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An Expert System for the Priorities Formation in Sustainable Development Fundamental Research
Abstract
Determining the priorities for sustainable development involves critical problems identifying, the conditions creating necessary for successfully solving such problems, and identifying a set of methods and tools to ensure that these conditions are met. The existing quantitative approaches to the priorities definition do not consider the problems of resource provision of scientific priorities. The developed expert system makes it possible to use effectively multilevel information-logical structures for the systematic analysis of scientific priorities according to many criteria. It allows ensuring the transition from research goals to methods of achieving these goals, the choice of specific means and the development of the necessary research methodology.
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Ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) includes a set of natural capital-based measures to adapt to climate change. UN Environment has called for measuring EbA costs and benefits before promoting the adoption of such a policy. Within such policy input, the paper objective is twofold. It first performs a critical survey of economic and valuation studies that measure the costs and benefits of undertaking EBA measures. It then proposes an integrated valuation approach, based on a set of 54 economic indicators that include ecological aspects and encompass the technical, financial and academic difficulties to perform thorough cost-benefit exercises, by providing policymakers with simple, though rigorous evidence.
Global scientific production around the Covid-19 pandemic, in the various disciplines on the various international scientific bibliographic databases, has grown exponentially. The latter builds a source of scientific enrichment and an important lever for most researchers around the world, each of its field and its position with an ultimate aim of overcoming this pandemic. In this direction, bibliometric data constitute a fundamental source in the process of evaluation of scientific production in the academic world; bibliometrics provides researchers and institutions with crucial strategic information for the enhancement of their research results with the local and international scientific community, especially in this international pandemic.
How to evaluate innovations, especially in the beginning of new product development, is a question constantly posed by academics, managers, and policymakers. One reason for this is that improved front-end decisions greatly affect company performance. To find the answers to this question, this review article analyzes scientific publications on innovation indicators published between 1980 and 2015. The objective of this article is to increase the understanding of the indicator landscape and to complement the various stages of the innovation process with relevant indicators. In doing so, this study categorizes the identified indicators into company-specific and contextual dimensions. Furthermore, this study analyzes the indicators in terms of their potential for ex-ante and ex-post evaluation and investigates the characteristics of relevant publications. The analysis finds that more process rather than product indicators exist in the literature. Current publications emphasize qualitative and indirect indicators but neglect indicators for the early stages of the innovation process. The review identifies 82 unique indicators to evaluate innovations including 26 indicators for the early stages. The results can help managers, researchers, and policymakers to better understand the innovation process and the indicator landscape. However, more concrete indicators are needed to improve front-end innovation decisions.
In this paper, we analyze the compelling issue of monetary valuation of a scientific publication. While many academic scholars tend to overlook the topic, as being either too difficult or even meaningless, policymakers begin to use very rough tools for evaluating publications, which have many limitations, as we will discuss in this work. The main objective of this work is to address this open problem by stimulating further discussion on the topic and future research developments. We provide an overview of different methods to value scientific publications. We discuss their main hypotheses, pros and cons by means of an illustration based on Sapienza University of Rome. Although we begin to address the issue of monetary valuation of scientific publications, presenting a range of available methods and listing the limits and benefits of each, further methodological and empirical research is still needed to comply with policy and stakeholders' needs which we expect will increase in the near future.
Open innovation (OI) has received considerable attention since its introduction and has positive and negative characteristics. To offer an overview for future research, this article produces a comprehensive review by combining bibliometric analysis and content analysis. A total of 4,463 journal articles and 3,061 conference papers on OI were extracted from Web of Science (WOS). The synthesized networks were constructed and visualized through CiteSpace software to aid analytical studies. After the descriptive bibliometric analysis of all publications, a content analysis of 213 articles was carried out to develop the conceptual framework of OI. The results reveal that OI still confined itself to limited disciplines and innovation-centric journals but is beginning to put more effort into becoming a more open ecosystem by influencing other disciplines. We also find some gaps in the extant research and provide some research directions in the OI field: empirical studies in various contexts could enrich the external validity of OI, other theoretical perspectives could provide novel views, and OI is on its way to becoming mature but has a long way to go.
An ongoing interest in innovation studies is to understand how knowledge generated from scientific research can be used in the development of technologies. While previous inquiries have devoted to studying the scientific capacity of technologies and institutional factors facilitating technology transfer, little is known about the intrinsic characteristics of scientific publications that gain direct technological impact. Here we focus on two features, namely basicness and novelty. Using a corpus of 3.8 million papers published between 1980 and 1999, we find that basic science papers and novel papers are substantially more likely to achieve direct technological impact. Further analysis that limits to papers with technological impact reveals that basic science and novel science have more patent citations, experience shorter time lag, and have impact in broader technological fields.
Massive exploitation of freshwater systems for hydropower generation in developing countries is challenging sustainability due to cumulative environmental impacts in regions with high endemism. Habitat fragmentation is recognized as a major impact on river ecosystems. The nature and magnitude of connectivity loss depend on characteristics of the hydropower projects, and of the threatened fish communities. In areas where appropriate mitigation technology is lacking, there is a need to identify the fish species that are most at risk to better concentrate efforts. This paper aimed to set conservation priorities for sustainable hydropower development by analyzing native fish species and project characteristics. The Chilean ichthyogeographic province, an ecoregion with high endemism and massive hydropower projects development, has been considered as a case study. By using overlapping information on the characteristics of 1124 hydropower projects and distribution of native fish species, we identified three project categories of projects based on their need for mitigation. These were projects where mitigation was considered: a) not required (15%), b) required and feasible (35%), and c) required but challenging (50%). Projects where mitigation was not required were located at sites where native fish were absent and/or where water intakes allowed fish to pass. Interestingly, projects where mitigation was feasible were inhabited by a species assemblage that comprised the genus Trichomycterus, Diplomystes and Percilia, and the species Ch. pisciculus and B. maldonadoi. This finding emphasises the need to develop a multispecific fishway that can accommodate this group. Projects where mitigation would be difficult to achieve were located at sites with a variety of different assemblages, thus making a standard fish pass solution challenging and site-specific. This study advances understanding for the need to develop mitigation strategies and technologies in ecoregions of high endemism threatened by hydropower and to prioritize the construction of planned projects.
Purpose:
The purpose of this study is to examine the previous and the current efforts and the priorities of sustainability initiatives in the public sector.
Design/methodology/approach:
This study has been conducted in one industry, overcoming contextual bias as a judgmental sampling was used to select the public hospitals that were studied. Only knowledgeable key informants were approached and used.
Findings:
The examination of the previous and the current efforts and the priorities of the sustainability initiatives revealed in this study indicate the existence of different trends in the public hospitals studied.
Research limitations/implications:
The results report the key trends that were disclosed in the public hospitals studied in their efforts towards sustainability. In particular, the results show that there appears to be a lack of guidelines and homogeneity in sustainability planning in public hospitals in Spain, accompanied by the near universal absence of the evaluation phase in respect to the outcomes of the sustainability initiatives that have been put in place in these organizations.
Managerial implications:
The multi-dimensional factors of sustainability initiatives provide managerial guidance to assess the previous and the current efforts and priorities. These factors also provide organizational guidance to assess the trends of an organization through time.
Originality/value:
This study contributes to a selection of factors regarding the previous and the current efforts and the priorities of sustainability initiatives applicable in public hospitals. It provides a multi-dimensional framework of factors that can be used in order to describe sustainability trends.
We propose an alternative firm-level measure for innovation activities—R&D elasticity—and we analyse its effects on the Tobin's Q of listed companies on the Euronext 100 Index. We find that R&D elasticity is positively related to market appreciation by stakeholder investors. Moreover, we analyse the role of default risk in the relationship between innovation activities and market value, and find that firms' default probabilities are negatively related to Tobin's Q. These findings are supported by OLS regressions, wherein Tobin's Q is regressed on R&D elasticity, five-year default probability, and controls such as ESG voluntary disclosure. These results further the research aimed at developing a conceptual framework for integrating at a policy level the R&D elasticity indicator as a type of innovation disclosure among the non-financial disclosures released by companies.
Background
With the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) the 196 member countries have agreed that organisms and their derivatives are the property of the country of their origin (CBD Art.3, Art 15). While the spirit of the CBD is generally acknowledged, the ownership causes considerable problems, last not least for research which by the CBD is considered as “use of genetic (=biological) resources” (GR). Such resources include all kinds of material which might contain functional genetic units while the derivatives consist of other materials of biological origin.
Hypothesis
Recently, many member countries claim the right of disposal also for digital sequence information about their GR. The Nagoya Protocol (NP) to the CBD regulates access to GR in exchange for sharing benefits arising from their use. Although the main focus of the NP is on “Research and Development” for commercial purposes, many of the issues and regulations apply also to basic, non-profit oriented biodiversity research.
Results
According to the NP (Art. 8a), simplified access to GR shall be granted by the provider countries for non-commercial biodiversity research, and a simple research permit may thus be sufficient for research projects not requiring transfer of GR. Nevertheless, there is not yet consensus about the interpretation of the terms “simplified measures” and “basic, academic, non-profit research”. Thus negotiations about access to GR for basic research are still an ad-hoc issue at the discretion of a country's relevant authority, termed “Focal Point”. Because basic research is mostly financed by public money, compliance of the researcher with the international regulations is of public interest, and in the EU, additional regulations shall make this sure on the part of the researcher by an obligatory declaration of “due diligence”.
Conclusion
Apart from all legal uncertainties on both sides the provider country and the researcher, respect of legal commitments and mutual trust are indispensable for overcoming ABS-difficulties in basic research.
This paper constructs a trade and growth model with firm heterogeneity, and basic and applied (technological) researches. It considers R&D activities of basic science conducted by the government using asset income tax and applied technology conducted by profit-maximizing firms to re-analyze the effect of trade liberalization on growth and welfare. It shows that trade liberalization elevates the growth rate, if the population size is small in an exogenous international spillover and endogenous growth model with firm heterogeneity. Moreover, it shows that the same condition is sufficient for welfare gain through further exposure to trade.
Chromosomes are the vehicles of genes, which are the functional units of a cell's nucleus. In humans, there are more than 20,000 genes that are distributed among 46 chromosomes in somatic cells. The study of chromosome structure and function is known as cytogenetics which is historically a field of hybrid science encompassing cytology and genetics. The field of cytogenetics has undergone rapid developments over the last several decades from classical Giemsa staining of chromosomes to 3-dimensional spatial organization of chromosomes with a high resolution mapping of gene structure at the nucleotide level. Improved molecular cytogenetic techniques have opened up exciting possibilities for understanding the chromosomal/molecular basis of various human diseases including cancer and tissue degeneration. This review summaries the history and evolution of various cytogenetic techniques and their current and future applications in diverse areas of basic research and medical diagnostics.
Bibliometric methods for the analysis of highly specialized subjects are increasingly investigated and debated. Information and assessments well-focused at the specialty level can help make important decisions in research and innovation policy. This paper presents a novel method to approximate the specialty to which a given publication record belongs. The method partially combines sets of key values for four publication data fields: source, title, authors and references. The approach is founded in concepts defining research disciplines and scholarly communication, and in empirically observed regularities in publication data. The resulting specialty approximation consists of publications associated to the investigated publication record via key values for at least three of the four data fields. This paper describes the method and illustrates it with an application to publication records of individual scientists. The illustration also successfully tests the focus of the specialty approximation in terms of its ability to connect and help identify peers. Potential tracks for further investigation include analyses involving other kinds of specialized publication records, studies for a broader range of specialties, and exploration of the potential for diverse applications in research and research policy context.