in a Farming Community in Southwestern Nigeria: Challenges for Public Libraries

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is one of the major setbacks to the achievement of the 2015 millennium development targets in Africa, generally, and Nigeria, in particular, where it is the leading cause of death. In terms of age and gender distribution, the most severely affected are sexually active females in their most economically reproductive years. A greater percentage of the Nigerian population lives in rural areas where there is low access to health information. This study assesses the knowledge level and attitudes of women in a farming community to HIV/AIDS, and suggests intervention strategies by the public libraries to bridge the knowledge gap on HIV/AIDS. This article suggests that public libraries as custodians of knowledge should play a significant role in transmitting information about how to prevent and control HIV/AIDS.     

AIDS in Haiti: a bibliometric analysis

OBJECTIVES: In Haiti, AIDS has become the leading cause of death in sexually active adults. Increasingly, AIDS has become a disease of women and children. Previous bibliometric studies have shown the emergence of Haiti as a leading country in the production of AIDS literature in the Latin American and Caribbean regions. No information exists, however, regarding the type of publications produced, the collaboration patterns used, or the subject content analysis of this production. The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the construction of this literature production. METHODS: A bibliometric analysis regarding Haitian AIDS research was conducted in the AIDSLINE database for the period 1980 to 1998. An attempt was made to identify the patterns of the growth in AIDS literature, as well as the types of documents published, authorship, institutional affiliations of authors, and subject content. RESULTS: Results indicated that most documents were published in periodicals. The International Conference on AIDS obtained the highest frequency. The United States, Haiti, and Canada were the main productive countries. CONCLUSIONS: While nearly 40% of the records corresponded to ethnology-related articles, HIV infections, sex behavior, pregnancy, and substance-related disorders headed the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) found. Main aspects of AIDS papers focused on epidemiology, complications, and trends issues.     

International Collaboration and Openness in Jordanian Research Output: A 10-year Publications Feedback

Previous reports stressed on the importance of international collaboration and open access (OA) publishing, as they increase the quality of the research and increase its benefits. In this study, we will assess Jordanian international research collaboration and OA publishing in the past 10 years. We performed a Scopus search for Jordanian publications in the years 2008–2017, where we extracted and calculated the total number of publications, publications in OA journals, publications with international collaborations. Moreover, we assessed the disciplines Jordanians usually publish in. During the 10-year interval, we found a total of 20,359 Jordan-affiliated publications indexed in Scopus. We found a dramatic increase in number of publications with international collaboration from 38% in 2008 reaching 53.3% in 2017, and an increase in OA publications from 7.3% of the total publications in 2008, reaching 18.7% of the total publications in 2017. Total number of Scopus indexed publications from Jordan has increased by 57.9% over the past 10 years. Although international collaboration and OA publications have dramatically increased in recent years, Jordanian researchers should focus more on international collaboration with developed countries and on self-archiving their publications.     

HIV/AIDS Information in Public Libraries

Abstract

Despite well-publicized advances in the development of antiretroviral therapies, HIV infection remains an incurable condition. Worldwide, the disease threatens to gravely impact a wide range of developing nations, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia and South America. In the United States, the poor and particularly women of color are at great, and increasing, risk for infection. Public libraries, as trusted public institutions for the dissemination of information, can continue to play an important role in promoting public health information surrounding HIV/AIDS prevention and education. Public libraries are not immune, however, to the political and value-driven public discourse surrounding HIV infection. Through carefully identifying the issues, taking a nonjudgmental service approach, and building collaborations with community based organizations, public libraries can become common ground for providing proactive prevention-focused information services. This article examines the current state of epidemic HIV/AIDS infection, reviews the literature on public library responses, and identifies highly select consumer health and biomedical monographic, serial, audio-visual and Web-based HIV/AIDS information tools.     

HIV/AIDS and nutrition: a bibliometric analysis

Diet and nutrition are directly involved in patient care protocols that reflect a shift in the treatment of HIV/AIDS as a chronic disease, with an emphasis on quality of life and expanded life trajectory. Research concerning HIV/AIDS and nutrition is multidisciplinary, yielding study results that appear in a wide variety of scholarly journals. The purpose of this research was to employ bibliometric techniques to evaluate the body of literature specific to HIV/AIDS and nutrition as well as to determine content overlap among major bibliographic citation databases.     

Predicting the number of coauthors for researchers: A learning model

Predicting the number of coauthors for researchers contributes to understanding the development of team science. However, it is an elusive task due to diversity in the collaboration patterns of researchers. This study provides a learning model for the dynamics of this variable; the parameters are learned from empirical data that consist of the number of publications and the number of coauthors at given time intervals. The model is based on relationship between the annual number of new coauthors and time given an annual number of publications, the relationship between the annual number of publications and time given a historical number of publications, and Lotka's law. The assumptions of the model are validated by applying it on the high-quality dblp dataset. The effectiveness of the model is tested on the dataset by satisfactory fittings on the evolutionary trend of the number of coauthors for researchers, the distribution of this variable, and the occurrence probability of collaboration events. Due to its regression nature, the model has the potential to be extended to assess the confidence level of the prediction results and thus has applicability to other empirical research.     

Co-Authorship and Scientific Publications: A Case Study at Shahed University

The purpose of this research is to study co-authorship and scientific publications of faculty members at Shahed University, located in Iran, during the period of 2000 to 2008. Scientometrics methods were used to evaluate scientific publications. The rate of co-authorship is high (91.27%) in comparison with single authorship (8.73%). Moreover, there is a great number of scientific collaborations among Shahed University faculty members but international collaboration is low. The article provides insight into co-authorship at Shahed University and provides useful information for researchers who are seeking to learn about the collaboration in scientific works by Iranian researchers at the national and international levels.     

HIV/AIDS and Subaltern Autonomous Rationality: A Call to Recenter Health Communication in Marginalized Sex Worker Spaces

Sex workers in India constitute a marginalized population. They are considered at high risk of HIV/AIDS and are stigmatized for “selling sex” in a culture that generally censures sex outside marriage. HIV/AIDS initiatives targeted at this population have mostly adhered to promoting condom use, increasing awareness, and encouraging blood tests to screen for HIV/AIDS. Missing from this discourse are voices of sex workers and their autonomous consciousness. Based on an analysis of interview data from an eight-week field project, this paper seeks to centralize sex worker subaltern rationality in a call to reframe expert-led HIV/AIDS communication efforts that cater to sex worker communities.     

A bibliometric analysis of academic publication and NIH funding

Academic productivity and research funding have been hot topics in biomedical research. While publications and their citations are popular indicators of academic productivity, there has been no rigorous way to quantify co-authors’ relative contributions. This has seriously compromised quantitative studies on the relationship between academic productivity and research funding. Here we apply an axiomatic approach and associated bibliometric measures to revisit a recent study by Ginther et al. (Ginther et al., 2011a, Ginther et al., 2011b) in which the probability of receiving a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 award was analyzed with respect to the applicant's race/ethnicity. Our results provide new insight and suggest that there is no significant racial bias in the NIH review process, in contrast to the conclusion from the study by D. K. Ginther et al. Our axiomatic approach has a potential to be widely used for scientific assessment and management.     

跨学科科研合作:背景、理论研究与实践进展

[目的/意义] 跨学科科研合作是新时代学术研究的重要形式和趋势,对科学创新和社会进步都具有推动作用,剖析其发展背景、现有理论研究与实践进展,将为跨学科科研合作领域的深入探究奠定基础。[方法/过程] 以跨学科研究的产生与发展引出跨学科科研合作问题,阐释其与跨学科研究的关联,剖析跨学科科研合作的发展背景,进而通过国内外文献梳理总结跨学科科研合作的研究主题,并结合网络调查分析其实践进展。[结果/结论] 国外研究主题聚焦于影响因素、合作环节与内容、促进策略;国内研究涉及合作现状与潜在合作、影响因素、跨学科团队知识交互、跨学科科研组织模式与管理机制;在实践方面,近年来科研资助机构大力资助跨学科科研合作项目、大型科研机构积极组织跨学科科研合作项目、世界一流高校建设跨学科科研合作平台与项目、重要国际会议倡导跨学科科研合作;未来的研究需强调跨学科科研合作的问题导向性和需求导向性,深入探究其运行保障体系、运行模式和管理机制、合作行为与交互机制等问题。     

On the relation between the degree of internationalization of cited and citing publications: A field level analysis,including and excluding self-citations

The growing complexity of scientific challenges demands increasingly intense research collaboration, both domestic and international. The resulting trend affects not only the modes of producing new knowledge, but also the way it is disseminated within scientific communities. This paper analyses the relationship between the “degree of internationalization” of a country’s scientific production and that of the relevant citing publications. The empirical analysis is based on 2010-2012 Italian publications. Findings show: i) the probability of being cited increases with the degree of internationalization of the research team; ii) totally domestic research teams tend to cite to a greater extent totally domestic publications; iii) vice versa, publications resulting from international collaborations tend to be more cited by totally foreign publications rather than by publications including domestic authors. These results emerge both at overall and at discipline level. Findings might inform research policies geared towards internationalization.     

Are NIH-funded publications fulfilling the proposed research? An examination of concept-matchedness between NIH research grants and their supported publications

The conceptual connections between scientific grants and publications are important, yet often overlooked in quantitative studies of science. An analysis of such connections could offer important insights into how science is conducted by individual researchers and research teams under the social and economic conditions of science. This study aims to offer the first piece of evidence towards this endeavor by analyzing the ratio of keyword matchedness between accepted NIH research grants from 2008 to 2015 and their funded publications. By applying linear regression method, we identified and examined three identified predictors of the outcome: 1) the funding rate of an NIH research program in a specific year, 2) the year difference between grant and publication, and 3) the funding size of a grant. Our findings suggest that these three factors contribute to the outcome in different capacities. Moreover, all of them may have different performances in individual funding programs, which highlights the importance of understanding the differences among individual funding mechanisms.     

International Information and Library Review: A Ten Year Bibliometric Study

The study intends to examine the publication patterns of International Information and Library Review from 2004 to 2013 and to predict the impact and influence of this established journal in the field of library and information science over the last decade. The study finds that International Information and Library Review has published the majority of papers in single authorship mode followed by in two-authorship mode while, contributions in three authorship and more than three-authorship mode are found less. The degree of collaboration in International Information and Library Review publications is found to be 0.45, indicating less intensity of collaborative trend of research. The study reveals that the University of Pittsburgh of the United States is the top performer with 12 authors followed by University of Wisconsin Milwaukee of the United States (10 authors), Universiteit van Pretoria of South Africa and University of the Punjab Lahore of Pakistan (7 authors each). In regard to geographical distribution of contributions, the United States is represented by contributions from 63 authors followed by India with 61 authors. Interestingly, 22 countries like, Argentina, Bhutan, Brazil, Cuba, and others have contributed one paper each. The study further reveals that Britz, J. J. of South Africa is identified as the most prolific author with a significant contribution of five papers followed by Bagheri, M. of Iran, Megnigbeto, E. of Benin, and Tuamsuk, K. of Thailand (four papers each). Moreover, the 2013 impact factor of International Information and Library Review based on records of Scopus citations is 0.588 and immediacy index is 0.09.     

Does the author’s collaboration mode lead to papers’ different citation impacts? An empirical analysis based on propensity score matching

This study explores the impact of different collaboration modes on the cited frequency of publications. Though several studies have obtained some research results, most of them exploit association or regression-based methods, which may not lead to causal conclusions. To overcome the above challenges, we use the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method to analyze and compare the citation frequencies resulting from four groups of collaboration models: international versus domestic, international multilateral versus international bilateral, domestic inter-organizational versus domestic intra-organizational, and domestic multi-author versus domestic single-author. More specifically, we conduct this analysis by exploring the publications with three computer science subfields from the Web of Science (WoS) database. The experimental results show that international collaboration, especially international multilateral collaboration, has a significant role in increasing the frequency of citations to scientific publications, showing that internationalization and collaboration are critical factors in the growth of the impact of the papers. Among national co-publications, collaborative publications within national organizations receive a higher citation impact. Multi-author collaborations significantly increase citation frequency compared to single-author publications. Our heterogeneity analysis across the different subfields of the computer science domain finds that the treatment effects for the three subfields differ modestly and mostly significant from the whole sample. Moreover, besides the implications for developing research policy and scientist collaboration, our study can capture the causal effect between author collaboration patterns and citation frequency to reveal their causal effects.     

Editorial

Maintaining a clinical HIV/AIDS section in an academic library collection that is both current and historically significant for research is essential. This article reports on a collection management project that was undertaken to weed HIV/AIDS books in targeted clinical areas of an academic library using a timeline model developed by Ondrusek (2001) as a supplement to traditional weeding methods. The combination proved effective for identifying clinical materials that were outdated and needed to be deaccessioned while maintaining historically relevant materials in these areas.     

Museums of Malawi Case Study: Tackling HIV/AIDS by Creating Awareness of Rights and Cultural Practices

The HIV/AIDS epidemic has greatly impacted the lives of many Malawians. In 2007, one million people in a population of 13 million were infected with the HIV virus. There are 91,000 cases of children living with HIV and over 550,000 orphans who lost their parents to this disease (UNAIDS 2008 Report on Global AIDS Epidemic). At the Museums of Malawi, many staff have died of HIV/AIDS‐related illnesses. The gravity of this matter prompted the Museums of Malawi to join hands with other stakeholders in a concerted effort to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The Museums of Malawi has found that the most significant reasons for HIV transmission are specific cultural beliefs and practices that abuse people’s rights, and that are as dangerous as the disease itself. The museum created activities that look at these beliefs in order to achieve behavioral change among youth and adults during the program.     

基于科学数据的合作网络研究——以ClinicalTrials.gov临床试验数据为例

[目的/意义]基于科学数据构建合作网络,并与传统出版物合作网络进行比较,从网络分析层面解读两个合作网络的差异,为科学数据管理工作提供借鉴。[方法/过程]以ClinicalTrials.gov网站的临床科学数据库为例,利用爬虫抓取该网站上传统论文题录信息以及临床试验信息的元数据并分别构建合作网络,通过复杂网络分析比较试验合作机构网络与论文合作机构网络之间的异同。[结果/结论]基于科学数据集和论文数据集的元数据构建的合作网络,与仅从论文数据集中提取元数据构建的网络相比,前者能够展现更丰富准确的合作信息,从而揭示科学数据管理和开放共享的重要性。