This study examines the extent to which women are represented among the world's highly cited rese... more This study examines the extent to which women are represented among the world's highly cited researchers (HCRs) and explores their representation over time and across fields, regions, and countries. The study identifies 11,842 HCRs in all fields and uses Gender-API, Genderize.Io, Namsor, and the web to identify their gender. Women's share of HCRs grew from 13.1% in 2014 to 14.0% in 2021; however, the increase is slower than that of women's representation among the general population of authors. The data show that women's share of HCRs would need to increase by 100% in health and social sciences, 200% in agriculture, biology, earth, and environmental sciences, 300% in mathematics and physics, and 500% in chemistry, computer science, and engineering to close the gap with men. Women's representation among all HCRs in North America, Europe, and Oceania ranges from 15% to 18%, compared to a world average of 13.7%. Among countries with the highest number of HCRs, the gender gap is least evident in Switzerland, Brazil, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States and most noticeable in Asian countries. The study reviews factors that can be seen to influence the gender gap among HCRs and makes recommendations for improvement.
o Sibai, A. M., Rizk, A., Coutts, A. P., Monzer, G., Daoud, A., Sullivan, R., Roberts, B., Meho, ... more o Sibai, A. M., Rizk, A., Coutts, A. P., Monzer, G., Daoud, A., Sullivan, R., Roberts, B., Meho, L. I., Fouad, F. M., DeJong, J. (2019). North-South inequities in research collaboration in humanitarian and conflict contexts. The Lancet, 394(10209), 1597-1600.
Effective public health nutrition interventions are needed to curb the escalating prevalence of n... more Effective public health nutrition interventions are needed to curb the escalating prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in many Arab countries. In order to generate the scientific evidence needed for the success of these interventions, an informed research agenda should be developed. The purpose of this review is to identify gaps and opportunities for research on nutrition and NCDs among Arab countries, which is an important step towards the formulation of this research agenda. Published papers that addressed nutrition and NCDs in Arab countries between the years 2006 and 2015 were reviewed (n = 824). The main gaps identified were related to the predominance of laboratory-based studies with few cohort and intervention studies, and the small percentage of articles examining dietary patterns. While food frequency questionnaires were the main dietary assessment method used, only 35% were validated. Very few studies included children and the majority considered nutrition in isolation, excluding other environmental factors. Opportunities identified included the promising momentum in studying nutrition and NCDs among Arab countries, evidenced by an increasing number of articles published over the years, that may be guided in future nutrition research to fill the identified gaps. In addition, the higher number of articles in high-income countries coupled with the
Food loss and food waste are recognized as two of the most challenging dilemmas facing the world ... more Food loss and food waste are recognized as two of the most challenging dilemmas facing the world today with serious repercussions on food security, the environment, and global as well as regional and national economies. This is not different in the Arab countries where the food loss and food waste generated per person sometimes exceeds 210 kg per year. Literature searches indicate there is a paucity of applied studies that investigate the drivers, sources, management, quantification, policies, interventions, and initiatives to reduce food loss and food waste in the Arab world, a region with more than 400 million inhabitants. Despite the importance of the topic, only twenty-five relevant articles were identified, providing limited data on food loss and food waste generation. The studies also use sampling procedures that do not allow for generalization of results over the Arab region or even for making comparisons among studies. The review concludes that further research on food loss and food waste along the food supply chain in the Arab world is necessary with a focus on trends, causes, and social, technological, behavioral, attitudinal, and cultural drivers. Investigating environmental and economic implications along with policy development and coping strategies, as well as consumer attitudes towards waste in general and food waste in particular are also important topics to be researched, especially given the variation in cultural and religious practices across the Arab world. The generation of such information and knowledge is indispensable for taking remedial action towards mitigating the problem of food loss and food waste.
This study examines gender disparities in the world's 141 most prestigious international research... more This study examines gender disparities in the world's 141 most prestigious international research awards. I find that (a) from 2001 to 2020 these awards were received 3,445 times by 2,011 men and 262 women; (b) women's share increased from an annual average of 6% during 2001-2005 to an annual average of 19% during 2016-2020; (c) 49 of the 141 awards were not received by women during 2016-2020; and (d) when the numbers of female full professors are taken into consideration, the gender gap remains highly disproportionate in biological and life sciences, computer science, and mathematics. Overall, women would be expected to increase their share of awards by nearly 50% to achieve parity with men today. The study shows great similarities between men and women award recipients in journal articles per author, the average number of authors per article, the proportion of articles in top journals, citations per article, and participation in large research groups and international collaborations. I conclude that the gender gap in highly prestigious research awards is largely a result of demographic inertia and other factors that deserve further investigation.
Publication, hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding decisions in computer science often depend on... more Publication, hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding decisions in computer science often depend on an accurate assessment of the quality of conferences. This study reviews relevant literature and tests Scopus's CiteScore database and method for evaluating the quality of 395 conferences in the field. The study identifies 154 conferences that match the CiteScore ranges of the top quartile journals. These 154 conferences make up 30% of all 515 top quartile publication venues in computer science, confirming the notion that publishing in conference proceedings-especially top rated ones-are as important and influential as publishing in top journals. The CiteScore method as implemented here shows that it is highly effective as a benchmark to evaluate and compare publication venues in computer science. Scopus, however, needs to enhance several of its indexing practices before the CiteScore database and method can become standard tools for conference quality assessment.
Asia is projected to account for the largest proportion of the rising burden of osteoporotic frac... more Asia is projected to account for the largest proportion of the rising burden of osteoporotic fractures worldwide. Data from the Middle East is scarce. We performed a systematic review on the epidemiology of vertebral and hip osteoporotic fractures in 22 Arab League countries, using Scopus, PubMed, and Embase. We identified 67 relevant publications, 28 on hip and 39 on vertebral fractures. The mean age of patients was 70-74 years, female to male ratio 1.2:2.1. Age-standardized incidence rates, to the UN 2010 population, were 236 to 290/100,000 for women from Kuwait and Lebanon, lower in Morocco. Risk factors for hip fractures included lower BMD or BMI, taller stature, anxiolytics, and sleeping pills. Most patients were not tested nor treated. Mortality derived from retrospective studies ranged between 10 and 20% at 1 year, and between 25 and 30% at 2-3 years. Among 39 studies on vertebral fractures, 18 described prevalence of morphometric fractures. Excluding grade 1 fractures, 13.3-20.2% of women, mean age 58-74 years, had prevalent vertebral fractures, as did 10-14% of men, mean age 62-74 years. Risk factors included age, gender, smoking, multiparity, years since menopause, low BMD, bone markers, high sclerostin, low IgF1, hypovitaminosis D, abdominal aortic calcification score, and VDR polymorphisms. Vertebral fracture incidence in women from Saudi Arabia, mean age 61, was 6.2% at 5 years, including grade 1 fractures. Prospective population-based fracture registries, prevalence studies, predictive models, fracture outcomes, and fracture liaison services from Arab countries are still lacking today. They are the pillars to closing the care gap of this morbid disease.
Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on ... more Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre-including this research content-immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
Background: Mental health research output in the Arab region is increasing, yet little is known a... more Background: Mental health research output in the Arab region is increasing, yet little is known about its recent landscape. This study provides a bibliometric analysis of mental health research in all 22 Arab countries over the past decade.
Background: The scarcity of evidence-based research on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) among Syr... more Background: The scarcity of evidence-based research on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) among Syrian refugees has hampered efforts to address the high burden of these diseases in host countries. The objective of this study is to examine published research on NCDs among Syrian refugees in order to inform future research, practice, programs, and policy.. Methods: Using the scoping review framework proposed by Arksey et al., 17 different databases were searched to identify studies reporting on NCDs among Syrian refugees. The number of relevant documents found was 34, with the earliest going back to 2013-2 years after the beginning of the Syrian conflict. Results: The majority of these documents were descriptive in nature and only two studies addressed the effectiveness of interventions in the management of NCDs. No studies investigated the prevention of these diseases. Furthermore, only 7 studies addressed the host community and only one research article, conducted in Lebanon, included subjects from the host community. The increasing number of documents over the past 5 years illustrates a growing interest in studying NCDs among Syrian refugees. Examination of the papers showed high prevalence of NCDs among Syrian refugees as well as unmet healthcare needs. Conclusion: The findings of this review highlighted the dire need for further research on the burden of NCDs among Syrian refugees. Future studies should diversify research design to include interventions, address the host community in addition to the refugees, tackle prevention as well as treatment of NCDs, and explore strategies to enhance the resilience of the host country's health system while ensuring quality of care for NCDs. The increasing momentum for research found in this review presents an opportunity to fill current knowledge gaps, which could result in preventing, controlling and ultimately reducing the burden of NCDs among Syrian refugees and their host communities.
This study examines the differences between Scopus and Web of Science in the citation counting, c... more This study examines the differences between Scopus and Web of Science in the citation counting, citation ranking, and h-index of 22 top human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers from EQUATOR--a large British Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration project. Results indicate that Scopus provides significantly more coverage of HCI literature than Web of Science, primarily due to coverage of relevant ACM and IEEE peer-reviewed conference proceedings. No significant differences exist between the two databases if citations in journals only are compared. Although broader coverage of the literature does not significantly alter the relative citation ranking of individual researchers, Scopus helps distinguish between the researchers in a more nuanced fashion than Web of Science in both citation counting and h-index. Scopus also generates significantly different maps of citation networks of individual scholars than those generated by Web of Science. The study also presents a comparison of h-index scores based on Google Scholar with those based on the union of Scopus and Web of Science. The study concludes that Scopus can be used as a sole data source for citation-based research and evaluation in HCI, especially if citations in conference proceedings are sought and that h scores should be manually calculated instead of relying on system calculations.
Academic institutions, federal agencies, publishers, editors, authors, and librarians increasingl... more Academic institutions, federal agencies, publishers, editors, authors, and librarians increasingly rely on citation analysis for making hiring, promotion, tenure, funding, and/or reviewer and journal evaluation and selection decisions. The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. ISI databases (or Web of Science), however, may no longer be adequate as the only or even the main sources of citations because new databases and tools that allow citation searching are now available. Whether these new databases and tools complement or represent alternatives to Web of Science (WoS) is important to explore. Using a group of 15 library and information science faculty members as a case study, this paper examines the effects of using Scopus and Google Scholar (GS) on the citation counts and rankings of scholars as measured by WoS. The ...
... 8, nos. 1-2 55. Khashan, Hilal. ???The Labyrinth of Kurdish Self-Determination.??? The Intern... more ... 8, nos. 1-2 55. Khashan, Hilal. ???The Labyrinth of Kurdish Self-Determination.??? The International Journal of Kurdish Studies 8, nos. ... 1 (1999): 15-32. Part of a special issue on Saladin. Provides a portrait of Saladin's character as drawn by chronicler Baha' ad-Din ibn Shaddad. ...
This study examines the extent to which women are represented among the world's highly cited rese... more This study examines the extent to which women are represented among the world's highly cited researchers (HCRs) and explores their representation over time and across fields, regions, and countries. The study identifies 11,842 HCRs in all fields and uses Gender-API, Genderize.Io, Namsor, and the web to identify their gender. Women's share of HCRs grew from 13.1% in 2014 to 14.0% in 2021; however, the increase is slower than that of women's representation among the general population of authors. The data show that women's share of HCRs would need to increase by 100% in health and social sciences, 200% in agriculture, biology, earth, and environmental sciences, 300% in mathematics and physics, and 500% in chemistry, computer science, and engineering to close the gap with men. Women's representation among all HCRs in North America, Europe, and Oceania ranges from 15% to 18%, compared to a world average of 13.7%. Among countries with the highest number of HCRs, the gender gap is least evident in Switzerland, Brazil, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States and most noticeable in Asian countries. The study reviews factors that can be seen to influence the gender gap among HCRs and makes recommendations for improvement.
o Sibai, A. M., Rizk, A., Coutts, A. P., Monzer, G., Daoud, A., Sullivan, R., Roberts, B., Meho, ... more o Sibai, A. M., Rizk, A., Coutts, A. P., Monzer, G., Daoud, A., Sullivan, R., Roberts, B., Meho, L. I., Fouad, F. M., DeJong, J. (2019). North-South inequities in research collaboration in humanitarian and conflict contexts. The Lancet, 394(10209), 1597-1600.
Effective public health nutrition interventions are needed to curb the escalating prevalence of n... more Effective public health nutrition interventions are needed to curb the escalating prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in many Arab countries. In order to generate the scientific evidence needed for the success of these interventions, an informed research agenda should be developed. The purpose of this review is to identify gaps and opportunities for research on nutrition and NCDs among Arab countries, which is an important step towards the formulation of this research agenda. Published papers that addressed nutrition and NCDs in Arab countries between the years 2006 and 2015 were reviewed (n = 824). The main gaps identified were related to the predominance of laboratory-based studies with few cohort and intervention studies, and the small percentage of articles examining dietary patterns. While food frequency questionnaires were the main dietary assessment method used, only 35% were validated. Very few studies included children and the majority considered nutrition in isolation, excluding other environmental factors. Opportunities identified included the promising momentum in studying nutrition and NCDs among Arab countries, evidenced by an increasing number of articles published over the years, that may be guided in future nutrition research to fill the identified gaps. In addition, the higher number of articles in high-income countries coupled with the
Food loss and food waste are recognized as two of the most challenging dilemmas facing the world ... more Food loss and food waste are recognized as two of the most challenging dilemmas facing the world today with serious repercussions on food security, the environment, and global as well as regional and national economies. This is not different in the Arab countries where the food loss and food waste generated per person sometimes exceeds 210 kg per year. Literature searches indicate there is a paucity of applied studies that investigate the drivers, sources, management, quantification, policies, interventions, and initiatives to reduce food loss and food waste in the Arab world, a region with more than 400 million inhabitants. Despite the importance of the topic, only twenty-five relevant articles were identified, providing limited data on food loss and food waste generation. The studies also use sampling procedures that do not allow for generalization of results over the Arab region or even for making comparisons among studies. The review concludes that further research on food loss and food waste along the food supply chain in the Arab world is necessary with a focus on trends, causes, and social, technological, behavioral, attitudinal, and cultural drivers. Investigating environmental and economic implications along with policy development and coping strategies, as well as consumer attitudes towards waste in general and food waste in particular are also important topics to be researched, especially given the variation in cultural and religious practices across the Arab world. The generation of such information and knowledge is indispensable for taking remedial action towards mitigating the problem of food loss and food waste.
This study examines gender disparities in the world's 141 most prestigious international research... more This study examines gender disparities in the world's 141 most prestigious international research awards. I find that (a) from 2001 to 2020 these awards were received 3,445 times by 2,011 men and 262 women; (b) women's share increased from an annual average of 6% during 2001-2005 to an annual average of 19% during 2016-2020; (c) 49 of the 141 awards were not received by women during 2016-2020; and (d) when the numbers of female full professors are taken into consideration, the gender gap remains highly disproportionate in biological and life sciences, computer science, and mathematics. Overall, women would be expected to increase their share of awards by nearly 50% to achieve parity with men today. The study shows great similarities between men and women award recipients in journal articles per author, the average number of authors per article, the proportion of articles in top journals, citations per article, and participation in large research groups and international collaborations. I conclude that the gender gap in highly prestigious research awards is largely a result of demographic inertia and other factors that deserve further investigation.
Publication, hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding decisions in computer science often depend on... more Publication, hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding decisions in computer science often depend on an accurate assessment of the quality of conferences. This study reviews relevant literature and tests Scopus's CiteScore database and method for evaluating the quality of 395 conferences in the field. The study identifies 154 conferences that match the CiteScore ranges of the top quartile journals. These 154 conferences make up 30% of all 515 top quartile publication venues in computer science, confirming the notion that publishing in conference proceedings-especially top rated ones-are as important and influential as publishing in top journals. The CiteScore method as implemented here shows that it is highly effective as a benchmark to evaluate and compare publication venues in computer science. Scopus, however, needs to enhance several of its indexing practices before the CiteScore database and method can become standard tools for conference quality assessment.
Asia is projected to account for the largest proportion of the rising burden of osteoporotic frac... more Asia is projected to account for the largest proportion of the rising burden of osteoporotic fractures worldwide. Data from the Middle East is scarce. We performed a systematic review on the epidemiology of vertebral and hip osteoporotic fractures in 22 Arab League countries, using Scopus, PubMed, and Embase. We identified 67 relevant publications, 28 on hip and 39 on vertebral fractures. The mean age of patients was 70-74 years, female to male ratio 1.2:2.1. Age-standardized incidence rates, to the UN 2010 population, were 236 to 290/100,000 for women from Kuwait and Lebanon, lower in Morocco. Risk factors for hip fractures included lower BMD or BMI, taller stature, anxiolytics, and sleeping pills. Most patients were not tested nor treated. Mortality derived from retrospective studies ranged between 10 and 20% at 1 year, and between 25 and 30% at 2-3 years. Among 39 studies on vertebral fractures, 18 described prevalence of morphometric fractures. Excluding grade 1 fractures, 13.3-20.2% of women, mean age 58-74 years, had prevalent vertebral fractures, as did 10-14% of men, mean age 62-74 years. Risk factors included age, gender, smoking, multiparity, years since menopause, low BMD, bone markers, high sclerostin, low IgF1, hypovitaminosis D, abdominal aortic calcification score, and VDR polymorphisms. Vertebral fracture incidence in women from Saudi Arabia, mean age 61, was 6.2% at 5 years, including grade 1 fractures. Prospective population-based fracture registries, prevalence studies, predictive models, fracture outcomes, and fracture liaison services from Arab countries are still lacking today. They are the pillars to closing the care gap of this morbid disease.
Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on ... more Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre-including this research content-immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
Background: Mental health research output in the Arab region is increasing, yet little is known a... more Background: Mental health research output in the Arab region is increasing, yet little is known about its recent landscape. This study provides a bibliometric analysis of mental health research in all 22 Arab countries over the past decade.
Background: The scarcity of evidence-based research on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) among Syr... more Background: The scarcity of evidence-based research on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) among Syrian refugees has hampered efforts to address the high burden of these diseases in host countries. The objective of this study is to examine published research on NCDs among Syrian refugees in order to inform future research, practice, programs, and policy.. Methods: Using the scoping review framework proposed by Arksey et al., 17 different databases were searched to identify studies reporting on NCDs among Syrian refugees. The number of relevant documents found was 34, with the earliest going back to 2013-2 years after the beginning of the Syrian conflict. Results: The majority of these documents were descriptive in nature and only two studies addressed the effectiveness of interventions in the management of NCDs. No studies investigated the prevention of these diseases. Furthermore, only 7 studies addressed the host community and only one research article, conducted in Lebanon, included subjects from the host community. The increasing number of documents over the past 5 years illustrates a growing interest in studying NCDs among Syrian refugees. Examination of the papers showed high prevalence of NCDs among Syrian refugees as well as unmet healthcare needs. Conclusion: The findings of this review highlighted the dire need for further research on the burden of NCDs among Syrian refugees. Future studies should diversify research design to include interventions, address the host community in addition to the refugees, tackle prevention as well as treatment of NCDs, and explore strategies to enhance the resilience of the host country's health system while ensuring quality of care for NCDs. The increasing momentum for research found in this review presents an opportunity to fill current knowledge gaps, which could result in preventing, controlling and ultimately reducing the burden of NCDs among Syrian refugees and their host communities.
This study examines the differences between Scopus and Web of Science in the citation counting, c... more This study examines the differences between Scopus and Web of Science in the citation counting, citation ranking, and h-index of 22 top human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers from EQUATOR--a large British Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration project. Results indicate that Scopus provides significantly more coverage of HCI literature than Web of Science, primarily due to coverage of relevant ACM and IEEE peer-reviewed conference proceedings. No significant differences exist between the two databases if citations in journals only are compared. Although broader coverage of the literature does not significantly alter the relative citation ranking of individual researchers, Scopus helps distinguish between the researchers in a more nuanced fashion than Web of Science in both citation counting and h-index. Scopus also generates significantly different maps of citation networks of individual scholars than those generated by Web of Science. The study also presents a comparison of h-index scores based on Google Scholar with those based on the union of Scopus and Web of Science. The study concludes that Scopus can be used as a sole data source for citation-based research and evaluation in HCI, especially if citations in conference proceedings are sought and that h scores should be manually calculated instead of relying on system calculations.
Academic institutions, federal agencies, publishers, editors, authors, and librarians increasingl... more Academic institutions, federal agencies, publishers, editors, authors, and librarians increasingly rely on citation analysis for making hiring, promotion, tenure, funding, and/or reviewer and journal evaluation and selection decisions. The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. ISI databases (or Web of Science), however, may no longer be adequate as the only or even the main sources of citations because new databases and tools that allow citation searching are now available. Whether these new databases and tools complement or represent alternatives to Web of Science (WoS) is important to explore. Using a group of 15 library and information science faculty members as a case study, this paper examines the effects of using Scopus and Google Scholar (GS) on the citation counts and rankings of scholars as measured by WoS. The ...
... 8, nos. 1-2 55. Khashan, Hilal. ???The Labyrinth of Kurdish Self-Determination.??? The Intern... more ... 8, nos. 1-2 55. Khashan, Hilal. ???The Labyrinth of Kurdish Self-Determination.??? The International Journal of Kurdish Studies 8, nos. ... 1 (1999): 15-32. Part of a special issue on Saladin. Provides a portrait of Saladin's character as drawn by chronicler Baha' ad-Din ibn Shaddad. ...
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