Rapid detection of fast innovation under the pressure of COVID-19.

Covid-19 has rapidly redefined the agenda of technological research and development both for academics and practitioners. If the medical scientific publication system has promptly reacted to this new situation, other domains, particularly in new technologies, struggle to map what is happening in their contexts. The pandemic has created the need for a rapid detection of technological convergence phenomena, but at the same time it has made clear that this task is impossible on the basis of traditional patent and publication indicators. This paper presents a novel methodology to perform a rapid detection of the fast technological convergence phenomenon that is occurring under the pressure of the Covid-19 pandemic. The fast detection has been performed thanks to the use of a novel source: the online blogging platform Medium. We demonstrate that the hybrid structure of this social journalism platform allows a rapid detection of innovation phenomena, unlike other traditional sources. The technological convergence phenomenon has been modelled through a network-based approach, analysing the differences of networks computed during two time periods (pre and post COVID-19). The results led us to discuss the repurposing of technologies regarding "Remote Control", "Remote Working", "Health" and "Remote Learning".

Journal ratings as predictors of articles quality in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences: an analysis based on the Italian Research Evaluation Exercise.

The aim of this paper is to understand whether the probability of receiving positive peer reviews is influenced by having published in an independently assessed, high-ranking journal: we eventually interpret a positive relationship among peer evaluation and journal ranking as evidence that journal ratings are good predictors of article quality. The analysis is based on a large dataset of over 11,500 research articles published in Italy in the period 2004-2010 in the areas of architecture, arts and humanities, history and philosophy, law, sociology and political sciences. These articles received a score by a large number of externally appointed referees in the context of the Italian research assessment exercise (VQR); similarly, journal scores were assigned in a panel-based independent assessment, which involved all academic journals in which Italian scholars have published, carried out under a different procedure. The score of an article is compared with that of the journal it is published in: more specifically, we first estimate an ordered probit model, assessing the probability for a paper of receiving a higher score, the higher the score of the journal; in a second step, we concentrate on the top papers, evaluating the probability of a paper receiving an excellent score having been published in a top-rated journal. In doing so, we control for a number of characteristics of the paper and its author, including the language of publication, the scientific field and its size, the age of the author and the academic status. We add to the literature on journal classification by providing for the first time a large scale test of the robustness of expert-based classification.

Economic evaluation of HIV treatments: the I.CO.N.A. cohort study.

OBJECTIVE: To describe the changes in costs of care for HIV-positive patients in Italy after the spread of antiretroviral combination therapies (HAART). METHODS: Five thousand four hundred and twenty-two patients from the I.CO.N.A. (Italian Cohort Naive Antiretrovirals) study were followed between 1997 and 2002. Costs included antiretroviral therapies (ART), hospital admissions, prophylaxis, and main laboratory examinations. The perspective was that of the National Health Service. RESULTS: Admission costs per person-year decreased from 2148 euro in 1997 to 256 in 2002, while the average annual costs of ART increased from 2145 to 3149 euro (1997 prices). From 1997 to 1999, ART costs increased from 42.3 to 85.9% of the total, while admission costs decreased from 42.3 to 7.0% and prophylaxis from 7.3 to 1.7%. The breakdown of ART costs shows how dual therapies decreased over time in favor of HAART, falling from 26.8% in 1997 to 5.9% in 2002. Patients with fewer than five treatment switches had the lowest costs distributions over the entire observation period. CONCLUSIONS: From 1997 to 2002 inpatient costs progressively decreased in favor of antiretroviral therapy. Annual average costs per patient decreased, while total direct costs increased over time: health resources, initially concentrated on hospitalized patients were then distributed over a growing number of subjects.