Search results

As the Covid-19 pandemic is a global threat to health that few can fully escape, it has provided a unique opportunity to study international reactions to a common problem. Such reactions can be partly obtained from public posts to Twitter, allowing investigations of changes in interest over time. This study analysed English-language Covid-19 tweets mentioning cures, treatments, or vaccines from 1 January 2020 to 8 April 2021, seeking trends and international differences. The results have methodological limitations but show a tendency for countries with a lower human development index score to tweet more about cures, although they were a minor topic for all countries. Vaccines were discussed about as much as treatments until July 2020, when they generated more interest because of developments in Russia. The November 2020 Pfizer-BioNTech preliminary Phase 3 trials results generated an immediate and sustained sharp increase, however, followed by a continuing roughly linear increase in interest for vaccines until at least April 2021. Against this background, national deviations from the average were triggered by country-specific news about cures, treatments, or vaccines. Nevertheless, interest in vaccines in all countries increased in parallel to some extent, despite substantial international differences in national regulatory approval and availability. The results also highlight that unsubstantiated claims about alternative medicine remedies gained traction in several countries, apparently posing a threat to public health.

The social sciences, arts and humanities all address issues of general interest that may generate broad societal impacts and public discussion. Although prior research suggests that this potential is not captured by altmetrics, it is not known whether this is true for all fields. In response, this article compares 35 social sciences, arts and humanities fields for 10 Altmetric.com scores (blogs, news, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Pinterest, Wikipedia, reviews, questions, Google Plus) for articles published in 2013. Excluding Twitter (maximum 41%), no field had more than 12% of its articles registering a non-zero score on any altmetric five years after publication. In some cases, fields with relatively high levels of attention were due to self-publicity or the activities of individuals rather than public discussion. There were substantial differences between fields, with Classics and Literature & Literary Theory being almost ignored and Archeology generating a relatively high level of attention on Facebook. Although journal articles are not central to many social sciences, arts and humanities fields, the apparently universally low levels of discussion about them online is surprising given their potential audience.

Female academics are more likely to be in teaching-related roles in some countries, including the USA. As a side effect of this, female-authored journal articles may tend to be more useful for students. This study assesses this hypothesis by investigating whether female first-authored research has more uptake in education than male first-authored research. Based on an analysis of Mendeley readers of articles from 2014 in five countries and 100 narrow Scopus subject categories, the results show that female-authored articles attract more student readers than male-authored articles in Spain, Turkey, the UK and USA but not India. They also attract fewer professorial readers in Spain, the UK and the USA, but not India and Turkey, and tend to be less popular with senior academics. Because the results are based on analysis of differences within narrow fields they cannot be accounted for by females working in more education-related disciplines. The apparent additional educational impact for female-authored research could be due to selecting more accessible micro-specialisms, however, such as health-related instruments within the instrumentation narrow field. Whatever the cause, the results suggest that citation-based research evaluations may undervalue the wider impact of female researchers.

The need to elicit public opinion about predefined topics is widespread in the social sciences, government and business. Traditional survey-based methods are being partly replaced by social media data mining but their potential and limitations are poorly understood. This article investigates this issue by introducing and critically evaluating a systematic social media analytics strategy to gain insights about a topic from YouTube. The results of an investigation into sets of dance style videos show that it is possible to identify plausible patterns of subtopic difference, gender and sentiment. The analysis also points to the generic limitations of social media analytics that derive from their fundamentally exploratory multi-method nature.

At the start of 2020, Covid-19 became the most urgent threat to global public health. Uniquely in recent times, governments have imposed partly voluntary, partly compulsory restrictions on the population to slow the spread of the virus. In this context, public attitudes and behaviors are vitally important for reducing the death rate. Analyzing tweets about the disease may therefore give insights into public reactions that may help guide public information campaigns. This article analyses 3,038,026 English tweets about Covid-19 from March 10 to 23, 2020. It focuses on one relevant aspect of public reaction: gender differences. The results show that females are more likely to tweet about the virus in the context of family, social distancing and healthcare, whereas males are more likely to tweet about sports cancellations, the global spread of the virus, and political reactions. Thus, women seem to be taking a disproportionate share of the responsibility for directly keeping the population safe. The detailed results may be useful to inform public information announcements and to help understand the spread of the virus. For example, failure to impose a sporting bans whilst encouraging social distancing may send mixed messages to males.

Este estudio examina el valor educativo de 15.117 libros escritos en español y publicados por editoriales españolas en disciplinas de ciencias sociales y humanidades en el período 2002-2011, en base a las menciones que reciben desde guías docentes en línea. Se implementó un método para identificar automáticamente las menciones y filtrar los resultados. El chequeo manual de las 52.716 menciones encontradas estimó una precision del 99,5% para filtrar las menciones falsas y del 74,7% para identificar las menciones correctas. Una quinta parte de los libros (2.849; 19%) se mencionaron al menos una vez en guías académicas en línea, y casi todos ellos (95%) han sido publicados por un tercio de las editoriales incluídas en el estudio. Un análisis detallado de los 23 libros más recomendados en guías docentes mostró que la mayoría son monografías de humanidades con un solo autor, escritos originalmente en español. Las menciones procedieron de 379 dominios web, mayoritariamente de sitios web de universidades españolas. En conclusión, es posible crear indicadores a partir de las menciones en guías docentes para evaluar el valor educativo de los libros en español, aunque se requieren chequeos manuales si los valores se usan para evaluar libros individuales.

The web is important for academic communication and publishing on an international scale, but it is difficult to assess the extent to which globalization actually has occurred. This article examines the connectivity structure of links between university websites in 25 Asian and European countries as a case study of an inter-regional and intra-regional web phenomenon. The five most linked-to universities in each nation-state were selected and network analysis techniques were used. The results suggested that the UK (and to a lesser extent some other European countries) has a high impact on the formation of link-xmediated academic networks in Asia and Europe. Universities' websites in Asia are more heavily connected to European universities than linked to each other. The overall findings were indicative of globalization rather than regionalism, but a better characterization might be globalization with regional imbalances and individual high performing countries.

The Web has become an important tool for universities, and one that is employed in a variety of ways. Examples are: disseminating and publicising research findings and activities; publishing teaching and administrative information for students; and collaborating with other institutions nationally and internationally. But how effectively are Spanish universities using the Web and what information can be gained about online communication patterns through the study of Web links? This paper reports on an investigation into 64 university Web sites that were indexed using a specialist information science Web crawler and analysed using associated software. There were a wide variety of sizes for university Web sites and that universities attracted links from others broadly in proportion to their site size. The Spanish academic Web was found to lag behind those of the four countries that it was compared to. However, the most commonly targeted top-level Internet domains were from non-Spanish speaking high Web using countries around the world, showing a broad international perspective and high degree of multilingualism for Web authors. The most highly targeted pages were mainly those that attracted automatically generated links, but several government ministries were a surprise inclusion. ; La web se ha convertido en una importante herramienta para las universidades, donde se utiliza en una amplia variedad de formas, tales como publicar y diseminar actividades y resultados de investigación, proporcionar información administrativa y académica de interés para los estudiantes o facilitar la colaboración con otras instituciones nacionales e internacionales. Pero, ¿cómo están realmente utilizando la Web las universidades españolas y qué información se puede obtener sobre sus modos de comunicación en línea a través del estudio de los enlaces web?. Para obtener respuestas se han investigado 64 sedes Web de universidades utilizando un robot especializado, analizando posteriormente los datos obtenidos. Existe una gran variedad en ...

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- Big Data: The Oil of the New Tourism Economy -- Scope and Structure of the Book -- Content of the Book -- 1 Composite Indicators for Measuring the Online Search Interest by a Tourist Destination -- 1.1 Introduction -- 1.2 Literature Review -- 1.2.1 Tourism and Statistical Information -- 1.2.2 Consumer Behaviour in Tourism, the Internet and Google Trends -- 1.2.3 Indicators and Web Analytics Strategy -- 1.3 Methodology -- 1.3.1 Theoretical Framework -- 1.3.2 Selection of Primary Indicators -- 1.3.3 Selection of Search Terms and Geographical Locations in GT -- 1.3.4 Transformation, Weighting and Aggregation of Primary Indicators -- 1.3.5 Data Collection from GT -- 1.3.6 Validation and Reliability of Indicators -- 1.4 Results -- 1.4.1 Search Interest of Foreign Markets for Tourism in Portugal -- 1.4.2 Validation and Reliability of Composite Indicators -- 1.5 Discussion -- 1.6 Conclusion -- References -- 2 Developing Smart Tourism Destinations with the Internet of Things -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 Big Data and Smart Connectivity -- 2.3 The Internet of Things for Tourism -- 2.4 Summary -- References -- 3 Big Data in Online Travel Agencies and Its Application Through Electronic Devices -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 Theoretical Framework -- 3.3 Methodology -- 3.4 Results -- 3.4.1 OTA Webpage -- 3.4.2 Registration -- 3.4.3 Filters -- 3.4.4 Hotels Offered in the Search Results -- 3.4.5 Booking Process -- 3.4.6 Customer Experience -- 3.5 Big Data Challenges in OTAs -- 3.6 Discussion -- 3.7 Conclusions -- References -- 4 Big Data for Measuring the Impact of Tourism Economic Development Programmes: A Process and Quality Criteria Framework for Using Big Data -- 4.1 Introduction -- 4.2 Economic Development Agencies: Functions, Information Needs and Measurement Trends -- 4.2.1 Functions.

Lexical combinations of at least two roots around "carbon" as the hub, such as "carbon finance" or "carbon footprint," have recently become ubiquitous in English-speaking science, politics, and mass media. They are part of a new language evolving around the issue of climate change that can reveal how it is framed by various stakeholders. In this article, the authors study the role of these "carbon compounds" as tools of communication in different online discourses on climate change mitigation. By combining a quantitative analysis of their occurrences with a qualitative analysis of the contexts in which the compounds were used, the authors identify three clusters of compounds focused on finance, lifestyle, and attitudes and elucidate the communicative purposes to which they were put between the 1990s and the early 21st century. This approach may open up new ways of analyzing the framings of climate change mitigation initiatives in the public sphere.