Bibliometric analysis with reference publication year spectroscopy showed how key programmes drove developmental care in newborn infants.

AIM: We investigated the historical origins of developmental care for newborn infants using Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS), an innovative method of bibliometric analysis. METHODS: A Web of Science search query that combined infant and intervention-related synonyms was performed on 2 February 2022. RPYS analysis was performed on this dataset to identify the most referenced historical publications for developmental care in newborn infants. Median deviation analysis identified the peak publication years, including the most cited historical references. Landmark publications were defined as those belonging to the top 10% of the most frequently referenced publications for at least 20 years. RESULTS: The RPYS peaks showed an early phase (1936-1986), during which infant development was studied and analysed, leading to a conceptualisation of developmental care for newborn infants. The following years (1987-2020), showed an explosion of interest in developmental care and highlighted two main programmes. The Neonatal Individualized Developmental Care Assessment Program (NIDCAP) and the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) inspired numerous publications during those years, which strove to demonstrate evidence of their clinical benefits. CONCLUSION: Developmental care has become increasingly important, thanks to the implementation of NIDCAP and IHDP.

Mapping Maternal Health in the New Media Environment: A Scientometric Analysis.

BACKGROUND: The new media provides a convenient platform to access, use and exchange health information. And as a special group of health care, maternal health care is still of international concern due to their high mortality rate. Scientific research is a good way to provide advice on how to improve maternal health through stringent reasoning and accurate data. However, the dramatic increase of publications, the diversity of themes, and the dispersion of researchers may reduce the quality of information and increase the difficulty of selection. Thus, this study aims to analyze the research progress on maternal health under the global new media environment, exploring the current research hotspots and frontiers. METHODS: A scientometric analysis was carried out by CiteSpace5.7.R1. In total, 2270 articles have been further analyzed to explore top countries and institutions, potential articles, research frontiers, and hotspots. RESULTS: The publications ascended markedly, from 29 in 2008 to 472 publications by 2020. But there is still a lot of room to grow, and the growth rate does not conform to the Price's Law. Research centers concentrated in Latin America, such as the University of Toronto and the University of California. The work of Larsson M, Lagan BM and Tiedje L had high potential influence. Most of the research subjects were maternal and newborn babies, and the research frontiers were distributed in health education and psychological problems. Maternal mental health, nutrition, weight, production technology, and equipment were seemingly hotspots. CONCLUSION: The new media has almost brought a new era for maternal health, mainly characterized by psychological qualities, healthy and reasonable physical conditions and advanced technology.

How vague is vague? How informative is informative? Reference analysis for Bayesian meta-analysis.

Meta-analysis provides important insights for evidence-based medicine by synthesizing evidence from multiple studies which address the same research question. Within the Bayesian framework, meta-analysis is frequently expressed by a Bayesian normal-normal hierarchical model (NNHM). Recently, several publications have discussed the choice of the prior distribution for the between-study heterogeneity in the Bayesian NNHM and used several "vague" priors. However, no approach exists to quantify the informativeness of such priors, and thus, we develop a principled reference analysis framework for the Bayesian NNHM acting at the posterior level. The posterior reference analysis (post-RA) is based on two posterior benchmarks: one induced by the improper reference prior, which is minimally informative for the data, and the other induced by a highly anticonservative proper prior. This approach applies the Hellinger distance to quantify the informativeness of a heterogeneity prior of interest by comparing the corresponding marginal posteriors with both posterior benchmarks. The post-RA is implemented in the freely accessible R package ra4bayesmeta and is applied to two medical case studies. Our findings show that anticonservative heterogeneity priors produce platykurtic posteriors compared with the reference posterior, and they produce shorter 95% credible intervals (CrI) and optimistic inference compared with the reference prior. Conservative heterogeneity priors produce leptokurtic posteriors, longer 95% CrI and cautious inference. The novel post-RA framework could support numerous Bayesian meta-analyses in many research fields, as it determines how informative a heterogeneity prior is for the actual data as compared with the minimally informative reference prior.

Compositional Analyses Reveal Relationships among Components of Blue Maize Grains.

One aim of this experiment was to develop NIR calibrations for 20-grain components in 143 pigmented maize samples evaluated in four locations across New Mexico during 2013 and 2014. Based on reference analysis, prediction models were developed using principal component regression (PCR) and partial least squares (PLS). The predictive ability of calibrations was generally low, with the calibrations for methionine and glycine performing best by PCR and PLS. The second aim was to explore the relationships among grain constituents. In PCA, the first three PCs explained 49.62, 22.20, and 6.92% of the total variance and tend to align with nitrogen-containing compounds (amino acids), carbon-rich compounds (starch, anthocyanin, fiber, and fat), and sulfur-containing compounds (cysteine and methionine), respectively. Correlations among traits were identified, and these relationships were illustrated by a correlation network. Some relationships among components were driven by common synthetic origins, for example, among amino acids derived from pyruvate. Similarly, anthocyanins, crude fat, and fatty acids all share malonyl CoA in their biosynthetic pathways and were correlated. In contrast, crude fiber and starch have similar biosynthetic origins but were negatively correlated, and this may have been due to their different functional roles in structure and energy storage, respectively.

Bibliometric analysis of global research on the rehabilitation of spinal cord injury in the past two decades.

PURPOSE: We aimed to build a model to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate publications of research of spinal cord injury rehabilitation from 1997 to 2016. METHODS: Data were obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection on October 6, 2017. We conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of publication outputs, journals, authors, institutions, countries, cited references, keywords, and terms by bibliometric methods and bibliometric software packages. RESULTS: We identified 5,607 publications on rehabilitation of spinal cord injury from 1997 to 2016, and found that the annual publication rate increased with time. The Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation published the largest number of literature, the most active country was USA, the most active institution was University of Washington, and Post MWM was the leading author. Keyword analysis indicated that life satisfaction, muscle strength, wheelchair training, walking, gait, and others were the hot spots of these research studies, whereas classification, exoskeleton, plasticity, and old adult were research frontiers. CONCLUSION: This bibliometric study revealed that research on rehabilitation of spinal cord injury is a well-developed and promising research field. Global scientific research cooperation is close. However, higher quality research is needed. Our findings provide valuable information for researchers to identify better perspectives and develop the future research direction.

Change of perspective: bibliometrics from the point of view of cited references-a literature overview on approaches to the evaluation of cited references in bibliometrics.

Citation analyses normally investigate the number of citations of publications (e.g. by people, institutions or journals) where the information on times cited from the bibliographic databases (such as Scopus or Web of Science) is evaluated. But in recent years, a series of works have also been published which have undertaken a change of perspective and are based on the evaluation of the cited references. The cited references are the works cited in the publications which are used to calculate the times cited. Since these evaluations have led to important insights into science and into scientometric indicators, this paper presents an overview of methods based on cited references, and examples of some empirical results from studies are presented. Thus, the investigation of references allows general statements to be made on the precision of citation analyses, and offers alternatives for the normalization of citation numbers in the framework of research evaluation using citation impact. Via the analysis of references, the historical roots of research areas or the works of decisive importance in an area can be determined. References allow quantitative statements on the interdisciplinarity of research units and the overall growth of science. The use of a selection for the analysis of references from the publications of specific research areas enables the possibility of measuring citation impact target-oriented (i.e. limited to these areas). As some empirical studies have shown, the identification of publications with a high creative content seems possible via the analysis of the cited references. The possibilities presented here for cited reference analysis indicate the great potential of the data source. We assume that there are additional possibilities for its application in scientometrics.