Snapshot Survey of the Presence of Perfluoroalkyl Substances in Products, Articles, and the Environment in Ecuador

The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants(POPs)is a legally binding instrument for 186 Parties(status:April 2023).Accordingly,among other responsibilities,countries are obliged to report the production,import,or export of the POPs listed in Annexes A,B,or C;provide information to registers;maintain inventories;and monitor the presence of POPs in the environment.In the broader context of international chemicals and waste management,producer responsibilities,harmonized reporting,and compliance with national and international regulations,Ecuador has addressed the newly listed group of perfluorinated alkyl substances(PFAS)in its national implementation plan and sent selected products from its national market for PFAS analysis.The products analyzed came from the initially listed fields of specific exemptions and acceptable purposes,including:fire-fighting foams;photographic aids;greasers/degreasers;various kinds of paper/packaging;textiles;and leather,coatings,cleaners,metal plating,and pesticides.Our results showed that the three PFAS presently listed in the Stockholm Convention could be quantified in only a few samples;additional PFAS,not yet listed in the Convention also had low detection frequencies.Although the number of samples was limited,the samples covered a large spectrum of sample matrices,making it possible to conclude that—once these products become waste and are regulated under the Basel Convention—they would not constitute a disposal problem.Nevertheless,verification of the presence of PFAS in products on the market is expected to pose an analytical challenge for both,developed and developing countries.

An Expert System to Detect Political Arabic Articles Orientation Using CatBoost Classifier Boosted by Multi-Level Features

The number of blogs and other forms of opinionated online content has increased dramatically in recent years.Many fields,including academia and national security,place an emphasis on automated political article orientation detection.Political articles(especially in the Arab world)are different from other articles due to their subjectivity,in which the author’s beliefs and political affiliation might have a significant influence on a political article.With categories representing the main political ideologies,this problem may be thought of as a subset of the text categorization(classification).In general,the performance of machine learning models for text classification is sensitive to hyperparameter settings.Furthermore,the feature vector used to represent a document must capture,to some extent,the complex semantics of natural language.To this end,this paper presents an intelligent system to detect political Arabic article orientation that adapts the categorical boosting(CatBoost)method combined with a multi-level feature concept.Extracting features at multiple levels can enhance the model’s ability to discriminate between different classes or patterns.Each level may capture different aspects of the input data,contributing to a more comprehensive representation.CatBoost,a robust and efficient gradient-boosting algorithm,is utilized to effectively learn and predict the complex relationships between these features and the political orientation labels associated with the articles.A dataset of political Arabic texts collected from diverse sources,including postings and articles,is used to assess the suggested technique.Conservative,reform,and revolutionary are the three subcategories of these opinions.The results of this study demonstrate that compared to other frequently used machine learning models for text classification,the CatBoost method using multi-level features performs better with an accuracy of 98.14%.

Corrigendum regarding missing informed consents in previously published articles

The publisher would like to draw the reader's attention to the following errors.Informed consents were not included in the published version of the following articles that appeared in previous issues of Grain&Oil Science and Technology.The authors were contacted after publication to request informed consents for the following articles.The appropriate informed consents,provided by the authors,are included below.

An explorative study on document type assignment of review articles in Web of Science,Scopus and journals’websites

Purpose:Accurately assigning the document type of review articles in citation index databases like Web of Science(WoS)and Scopus is important.This study aims to investigate the document type assignation of review articles in Web of Science,Scopus and Publisher’s websites on a large scale.Design/methodology/approach:27,616 papers from 160 journals from 10 review journal series indexed in SCI are analyzed.The document types of these papers labeled on journals’websites,and assigned by WoS and Scopus are retrieved and compared to determine the assigning accuracy and identify the possible reasons for wrongly assigning.For the document type labeled on the website,we further differentiate them into explicit review and implicit review based on whether the website directly indicates it is a review or not.Findings:Overall,WoS and Scopus performed similarly,with an average precision of about 99% and recall of about 80%.However,there were some differences between WoS and Scopus across different journal series and within the same journal series.The assigning accuracy of WoS and Scopus for implicit reviews dropped significantly,especially for Scopus.Research limitations:The document types we used as the gold standard were based on the journal websites’labeling which were not manually validated one by one.We only studied the labeling performance for review articles published during 2017-2018 in review journals.Whether this conclusion can be extended to review articles published in non-review journals and most current situation is not very clear.Practical implications:This study provides a reference for the accuracy of document type assigning of review articles in WoS and Scopus,and the identified pattern for assigning implicit reviews may be helpful to better labeling on websites,WoS and Scopus.Originality/value:This study investigated the assigning accuracy of document type of reviews and identified the some patterns of wrong assignments.

Topic Models to Analyze Disaster-Related Newspaper Articles: Focusing on COVID-19

Major media outlets have run many articles on the COVID-19 pandemic.Since the public suffers cognitive and emotional effects related to COVID-19 from such reports,we analyzed and reviewed the topics of news reports.We searched newspaper articles with the term‘COVID-19’term in four Korean daily newspapers from January 20,2020,when thefirst patient in Korea was found,to June 15,2020.Topic modeling analysis was conducted through text mining using R.Five themes were found:“Changes in people’s everyday life,”“Socio-economic shock,”“Trends in infection,”“Role of the government and business,”and“Increased psychological anxiety,”which all showed sharp increases in articles from mid-February to early March and then decreased.Despite the increased psychological anxiety people suffered from the COVID-19 pandemic,this topic showed the fewest articles.“Changes in people’s everyday life”showed the most,focusing attention on stimulating lifestyle articles of general interest.Since the COVID-19 pandemic can lead to mental health problems due to severe changes and isolation in everyday life,a comprehensive response to the news focusing on the impact on the mental health of the population around the world should be made.

Fuzzy Words Distribution in Management Science Research Articles

By using ZHANG Qiao＇s method for identifying fuzzy words （1998）, the present paper makes a statistic analysis of fuzzy words appearing in about 43,000 words of 6 academic research articles in management science. A distribution curve of fuzzy words in management research articles is drawn in accordance with the structures of the articles, and it is proved to be reasonable for tile discourse function of each section. Furthermore, the fuzzy words are divided into three categories and eleven sub-categories, including Category Ⅰ-fuzzy words, Category Ⅱ-fuzzy words＋non-fuzzy part / non-fuzzy part＋fuzzy words, Category Ⅲ-approximators＋fuzzy words. Distribution of fuzzy words varies in different sections of research articles in management science, because of different communicative purposes or discourse functions. Introduction section and Conclusion section have a higher occurrence rate of fuzzy words than Abstract section and Methodology and Data section.

An Empirical Study on Academic Writing of Applied Linguistics Articles

It has been suggested that Swales’create-a-research-space(CARS)model has had a tremendous influence on genre analysis in EAP and ESP and on the teaching of academic writing aiming at both L1 students or NNS students.In this essay,five RAs from TESOL Quarterly published from 1999 to 2001 will be analysed.The papers were selected because they were close in time and they had clearly defined and labelled introduction and conclusion sections.Based on CARS model,the paper will focus on structure of introductions and examine the link between introductions and conclusions by analysing the structure of conclusions.

Reporting Verbs in Agricultural Science Research Articles

Selection of an appropriate reporting verb and its tense & voice in a particular context is one of the best ways for the writer to present his work appropriately and to communicate effectively with others in the academic community.Previous studies on reporting verbs varied from sample to discipline,however,to my knowledge,no study has specifically addressed the question of whether there is tense and voice variation of reporting verbs in research articles in Introduction and Discussion in agricultural context.The present study is an attempt to investigate the tense and voice variation of reporting verbs and looks for explanations based on 30 agricultural science research articles.Results showed that no predominant tense choice was found in Introduction while simple past tense and present perfect tense were two tense preferences in Discussion.Active voice was found to be predominant in Introduction whereas passive voice was found to be predominant in Discussion.

Bibliometric analysis of top 100 cited articles in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease research

AIM To identify and assess the research situation of top 100 cited articles in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease(NAFl D).METHODS The global scientific research articles in the science Citation Index-Expanded relevant to NAFl D were retrieved and listed according to their citation times from the most to the least. The 100 most frequently cited original articles were selected to systematically evaluate their bibliometric parameters including times cited, publication year, journals, subject categories, and the highly related concepts of NAFl D, which reflected the history and current situation, publication distribution of leading countries and institutes as well as the research hotspots of NAFl D.RESULTS Top 100 cited articles in NAFl D were published from 1965 to 2015 with a citation ranging of 227 to 2151 times since publication, in which the United states was the most predominant country and Mayo Clin was the most productive institution. The majority of the top 100 cited articles were concentrated in s CI subject category of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. Hepatology and Gastroenterology is the top journal that published over half 100 top-cited articles. The significant peak of top cited articles present in the first half of the 2000 s while the highest mean number of citation presents in first half of the 1980 s. In addition, concepts related to pathology characteristics, epidemiology and medicalization, metabolic syndrome and its combination of symptoms including insulin resistance, biomarkersof lipid metabolism and obesity are listed as the highly related concepts.CONCLUSION The 100 top-cited articles marked with the leading countries, institutions, journals, hotspots and development trend in NAFl D field that could provide the foundation for further investigations.

Journal of Natural Gas Chemistrv thanks the authors of our most cited articles

According to the Thomson Reuter report on 28 June 2012, the 2011 Impact Factor of Journal of Natural Gas Chemistry is 1.348, which ranks first among chemistry journals in China. We would like to express our appreciation to all the authors who have contributed their good work to the Journal. The following is the list of the articles published in 2009 and 2010 which received the most citations and thus contributed the most to the new impact factor.

Contrastive thematic analysis in research articles

Based on the theory of thematic complexity, a contrastive analysis on 2 sections selected from research articles-method and discussion, was conducted. The differences and similarities between the 2 sections in simple theme, multiple theme, textual theme, interpersonal theme, topical theme and thematic progression were analyzed and concluded. The author believes that the causes of the differences and similarities are the different genre features of the 2 sections and the academic features of the materials selected.

Preface to the Special Issue “ISSPIC XIX: International Symposium on Small Particles and Inorganic Clusters 2018”

This Special Issue serves as the proceedings for the 19th International Symposium on Small Particles and In- organic Clusters (ISSPIC XIX), held in Hangzhou, China from August 12-17, 2018. All the articles represent orig- inal research and are peer-reviewed.

Latest data on articles from Neural Regeneration Research (NRR) indexed by SCI,Chemical Abstracts (CA) and Excerpta Medica (EM)

NRR retrieved articles indexed by SCI, CA and EM at the beginning of March, 2008. The most recent data are as follows：

Articles collection published in Neural Regeneration Research 2011

Neural Regeneration Research （NRR, ISSN 1675-5374, CN11-5422/R）, an English language journal published in China every ten days, is dedicated to presenting peer-reviewed, evidenced based scholarly research in neuroregeneration, including neural stem cells, nerve tissue engineering, gene therapy, and traditional Chinese medicine.

Highly Recommended Articles

We invite you tosubmit your next paper at https://mc03.manuscrptentral.com/cbm Epidemiology of ovariancancer:areview Brett MReid,Jennifer BPermuth,Thomas A SellersColorectalcancer carcinogenesis:areview of mechanisms Kanwal Tariq,Kulsoom Ghias Programmed cell death ligand-1(PD-L1)expressionbv immunohistochemistry:could it be predictive and/or prognostic innon-small celllung cancer?