[Sigmet-officers] Student Paper Abstracts

[Powell, Kimberly Robin]

Okay, found were the submission system put the abstracts.  See below...
~Kim



Accessing Government Statistical Information





As a governmental data resource, statistical information is an important and valued source of information. The United States Federal Government is the biggest supplier of statistical information in the country. Federal Government agencies produce statistics in the course of research, program management, making projections and through administration functions; these are used by government agencies and the general public. This research essay will cover the background of government statistics, accessing the most valuable resources for this information and how important of a resource and skill this is. This will mostly include open source resources but will also cover certain subscription databases.



A Review of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) that Examines Internet Based Smoking Reduction/Cessation Programs

Consumer Health Informatics (CHI) includes the development and implementation of Internet based systems to deliver health risk management information, and health intervention applications to the public. The application of CHI to educational and interventional efforts for smoking reduction/cessation has recently garnered attention from both consumers and health researchers. Scientists believe that smoking avoidance or cessation before age 30 can prevent over 90% of smoking related cancers, and that individuals that stop smoking can prevent cancer as well as those that never start. Approaches to reducing smoking related cancer deaths include encouraging current smokers to stop and preventing people from developing this dangerous habit.
This paper reviews Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) centered on Internet based smoking reduction/cessation interventions. A search of the University of North Texas EBSCO Host databases, PubMed, the Cochrane Library, and EMBASE identified 10 RCTs that summarized the outcomes of 14 Internet based smoking reduction/cessation programs (2006 - 2011). These studies demonstrated that Internet based smoking reduction/cessation programs are promising tools in the effort to reduce smoking/improve public health. Several programs effectively reduced smoking, and Internet based programs reach many people at low cost. An important area of future research is the identification of Internet based smoking reduction/cessation interventions that meet the needs of smokers with different personalities, motivations for quitting, social, and economic circumstances.

Mendeley readership altmetrics for the social sciences and humanities: Research evaluation and knowledge flows
Although there is evidence that counting the readers of an article in the social reference site, Mendeley, may help
to capture its research impact, the extent to which this is true for different scientific fields is unknown. This study
compares Mendeley readership counts with citations for different social sciences and humanities disciplines. The
overall correlation between Mendeley readership counts and citations for the social sciences was higher than for
the humanities. Low and medium correlations between Mendeley bookmarks and citation counts in all the
investigated disciplines suggest that these measures reflect different aspects of research impact. Mendeley data
was also used to discover patterns of information flow between scientific fields. Comparing information flows
based on Mendeley bookmarking data and cross disciplinary citation analysis for the disciplines revealed
substantial similarities and some differences. Thus, the evidence from this study suggests that Mendeley
readership data could be used to help capture knowledge transfer across scientific disciplines, especially for
people that read but do not author articles, as well as giving impact evidence at an earlier stage than is possible
with citation counts.


Multiple h index: A new Scientometric Indicator

This study aimed to evaluate some of these indexes by using virtual data and propose a new index, named multiple h index, for removing the limits of these variants. Citation report for 40 researchers in Babol, Iran was extracted from Web of Science (WoS) and entered in a checklist together with their scientific lifetimes and published ages of their papers. Some statistical analyses, especially exploratory factor analysis and structural correlations were done in SPSS 19. Exploratory factor analysis revealed 3 factors with eigenvalues greater than 1 and explained variance over 96% in the studied indexes including multiple h index. Factors 1, 2 and 3 explained 44.38%, 28.19%, and 23.48% of variance in correlation coefficient matrix. M index (with coefficient of 90%) in factor 1, a index (with coefficient of 91%) in factor 2, and h and h2 indexes (with coefficients of 93%) in factor 3 had the highest factor loadings. Correlation coefficients and related comparative diagrams showed that multiple h index is more accurate than the other 9 variants in differentiating the scientific impact of researchers with the same h index. As the studied variants could not satisfied all limits of h index, scientific society needs an index which accurately evaluates individual researchers' scientific output. As multiple h index has some advantages over the other studied variants, it can be an appropriate alternative for them.

Cognitive Distance and Peer Review: a study of a grant scheme in Infection Biology
The aim of this paper is to discuss a methodology for measuring the cognitive distance between applicants and referees. Researchers' knowledge based cited papers and research contents are used to represent their scientific cognitions. Using two different methodologies: 1) author bibliographic coupling analysis and 2) author topic analysis, we apply these methods on a recent competition for grants from the Swedish Strategic Foundation (SSF). The agency used a two stage approach: in the first selection stage there were 57 main applicants with 136 co-applicants. For this stage there were 14 referees with a diversity of backgrounds, mostly Swedish but both university and industry, 11 of these had more than 10 publications during the period 2004-2011. In the second round, 28 applications were considered. At this stage 19 new international (non-Swedish) referees were taken into action (it is not known whether they were assembled from abroad or if they had a face-to-face meeting). Five out of the referees in the second round did not have any papers or very few papers <10 papers). The procedure resulted in a selection of nine proposals, nine teams that passed through the two-stage process with a large grant for studies in infection biology, out of which three were proposed by female researchers. This reflects the distribution over gender among main applicants. Therefore, we put this question aside this time and concentrate on other aspects of peer review and grant selection.

Modelling Article Citation Impact Factors Using an Integrated Statistical Method
This study uses an advanced statistical model to simultaneously assess a number of factors that may associate with increased citation impact: research collaboration; journal and reference impact and internationality; author and institutional impact; article size features; and readability of abstract in Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, Clinical Medicine and Social Sciences. Using a negative binomial-logit hurdle model, the results show that individual and international collaborations are significant determinants of increased citation counts and decreased zero citations in the four fields. Journal and reference impact and internationality also significantly associate with increased citations. Among article size attributes, title length is not an important factor of citations but other attributes associate with increased positive citations and decreased zero citations. In the all four models, the author impact is the only insignificant factor of citations.

-----
Kimberly R Powell, MIS
Life Sciences Informationist
Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library<health.library.emory.edu>
1462 Clifton Road, NE
Atlanta GA 30322
(404) 727-3961


________________________________

This e-mail message (including any attachments) is for the sole use of
the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged
information. If the reader of this message is not the intended
recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution
or copying of this message (including any attachments) is strictly
prohibited.

If you have received this message in error, please contact
the sender by reply e-mail message and destroy all copies of the
original message (including attachments).
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.asis.org/pipermail/sigmet-officers/attachments/20130814/bf708278/attachment-0001.html>