Dimensions of Research

Performative Microforests: Investigating the potential benefits of integrating spatial vegetation environments into buildings, in regards to the performance of buildings, their occupants + local ecosystems

While the reasons for the divide are common to many fields, CIE academic research has the added challenge of being situated in the highly practical field of education. However, this makes practitioner access to CIE academic research all the more crucial. Along with discussing issues of relevance and access, this discussion chapter highlights the exploration of alternative sources of academic research content to help academics and other scholars in CIE make their research more accessible. In this way, this discussion proposes that academic research and practice meet in the middle. Not only by increasing physical access to research through the various means discussed but also by using scaffolding approaches to academic research dissemination with the aim to increase the capacity of practitioners’ access to and use of CIE academic research. These approaches not only serve to bring academic research into the visibility of practice, but also to support practitioners’ skills in accessing and applying academic CIE research more easily.

The thesis considers whether international research should contribute to the reduction of global health disparities and, if so, how the enterprise should do so. To answer these questions, I systematically analyse cosmopolitan and middle ground theories of justice in order to determine if they support the conduct of international health research. I then investigate which theory, if any, can provide the most comprehensive guidance about what is owed by external research actors from high-income countries to parties in low and middle-income countries and is, therefore, best-equipped to serve as the basis of a justice framework for international research. The analysis reveals that the human rights cosmopolitan theories of Thomas Pogge and Henry Shue, Peter Singer’s consequentialist cosmopolitan theory, and Jennifer Ruger’s health capability paradigm each provide grounds for the contention that international research should advance justice in global health. Of these theories, the health capability paradigm is selected to serve as the starting point of a justice framework for international clinical research. Relying on premises derived from the health capability paradigm, I develop the ‘research for health justice’ framework. The framework provides guidance on how four key aspects of international clinical research should be structured so that the enterprise most effectively reduces health disparities between and within countries. Those four aspects are: the research target, research capacity strengthening, ancillary care, and post-trial benefits. The framework identifies the obligations of multilaterals, governments, research funders, sponsors, and investigators towards putting this model of international clinical research into practice. The thesis then utilises empirical methods to test the theoretical concepts that it develops. To determine whether high-income country governments meet their obligations under the ‘research for health justice’ framework, I evaluate the alignment of research law and policy in the United States and United Kingdom against its requirements. Neither country is shown to have enacted research law and policy similar to that called for by the framework. Due to their sustained commitment to technology transfer legislation, both countries’ health research systems are organised to promote domestic economic ends rather than health equity. To establish whether and how research funders, sponsors, and investigators meet their obligations under the ‘research for health justice’ framework, case study research was performed on an ongoing equity-oriented international clinical trial—the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit’s vivax malaria treatment trial. Data were collected utilising a mix of qualitative research methods and analysed according to the principles of thematic analysis. The results demonstrate that international clinical research can meet ethical requirements linking it to justice in global health, even in difficult circumstances (i.e., where a research population largely cannot access its government health system). Framework requirements were largely upheld by Wellcome Trust (funder), Oxford University (sponsor), and investigators on the vivax malaria treatment trial. A number of factors facilitated adherence to the requirements, including chief investigators’ intentions and practices and the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit’s dual role as a research unit and health care provider.

Using macroeconomic variables in the prediction of stock market indices:A theoretical and empirical assessment within BRICS and selected developed economies

Background: Research is fundamental in improving health through informing health practices and policies. Despite significant capacity building in some areas to support health research efforts, research capacity in low-middle countries, such as Papua New Guinea, is weak. Bachelor of Midwifery students at the University of Goroka, between 2012 and 2016, were introduced to research and produced a proposal for a small study to be implemented when they returned to their place of work as qualified midwives. Despite students being very enthusiastic about carrying out the research during the development of their research proposal, there was limited evidence of them being able to successfully complete their research. This study aimed to understanding the barriers perceived by the graduate midwives to performing research in their own setting so as to inform development of strategies to support the students and graduates in their research efforts in the future. Methods: An exploratory, descriptive study was conducted using a qualitative approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine Bachelor of Midwifery graduates from the University of Goroka practising in the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. Data was thematically analysed using Braun and Clark’s six stage approach and themes and sub-themes identified. Findings: Participants viewed research as a skill set and a tool that could be used for problem solving, improving practice and creating evidence. Although some participants were confident with some research skills and had started a research study, they felt they did not have enough skills to complete the study. Others stated that although they were interested to undertake research, they did not understand the research process, and were lacking in knowledge and skills. Barriers to performing research identified by participants included lack of time, lack of support in the workplace, lack of resources and no culture of research in the workplace. Enablers identified included having an experienced researcher as a mentor, having access to ongoing training in research and other skills, e.g. computer and internet use, having resources such as books and internet access, having time during work to undertake research, and having support in workplace. Conclusion: Despite some introductory integration of research knowledge and skills into undergraduate midwifery curriculum and a perception by graduate midwives that research is important it does not translate into graduate midwives professional practice. Bachelor of Midwifery curricula must increase the amount of time spent on research content which must be taught in practical ways and by experienced educators so students are inspired and skilled to undertake research.

PurposeThus far, no study collects evidence from practitioners directly to investigate the characteristics of operations management (OM) research that appears to have impacts on OM practice, nor do we know how practitioners evaluate the managerial relevance of OM research. This paper aims to answer two interesting and important questions: how do practitioners judge the managerial relevance of OM research; and whether practitioners' criteria on managerial relevance can help OM researchers improve the relevance?Design/methodology/approachA panel of senior executives was asked to read the top 10 most downloaded papers from theJournal of Operations Managementand fill the designed questionnaire. Following Cronbach's cumulative theory‐building process through which progress is made by successively testing the efficacy of the measures, this research examined the diverse disciplines, consolidated relevant findings, and integrated them into a tractable, meaningful research framework.FindingsThis paper reveals that practitioners evaluate our OM research by three criteria: whether academic research is applicable or implementable (solution oriented), whether academic research provides novel insights or new perspectives to management (eye opening), and whether academic research helps practitioners recognize their situations (accessibility).Originality/valueWhile the awareness of managerial relevance in OM research has been growing, few systematic, quantitative‐oriented empirical studies of practitioners' attitude toward academic OM research exist in current literature. This paper directly explores practitioners' opinions on managerial relevance through quantitative analysis and identified several possible dimensions to pursue managerial relevance in OM research.

‘Mind the gap’

Objective By investigating the satisfaction of scientific research incentive from medical researchers in a grade A tertiary hospital to find the problems in the system of scientific research management and propose possible solution for improvement. Methods Through literature retrieval and questionnaire survey, firstly divided medical researchers into groups by gender, service period, education degree, technical title, job categories, then analyze different types of medical researcher satisfaction by using T Test, ANOVAwith SPSS 20.0 software. Results Different education levels have statistically differences, PhD researchers have the lowest satisfaction. Different technical titles of medical researchers in scientific research protection, transformation and improving their awareness have statistical differences too, Senior title have lower satisfaction.Different job categories of medical researcher engaged in scientific research of material reward satisfaction with statistical differences, clinicians and researchers conduct basic science research showed the lowest satisfaction.There is no statistical differences in different gender, or service period of medical researchers for their satisfaction of scientific research incentive. Conclusions According to the differences among satisfaction attitudes of researchers, tailored research management measurements should be developed to strengthen the incentives from multidimensions, motivate researchers for conducting scientific research, enhance their statisfaction of research job in order to improve the research capacity of hospital gradually. Key words: Hospital; Medical researcher; Researchincentivemechanism; Satisfaction

Objective Current study used quantitative research methods to reveal the regional medical information research in hotspots, and summarize the mainstream knowledge base to provide the reference for researchers in the field. Methods A systematic search was conducted to find publications in CNKI, Wanfang Database and PubMed. Bibliometrics method, social network analysis, co-word analysis, principal component analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis were used in this study. Results ① total 11, 482 articles published from 1984 to 2013 were screened out. The development of research publications showed an increasing trend, and the papers were distributed in 1233 types of journals. The number of authors who located in Beijing, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Shandong ranked top five. ② The top 59 high-frequency key words were identified that representing the hot contents in regional health information technology research field, and was used to build knowledge network map. Among them, HIS, electronic medical records, hospital information technology, information technology were at the core of this research area. ③ We summarized research and development in the field of nine major mainstream knowledge base include: research on electronic medical records, medical personnel, information systems, information security, information networks, information sharing, information integration, information technology, and information management, resident’s health record related studies; qualitative analysis and problem-oriented research; HIS and telemedicine-related research; community-related research, two-way referral related research, health care reform and cloud computing-related research, telemedicine related research and V43 related research. Conclusions The development of regional medical information research has good momentum and closely follow the international trend, but the research contents and methods are still distance from international standard.. Research mostly focused on hospital information system construction, regional research and applied research are weak and need to be further improved. Key words: Regional medical information; Bibliometrics, co-word analysis; Social network analysis; Knowledge Network; Quantitative research

Objective To study the cognition of scientific research integrity and know status of scientific research standard of nurses who had research experience so as to provide some evidence for nursing research integrity management.Methods A total of 296 nurses whose working years was more than 5years and who had delivered scientific research papers in 13 Grade A hospitals from 7 cities were investigated by self-designed questionnaires.Results More than 64.0％ nurses showed not appropriate or inappro-priate for those irresponsible research behavior.64.5％ nurses did not agree with the researchers to referring the research object situation for others,97.0％ nurses believed the research achievement should be objective.While nurses did not know the research standards well:only 56.1％ nurses knew the standard of submitting manuscript,and 20.6％ nurses knew research data collection,preservation and usage.Conclusions It is necessary to enhance the management of nursing research integrity through education and propaganda of the research standards,improving the scientific management system,increasing the research support for nurse scientific so as to promote the nursing research integrity. Key words: Clinical nurses; Nursing research; Research integrity; Research standards; Research management

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The core service of most research portal sites is providing relevant research papers to various researchers that match their research interests. This kind of service may only be effective and easy to use when a user can provide correct and concrete information about a paper such as the title, authors, and keywords. However, unfortunately, most users of this service are not acquainted with concrete bibliographic information. It implies that most users inevitably experience repeated trial and error attempts of keyword-based search. Especially, retrieving a relevant research paper is more difficult when a user is novice in the research domain and does not know appropriate keywords. In this case, a user should perform iterative searches as follows : i) perform an initial search with an arbitrary keyword, ii) acquire related keywords from the retrieved papers, and iii) perform another search again with the acquired keywords. This usage pattern implies that the level of service quality and user satisfaction of a portal site are strongly affected by the level of keyword management and searching mechanism. To overcome this kind of inefficiency, some leading research portal sites adopt the association rule mining-based keyword recommendation service that is similar to the product recommendation of online shopping malls. However, keyword recommendation only based on association analysis has limitation that it can show only a simple and direct relationship between two keywords. In other words, the association analysis itself is unable to present the complex relationships among many keywords in some adjacent research areas. To overcome this limitation, we propose the hybrid approach for establishing association network among keywords used in research papers. The keyword association network can be established by the following phases : i) a set of keywords specified in a certain paper are regarded as co-purchased items, ii) perform association analysis for the keywords and extract frequent patterns of keywords that satisfy predefined thresholds of confidence, support, and lift, and iii) schematize the frequent keyword patterns as a network to show the core keywords of each research area and connecting keywords among two or more research areas. To estimate the practical application of our approach, we performed a simple experiment with 600 keywords. The keywords are extracted from 131 research papers published in five prominent Korean journals in 2009. In the experiment, we used the SAS Enterprise Miner for association analysis and the R software for social network analysis. As the final outcome, we presented a network diagram and a cluster dendrogram for the keyword association network. We summarized the results in Section 4 of this paper. The main contribution of our proposed approach can be found in the following aspects : i) the keyword network can provide an initial roadmap of a research area to researchers who are novice in the domain, ii) a researcher can grasp the distribution of many keywords neighboring to a certain keyword, and iii) researchers can get some idea for converging different research areas by observing connecting keywords in the keyword association network. Further studies should include the following. First, the current version of our approach does not implement a standard meta-dictionary. For practical use, homonyms, synonyms, and multilingual problems should be resolved with a standard meta-dictionary. Additionally, more clear guidelines for clustering research areas and defining core and connecting keywords should be provided. Finally, intensive experiments not only on Korean research papers but also on international papers should be performed in further studies.

The thesis titled antecedents and enablers of green supply chain practices focuses on one of the most contemporary issues in supply chain management. The literature review explores the existing literature and research work on green supply chain practices and develops a framework for the research. The research is qualitative in nature and data was collected from the three automobile component-manufacturing companies in India. Semi structured interviews were conducted over a period of 18 months. There were three objectives for this thesis: 1. Describing the current state of green supply chain practices? 2. What are the antecedents and enablers for green supply chain practices? 3. What are the underlying mechanisms, if any? The research work concludes by answering all the above three questions and also gives the future direction for research. The research work started by finding a gap for the empirical research in the context of green supply chain practices. The objective of the research was to focus on antecedents and enablers of green supply chain practices. Some contextual factors, inhibitors and consequences are also emerged during the pilot case study. The research work is rigor and to ensure the rigor of the research design, five-stage process was used to structure the methodology. As a final check author assessed his research against the four basic tests commonly used in empirical research; construct validity, internal validity, external validity and reliability. The research study has contributed both to the development and testing of theory relating to the antecedents and enablers of green supply chain practices. The review of literature provided a synthesis of the underpinning bodies of literature that has not previously been conducted in this way. This resulted in the identification of ten core green supply chain practices for the development of antecedents and enablers that created the foundation for author’s empirical investigation. It was found that previous studies have been largely theoretical. The empirical studies that do exist have focused on one particular dyadic relationship with in green supply chain practices. A double contribution has been made to testing the theory of green supply chain practices from a process and output perspective. As process perspective, a contribution has been made to methodology by developing a robust approach for conducting supply chain research beyond the dyad. From output perspective, the author has the empirical results from the three individual case studies and their cross-case comparison for dissemination to an academic audience. Specific contribution of this research to theory development include: 1. Development of macro model of green supply chain practices with the inputs from literature. 2. The synthesis of ten core green supply chain practices with antecedents and enablers from existing body of literature enriched through empirical testing 3. Empirical derivation of three contextual factors. Although the research work is new and contribute to the theory and practices, there are still some limitations of this research. Two minor limitations have been identified: 1. Generalizability of result to practice to practice: Due to the limited size of the case study approach, the results can only be generalized to theory and not to practice. 2. Variation in quality of information: The scope of data collection for all three case studies was same still the quality of information gathered was different. As good quality cross-case analysis was still possible but the relative strengths of the three cases varied. Overall the research work is original, rigor, and contributes to the existing theory and also paves the path for future research work in the area of green supply chain practices.

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the competition between basic and applied research within public research organizations. International publications are considered here a proxy of basic research, whereas self-financing deriving from technology transfer activities is an indicator of applied research. Results suggest, within one of the largest European research organizations an increasing competition between basic and applied research, both in human and natural sciences, due to shrinking of public research lab budgets. In particular, institutes and scientists pay more attention to applied research activities, which are capable of attracting market funds for economic survival of public research labs but this organizational behaviour reduces basic research activity in the long run. Managerial and organizational behaviour of public research organizations are also discussed. Keywords. Applied r esearch, Basic research, Public research organization, Public lab, Science policy, Organizational behaviour, Public management. JEL. B50, B59, I23, L20, L29, O33.

Medicine and ethics have increasingly more links caused by considerable progresses in biotechnology in different fields of medical diagnosis, treatment and prevention. The issue of research ethics is one of the most important subjects which have been emphasized by international and regional organizations, policy-makers, medical and religious professions, scientists and researchers in different countries in recent decade. Research ethics, as one of the main issues of modern bioethics, has attracted the interest of scientists and ethicists in various areas of science and technology around the world. Research Ethics Committees (RECs) have been established to improve putting ethics into practice in the field of research. A ‘Research Ethics Committee' (REC) is defined as a multidisciplinary, independent, body charged with reviewing research involving human participants to ensure that their dignity, rights and welfare are protected. Research ethics committees protect the welfare and rights of participants involved in research through reviewing research proposals, monitoring the conduct of research and dealing with complaints that arise from research. RECs, fortunately, have received a great deal of attention in different countries, and their mission, goals, and tasks have been described in many national and international guidelines. Ethical guidelines for biomedical research and RECs administrative regulations have been developed in Iran too. This manuscript will introduce you to the concepts underlying research ethics committees worldwide and in Iran. In this study, we present suggestions concerning course presentation and contents, which are provided by international assemblies. In view of the fact that many RECs in our country do not have specific plans for their members' primary training and continuing education, there seems to be a need for fundamental changes in the educational prerequisites for membership in this important organization. We hope the manuscript could enhance awareness of biomedical researchers about status and duties of research ethics committees and consequently strengthen the RECs in our country. Moreover, it is recommended that the Ministry of Health and Medical Education take more serious actions to establish and monitor ethics committees throughout the country. Therefore, a comparative study of ethical codes and guidelines is necessary to prevent the possible deviations in the course of research. This study is a literature review study and after reviewing the scientific literature in this field, review set of existing international codes such as Nuremberg, Helsinki, Belmont and... . The findings of this review article can help developing policymakers of codes of ethics.