Of Frogs & Rhetoric: The Atrazine Wars

In a scientific dispute over the effects of atrazine on amphibians, chemical industry–funded and publically funded scientists present stunningly contrasting constructions of atrazine's environmental concentrations, persistence, and potential to harm. Considerable scientific uncertainties and variable ranges allow authors to construct preferred versions of the story of atrazine. These incommensurate rhetorical constructions, more the result of competing economic and environmental interests than of any paradigmatic misalignments, have prolonged the dispute not only over atrazine's effects but also over whether its sales should be banned.     

Science textbooks for lower secondary schools in Brunei: issues of gender equity

This paper is concerned with issues affecting equity in science education for girls and boys. In the paper the results of an investigation into the recently published (1998–2000) series of textbooks entitled Lower Secondary Science for Brunei Darussalam are presented. In the first part of the paper, background issues of continuing gender inequality in science education and of the nature and scope of textbook analyses are outlined. Then the representation of males and females in both illustrations and text in the Bruneian textbooks is discussed. From this analysis a picture emerges of the extent to which science is portrayed as a pursuit of equal appropriateness for both boys and girls. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of the findings presented within the wider context of gender and education in Brunei.     

Assessment in special schools: national early assessment procedures and pupils attending special schools in England

An implicit assumption that fostering inclusion means having shared systems encompassing the needs of all children is evident in many aspects of policy development over the past decade. Reflecting this, the implementation of ‘baseline assessment’ schemes (i.e. testing at around age 5 years) is a statutory requirement on all state-maintained special and mainstream schools in England since 1998. Our argument is that the enthusiasm for commonality has obscured the need to question the value and validity of baseline assessment schemes for children with special educational needs (and possibly some others such as children having English as an additional language). We illustrate this position with reference to data from our recent study on baseline assessment in England. The study encompassed survey data from a national sample of 982 schools, of which 107 were special schools. Between them, these special schools used 42 different baseline assessment schemes. Comparisons between our mainstream and special school respondents indicated that there were similarities in the nature and perceived value of the schemes used. However, special schools were less satisfied with their schemes. We suggest that a reappraisal of the nature and purpose of baseline assessment for pupils with special educational needs warrants greater critical debate. Without this, there is a danger that a stress on commonality, veiling an inclusion orthodoxy, will ultimately be counterproductive.     

The Combined Effects of Instructor Communicative Behaviors,Instructor Credibility,and Student Personality Traits on Incivility in the College Classroom

This study investigated the combined role of instructor communication variables (nonverbal immediacy and self-disclosure), instructor credibility (competence, caring, and trustworthiness), and student personality traits (extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness) in predicting students’ uncivil behaviors in class. A total of 406 students completed online questionnaires regarding the instructor of the class they attended prior to the one in which the study was administered. Personality and instructor behavior variables contributed approximately equally to explaining variance in student incivility. Students’ conscientiousness and agreeableness had direct negative relationships with incivility, whereas instructors’ amount and negativity of self-disclosure had direct positive relationships with incivility.     

The Peril of Ignoring Middle School Student Speech Rights

Analysis of two recent federal court cases in which principals violated student speech rights offers guidance to middle school administrators as they attempt to address student expression. Characteristics of a successful school from the Association for Middle Level Education provide a framework for analyzing these cases in order to prevent potential violations of First Amendment speech rights of students.     

Mapping the literature of hospital pharmacy

Objectives

This study describes the literature of hospital pharmacy and identifies the journals most commonly cited by authors in the field, the publication types most frequently cited, the age of citations, and the indexing access to core journals. The study also looks at differing citation practices between journals with a wide audience compared to a national journal with a focus on regional issues and trends in the field.

Method

Cited references from five discipline-specific source journals were collected and analyzed for publication type and age. Two sets were created for comparison. Bradford''s Law of Scattering was applied to both sets to determine the most frequently cited journals.

Results

Three-quarters of all cited items were published within the last 10 years (71%), and journal articles were the most heavily cited publication type (n=65,760, 87%). Citation analysis revealed 26 journal titles in Zone 1, 177 journal titles in Zone 2, and the remaining were scattered across 3,886 titles. Analysis of a national journal revealed Zone 1 comprised 9 titles. Comparison of the 2 sets revealed that Zone 1 titles overlapped, with the exception of 2 titles that were geographically focused in the national title.

Conclusion

Hospital pharmacy literature draws heavily from its own discipline-specific sources but equally from core general and specialty medical journals. Indexing of cited journals is complete in PubMed and EMBASE but lacking in International Pharmaceutical Abstracts. Gray literature is a significant information source in the field.     

Access to human,animal, and environmental journals is still limited for the One Health community

Objective

“One Health” is an interdisciplinary approach to evaluating and managing the health and well-being of humans, animals, and the environments they share that relies on knowledge from the domains of human health, animal health, and the environmental sciences. The authors'' objective was to evaluate the extent of open access (OA) to journal articles in a sample of literature from these domains. We hypothesized that OA to articles in human health or environmental journals was greater than access to animal health literature.

Methods

A One Health seminar series provided fifteen topics. One librarian translated each topic into a search strategy and searched four databases for articles from 2011 to 2012. Two independent investigators assigned each article to human health, the environment, animal health, all, other, or combined categories. Article and journal-level OA were determined. Each journal was also assigned a subject category and its indexing evaluated.

Results

Searches retrieved 2,651 unique articles from 1,138 journals; 1,919 (72%) articles came from 406 journals that contributed more than 1 article. Seventy-seven (7%) journals dealt with all 3 One Health domains; the remaining journals represented human health 487 (43%), environment 172 (15%), animal health 141 (12%), and other/combined categories 261 (23%). The proportion of OA journals in animal health (40%) differed significantly from journals categorized as human (28%), environment (28%), and more than 1 category (29%). The proportion of OA for articles by subject categories ranged from 25%–34%; only the difference between human (34%) and environment (25%) was significant.

Conclusions

OA to human health literature is more comparable to animal health than hypothesized. Environmental journals had less OA than anticipated.Keywords (Medical Subject Headings) Publishing, Periodicals as Topic, Access to Information, Veterinary Medicine, Environment, Environmental Health, Medicine“One Health” is an integrated, transdisciplinary approach to solve complex problems at the diverse interfaces shared by humans, animals, and the environment [1]. The One Health approach to evaluating and managing the health and well-being of humans, animals, and the environments that they share relies on knowledge from the domains of human health, animal health, and the environmental sciences. Although there is a growing body of literature about the development of the One Health concept as documented by Pepper, Carrigan, Shurtz, and Foster [2], this literature is not the same as the combination of literature from the three domains that is applied in service of One Health. Every discipline related to One Health has its unique mindset and language, with corresponding lists of acronyms that are frequently an impediment to effective communication across the participating professions. Relevant papers guiding a One Health approach may never specifically use “One Health” as a term or concept.To promote better communication and collaboration among health professionals and environmental scientists, a public monthly One Health Intellectual Exchange Group (IEG) hosted by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center was launched in 2009. In 2011, faculty from the North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine, University of North Carolina''s Gillings School for Global Public Health, Duke Global Health Institute, and Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University expanded the IEG series into a weekly seminar course with eight One Health focus areas [3]. The eight focus area modules were the following: an introduction to One Health; environmental health and ecology; the human and animal bond; zoonoses and emerging infectious diseases; food and water safety; disease surveillance, informatics, and disaster preparedness; benefits of comparative medicine; and policy and education (Appendix A, online only). Each seminar speaker recommended papers to read prior to the session to provide a foundation for the topic because student backgrounds and majors were quite diverse. Represented student majors included master''s of public health, master''s of animal science, doctor of veterinary medicine, graduate-level environmental sciences, and undergraduate-level biochemistry, engineering, and biology.Open access (OA) to relevant literature is very important to scholars and practitioners working on interdisciplinary problems. The One Health Proof of Concept Workgroup found that few studies assess outcomes in human, animal, and environmental spheres simultaneously [4], making it important to be able to access articles from each of the three domains to get a more complete picture.The objective of this study was to evaluate the extent of OA to journal articles in a sample of literature relevant to One Health from the human, animal, and environmental domains. Working in a college of veterinary medicine and supporting faculty, staff, and students addressing interdisciplinary problems under the One Health umbrella [5], the authors were familiar with the extent of OA in human biomedical and public health literature and the literature of veterinary medicine but were less familiar with environmental journals. In light of general availability of environmental information and OA to publications such as Environmental Health Perspectives, we thought it likely that environmental literature would be relatively open compared to the other subject areas. Therefore, we hypothesized OA to articles from human health or environmental journals was greater than access to animal health literature. We chose to look at article-level subject categorization and access, as well as journal-level categorization and access, because they might differ. Article-level access relates more to authors'' decisions about OA for a content domain, while journal-level access and subject categorization are driven by publishers and associations. Understanding the distinction and having data would inform our efforts to promote increased OA to this literature.