Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Science”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 991 records · Page 55Linked to original sources

Behavioral and social sciences theories and models: are they used in unintentional injury prevention research?

Behavioral and social sciences theories and models have the potential to enhance efforts to reduce unintentional injuries. The authors reviewed the published literature on behavioral and social science theory applications to unintentional injury problems to enumerate and categorize the ways different theories and models are used in injury prevention research. The authors conducted a systematic review to evaluate the published literature from 1980 to 2001 on behavioral and social science theory applications to unintentional injury prevention and control. Electronic database searches in PubMed and PsycINFO identified articles that combined behavioral and social sciences theories and models and injury causes. The authors identified some articles that examined behavioral and social science theories and models and unintentional injury topics, but found that several important theories have never been applied to unintentional injury prevention. Among the articles identified, the PRECEDE PROCEED Model was cited most frequently, followed by the Theory of Reasoned Action/Theory of Planned Behavior and Health Belief Model. When behavioral and social sciences theories and models were applied to unintentional injury topics, they were most frequently used to guide program design, implementation or develop evaluation measures; few examples of theory testing were found. Results suggest that the use of behavioral and social sciences theories and models in unintentional injury prevention research is only marginally represented in the mainstream, peer-reviewed literature. Both the fields of injury prevention and behavioral and social sciences could benefit from greater collaborative research to enhance behavioral approaches to injury control.

Accident Prevention↗

Science at a crossroads.

Science is entering an alliance with the economy that will speed the effect of innovation through society. Despite the slowdown of the 'new economy', a cascade paradigm of innovation appears key to increasing the rate of economic growth. Yet for science to continue to thrive and make this contribution to innovation, it must traverse at least three key crossroads. First, while life sciences have built a strong advocacy model to secure growing federal research funding, the physical sciences (including mathematics and engineering) have not and must now do so to thrive. Second, the drop in the numbers of physical scientists and engineers must be reversed if we are to have the talent to maintain a strong trend of scientific advance. Third, although science advances are increasingly interdisciplinary and occurring in the space between the historic science stovepipes, the organization of federal science support is largely unchanged since the beginning of the cold war. While a decentralized model has value, we must also consider new approaches that encourage deeper cooperation across science sectors and agencies.

Biological Science Disciplines↗

Crème de la crème in forensic science and legal medicine. The most highly cited articles, authors and journals 1981-2003.

The importance and prestige of a scientific journal is increasingly being judged by the number of times the articles it publishes are cited or referenced in articles published in other scientific journals. Citation counting is also used to assess the merits of individual scientists when academic promotion and tenure are decided. With the help of Thomson, Institute for Scientific Information (Thomson ISI) a citation database was created for six leading forensic science and legal medicine journals. This database was used to determine the most highly cited articles, authors, journals and the most prolific authors of articles in the forensic sciences. The forensic science and legal medicine journals evaluated were: Journal of Forensic Sciences (JFS), Forensic Science International (FSI), International Journal of Legal Medicine (IJLM), Medicine, Science and the Law (MSL), American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology (AJFMP), and Science and Justice (S&J). The resulting forensics database contained 14,210 papers published between 1981 and 2003. This in-depth bibliometric analysis has identified the creme de la creme in forensic science and legal medicine in a quantitative and objective way by citation analysis with focus on articles, authors and journals.

Bibliometrics↗

A survey of the teaching and learning of biological sciences on undergraduate nursing courses.

Curriculum planners developing degree courses in nursing have to decide how much time to allocate to each of the academic disciplines including biological sciences. There is no research-based evidence to suggest what depth and detail of knowledge of biological sciences is required to support nursing practice. There is also some debate about the teaching methods used and who should teach the biological sciences. This paper reports the results of a small survey investigating the teaching of biological sciences on 16 nursing degree courses in the UK. The survey uncovered great variation in the number of hours spent on biological sciences in the different universities and in the science entry requirements of the different universities. Most teachers of biological sciences had a first degree in the subject but few were nurses. The possible implications of these findings are discussed. Problems associated with shared learning and didactic teaching methods are also highlighted. Although the biological sciences input will largely be a matter of institutional preferences, nursing needs to develop a research-based framework to aid curriculum planning.

Biological Science Disciplines↗

Why there should be more science Nobel prizes and laureates - And why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions.

The four science Nobel prizes (physics, chemistry, medicine/physiology and economics) have performed extremely well as a method of recognizing the highest level of achievement. The prizes exist primarily to honour individuals but also have a very important function in science generally. In particular, the institutions and nations which have educated, nurtured or supported many Nobel laureates can be identified as elite in world science. However, the limited range of subjects and a maximum of 12 laureates per year mean that many major scientific achievements remain un-recognized; and relatively few universities can gather sufficient Nobel-credits to enable a precise estimate of their different levels of quality. I advocate that the Nobel committee should expand the number of Nobel laureates and Prize categories as a service to world science. (1) There is a large surplus of high quality prize candidates deserving of recognition. (2) There has been a vast expansion of research with a proliferation of major sub-disciplines in the existing categories. (3) Especially, the massive growth of the bio-medical sciences has created a shortage of Nobel recognition in this area. (4) Whole new fields of major science have emerged. I therefore suggest that the maximum of three laureates per year should always be awarded in the categories of physics, chemistry and economics, even when these prizes are for diverse and un-related achievements; that the number of laureates in the 'biology' category of physiology or medicine should be increased to six or preferably nine per year; and that two new Prize categories should be introduced to recognize achievements in mathematics and computing science. Together, these measures could increase the science laureates from a maximum of 12 to a minimum of 24, and increase the range of scientific coverage. In future, the Nobel committee should also officially allocate proportionate credit to institutions for each laureate, and a historical task force could also award institutional credit for past prizes.

Chemical Phenomena↗

Biological sciences and the nursing curriculum: a challenge for educationalists.

In recent years there has been considerable emphasis on the social and behavioural sciences in the nursing curriculum, with a corresponding tendency to devalue the role of the biological sciences. This paper argues the case for the biological sciences as being essential to the development of 'intelligent practitioners' and the progress of nursing. The notion of 'intelligent practice' is discussed against the background of a historical perspective which seeks to present a brief comparison of the traditional expectations of nursing practice with those for practice in the future. It is suggested that the application to nursing practice of relevant knowledge from the biological sciences is central to skillful practice and a 'caring' philosophy. Without such knowledge, nurses are unable to deliver safe, high-quality care and, in addition, 'handmaiden status' is perpetuated. In the past, the biological science component of the nursing curriculum was derived from medicine and the biomedical model: its teaching was, largely, inadequate and ineffective. If knowledge of biological science is crucial to 'intelligent practice' then there is an urgent need to review how this knowledge is structured and taught in the nursing curriculum. The conceptual model of 'bionursing' is suggested as a possible framework for developing a new approach to the structuring and teaching of biological sciences in the curriculum. Finally, consideration of biological sciences as an educational task, and the challenge of implementing a coherent, structured curriculum, are addressed.

Biological Science Disciplines↗

Whose evidence? Lessons from the philosophy of science and the epistemology of medicine.

OBJECTIVE: To demonstrate the inadequacies of empiricism as a scientific foundation for evidence-based approaches to psychiatry. METHOD: The principles of empiricism are reviewed in the light of developments in the philosophy of science and phenomenology. Case studies are selected from the history of physical sciences, biological science and clinical sciences (pathology, neuroscience, psychosocial science and psychopathology), paying particular attention to the role of observation in theory construction. RESULTS: The principles of empiricism, particularly its view of the nature of observation as the basis of evidence do not reflect the historical reality of scientific theorizing and practice. Science has constructed alternative models of its own activity that do justice to the complexities of its subject matter, including the world of human experience and mental illness. CONCLUSIONS: A failure to recognize both the limitations of empiricism in science and the conceptual richness of alternative formulations that accord more closely with the complexity of psychiatry's domain will result in a naïve model of science and inadequate understanding of the limitations of 'evidence' that guide the training, clinical practice and research in our profession. The consequences will be the intellectual, clinical and ethical impoverishment of psychiatry.

Evidence-Based Medicine↗

The new nutrition science project.

OBJECTIVE: To show that nutrition science, with its application to food and nutrition policy, now needs a new conceptual framework. This will incorporate nutrition in its current definition as principally a biological science, now including nutritional aspects of genomics. It will also create new governing and guiding principles; specify a new definition; and add social and environmental dimensions and domains. METHOD: A narrative review of nutrition science, its successes and achievements, and its dilemmas, paradoxes, shortcomings, dissonances and challenges. Reference is made to 16 associated papers. Equal use is made of continuous text and of boxed texts that extend the review and give salient examples. RESULTS: Recent and current interrelated electronic and genomic discoveries and linked sequential demographic, nutritional and epidemiological shifts, in the context of associated and interlinked global social, cultural, environmental, economic, political and other developments, altogether amount to a world in revolution, requiring all disciplines including that of nutrition science to make comparably radical responses. CONCLUSION: Nutrition in principle and practice should be a biological and also an environmental and social science. This new broad integrated structure brings much recent and current progressive work into the centre of nutrition science, and in some ways is a renewal of the period when nutrition science had its greatest impact. It amounts to a map charting well-known and also new worlds. The new nutrition science is concerned with personal and population health, and also with planetary health--the welfare and future of the whole physical and living world of which humans are a part. In this way the discipline will make a greater contribution to the preservation, maintenance, development and sustenance of life on Earth, appropriate for the twenty-first century.

Biological Science Disciplines↗

Family medicine as a social science.

The branch of clinical medicine most likely to qualify as a social science is family medicine. Whether family medicine is a social science is addressed in four steps. First, the nature of family medicine is outlined. Second, the extent to which social science knowledge is used in family practice is discussed. Third, the extent to which family medicine can qualify as a social science is considered with respect to an orthodox model of the social science, that is, one that emphasizes affinities between the natural and social sciences. Finally, the same question is addressed with respect to an unorthodox model of the social sciences, that is, one that stresses the evaluative nature of the social sciences.

Behavior↗

Securing the future of nutritional sciences through integrative graduate education.

The new millennium has ushered in unprecedented opportunities for research and discovery in the nutritional sciences. These have arisen from major advancements in the social and biological sciences, notably genetics, genomic technologies, computational statistics, and behavioral sciences. The most exciting academic challenges and employment opportunities for nutritional sciences graduates interface with other disciplines, and doctoral training programs in the nutritional sciences must respond to the wealth of these emerging opportunities. The American Society for Nutritional Sciences (ASNS) Graduate Nutrition Education Committee suggests that three major challenges face the nutritional sciences: (a) to train doctoral students to be full and active participants in interdisciplinary research and discovery, and (b) to achieve this goal while maintaining nutrition's unique academic identity and (c) fostering a cohesive academic community. The committee proposes that these objectives are best engaged at the level of graduate education and that the future of ASNS will be secured by strengthening graduate nutrition programs. This manuscript reviews educational strategies that address these challenges and advocates that ASNS actively engage graduate doctoral programs in nutritional sciences.

Education, Graduate↗

A program to enhance k-12 science education in ten rural New York school districts.

The Rural Partnership for Science Education, designed by educators and scientists in 1991 with funding from the National Institutes of Health, works in two rural New York State counties with students and their teachers from kindergarten through grade 12 to improve pre-college science education. The Partnership is an alliance among ten rural New York school districts and several New York State institutions (e.g., a regional academic medical center; the New York Academy of Sciences; and others), and has activities that involve around 4,800 students and 240 teachers each year. The authors describe the program's activities (e.g., summer workshops for teachers; science exploration camps for elementary and middle-school students; enrichment activities for high school students). A certified science education specialist directs classroom demonstrations throughout the academic year to support teachers' efforts to integrate hands-on activities into the science curriculum. A variety of evaluations over the years provides strong evidence of the program's effectiveness in promoting students' and teachers' interest in science. The long-term goal of the Partnership is to inspire more rural students to work hard, learn science, and enter the medical professions.

Adolescent↗

Women's health and complexity science.

Conceptual frameworks in science have shifted from reductionism and its focus on ever-smaller parts to complexity, an outgrowth of chaos theory that views those parts in relation to one another, to the larger entity they form and to the environment in which that entity exists. Examples of this conceptual shift are occurring in many areas of science, but nowhere is it more germane than in the medical sciences that serve women. After a historical focus on reproduction and the development of obstetrics-gynecology, medicine has now gained a broader view of the woman using sex- and gender-based science, and a new field called "women's health" is evolving. Complexity science does not invalidate or eliminate the need for reductionist science, it simply makes a wider array of phenomena understandable. Its method allows going beyond the metaphor of the body as a machine and challenges the user to re-examine how health and illness are understood. This article explores how these changes in science must inform the development of an academic discipline in women's health. The conceptual framework of complexity science also advances the discussions about women's health from reproduction to a totally new and exciting exploration of the interactions between reproduction and all other organ functioning that occurs in women in the contexts of their lives.

Curriculum↗

Expressing freedom and taking liberties: the paradoxes of aberrant science.

Complete freedom does not exist, despite people's preparedness to die for it. Scientific freedom is much defended and yet much misunderstood. Scientists have limits imposed on their freedom by the disciplines and discourse communities in which they place themselves. Freedom within these socially constructed constraints needs to be distinguished from taking liberties with the rules and practices that make up these constraints, and validate the activities of special groups within society. Scientists (and the public) perceive taking liberties with science's rules and practices as aberrant science, and they often react punitively. Aberrant science can be broadly examined under four headings: wicked science, naughty science, dysfunctional science, and ideologically unacceptable science. When we examine examples of perceived aberrant science, we find that these categories of "misconduct" are connected and often confused. Scientific freedom needs to be redefined with due regard to current understandings of scientists as human beings facing powerful social pressures to deliver results of a particular kind.

Attitude↗

Towards an externalist history of Islamic science.

The author sets out to propose a methodology for the study of the history of Islamic science. He chooses the externalist, rather than the internalist method for his discussion. The internalist method of science follows a rational course, while the externalist methodology studies many factors that influence the direction of sciences and may not be rational. He argues that narrative history and the logic of discovery are not adequate when one is trying to identify those key factors that have influenced the tradition of Islamic science. If Islamic science is unique, we should be able to explain how and when, it branched off from the ancient sciences. Only external history, involving a study of cultural and sociological influences on the development of science and the roles of various socioeconomic and political institutions can explain how Islamic science developed as a unique tradition and why it could not be sustained.

Historiography↗

[The role of behavioral sciences in the Hungarian and international medical education: overview and possibilities].

The unilateral bio-medical approach cannot be effective in the prevention and effective treatment of chronic disorders of great epidemiological significance, because the behavioural risk factors are strongly influenced by psychosocial factors too. After the change of the political system in Hungary the most important step in curriculum development was establishing the institutes of behavioural sciences. However, the share of behavioural sciences nowhere exceeds 3% of the curriculum. Yet it has an important role in bridging the gap between the natural and social sciences. Built on the firm basis of natural sciences, the behavioural sciences complement this foundation with aspects of social sciences which emphasize the psychological needs of the patients as well as the psychosocial determinants of health and diseases. The most significant field of behavioural sciences is medical psychology but according to the latest reports on medical education development communication, medical sociology, medical anthropology and bioethics have become increasingly important disciplines in developing medical competence. These fields are organized into an integrated process, arching over the six years of medical training. The present paper gives an overview of the situation and perspectives of teaching behavioural sciences at medical universities.

Academies and Institutes↗

Attitudes towards science and alternative medicine of medical, economics and business, and electrical engineering students in Split, Croatia.

AIM: To assess attitudes of students at the Split University Schools of Medicine, Economics and Business, and Electrical Engineering towards science and alternative medicine. METHODS: There were 275 respondents surveyed for their opinion on science and different aspects of alternative medicine. The respondents were grouped into three major groups: medical students (83 or 30%), economics and business students (95 or 35%), and electrical engineering students (97 or 35%). Each group was composed of two subgroups: first and final year students. We used a specially designed questionnaire composed of four parts to collect students' demographic data and investigate their scientific experience and attitudes towards science and alternative medicine. ANOVA was used to test the differences among the three major groups of students and between first and final year students within each group. RESULTS: There was no significant difference among the first year students at three different schools in their scores on attitude towards science (ANOVA; F=0.001, p=0.99) and the attitude towards alternative medicine (F=2.61, p=0.08). However, there was a significant difference among the final year students at the three schools, with medical students being the most positive in their score on the attitude towards science (F=7.30, p=0.001) and least positive in their score on the attitude towards alternative medicine (F=30.7, p<0.001). There was a negative correlation between attitudes towards science and alternative medicine (r=-0.37, p<0.001) for all schools. CONCLUSION: Medical students showed the most positive attitude towards science and least positive attitude towards alternative medicine, compared with the students of economics and business or electrical engineering. The curriculum of the Medical School, unlike the curricula of other two schools, could have an impact on students' attitudes towards science.

Attitude↗

Our "Collegium Antropologicum" officially the most improved social science journal in the world for mid-2002.

Thomson ISI's bimonthly web-product ISI Essential Science Indicators (ESI) is an in-depth analytical tool that regularly reports quantitative analyses of research performance and science trends, covering about 8,500 scientific journals from the entire world. In each issue ESI lists the scientists, institutions, countries and journals that are most improved from one update to the next, i.e. that show the largest percentage increase in total citations. In its edition of January 2003, it reported that our "Collegium Antropologicum" was the most improved journal in the field of Social Sciences during the period from July 2002 to September 2002. The field of Social Sciences is one of 22 categories of science regularly analyzed by ESI. It includes anthropology, public health, sociology, social work and policy, political science, law, education, communication, library and information sciences, environmental studies and rehabilitation. Due to journal's success, which is based on publications of predominantly Croatian scientists within the past seven post-war years, Croatia was also officially the most improved among more than 200 countries, and University of Zagreb was the most improved in the field of Social Science among thousands of other institutions. We hope that this is an early sign of revival of the scientific activity in our country after the War in Croatia (1991-1995).

Anthropology↗

An investigation of Taiwanese early adolescents' views about the nature of science.

This study developed a Pupils' Nature of Science Scale, including the subscales of the invented and changing nature of science, the role of social negotiation on science, and cultural context on science, to assess early adolescents' views about the nature of science. More than 6,000 fifth and sixth graders in Taiwan responded to the Scale. The study revealed that the adolescents had quite different perspectives toward different subscales of the nature of science. Moreover, male adolescents tended to express more constructivist-oriented views toward the nature of science than did their female counterparts. The adolescents of different grades and races also displayed varying views toward the nature of science.

Adolescent↗