Dry eye disease (DED) is a chronic and progressive multifactorial disorder of the tears and ocular surface, which results in symptoms of discomfort and visual disturbance. The aim of this systematic literature review was to evaluate the burden of DED and its components from an economic and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) perspective, and to compare the evidence across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, USA, Japan, and China. PubMed, Embase, and six other resources were searched for literature published from January 1998 to July 2013. Of 76 titles/abstracts reviewed on the economic burden of DED and 263 on the HRQoL burden, 12 and 20 articles, respectively, were included in the review. The available literature suggests that DED has a substantial economic burden, with indirect costs making up the largest proportion of the overall cost due to a substantial loss of work productivity. In addition, DED has a substantial negative impact on physical, and potentially psychological, function and HRQoL across the countries examined. A number of studies also indicated that HRQoL burden increases with the severity of disease. Additional data are needed, particularly in Asia, in order to gain a better understanding of the burden of DED and help inform future health care resource utilization.
The rapid development of AI agent has spurred the development of advanced research tools, such as Deep Research. Achieving this require a nuanced understanding of the relations within scientific literature, surpasses the scope of keyword-based or embedding-based retrieval. Existing retrieval agents mainly focus on the content-level similarities and are unable to decode critical relational dynamics, such as identifying corroborating or conflicting studies or tracing technological lineages, all of which are essential for a comprehensive literature review. Consequently, this fundamental limitation often results in a fragmented knowledge structure, misleading sentiment interpretation, and inadequate modeling of collective scientific progress. To investigate relation-aware retrieval more deeply, we propose SciNetBench, the first Scientific Network Relation-aware Benchmark for literature retrieval agents. Constructed from a corpus of over 18 million AI papers, our benchmark systematically evaluates three levels of relations: ego-centric retrieval of papers with novel knowledge structures, pair-wise identification of scholarly relationships, and path-wise reconstruction of scientific evolutionary trajectories. Through extensive evaluation of three categories of retrieval agents, we find that their accuracy on relation-aware retrieval tasks often falls below 20%, revealing a core shortcoming of current retrieval paradigms. Notably, further experiments on the literature review tasks demonstrate that providing agents with relational ground truth leads to a substantial 23.4% performance improvement in the review quality, validating the critical importance of relation-aware retrieval. We publicly release our benchmark at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SciNetBench/ to support future research on advanced retrieval systems.
Raymond Fok, Joseph Chee Chang, Marissa Radensky
et al.
Comprehensive literature review requires synthesizing vast amounts of research -- a labor intensive and cognitively demanding process. Most prior work focuses either on helping researchers deeply understand a few papers (e.g., for triaging or reading), or retrieving from and visualizing a vast corpus. Deep analysis and synthesis of large paper collections (e.g., to produce a survey paper) is largely conducted manually with little support. We present DimInd, an interactive system that scaffolds literature review across large paper collections through LLM-generated structured representations. DimInd scaffolds literature understanding with multiple levels of compression, from papers, to faceted literature comparison tables with information extracted from individual papers, to taxonomies of concepts, to narrative syntheses. Users are guided through these successive information transformations while maintaining provenance to source text. In an evaluation with 23 researchers, DimInd supported participants in extracting information and conceptually organizing papers with less effort compared to a ChatGPT-assisted baseline workflow.
In the automobile industry, ensuring the safety of automated vehicles equipped with the Automated Driving System (ADS) is becoming a significant focus due to the increasing development and deployment of automated driving. Automated driving depends on sensing both the external and internal environments of a vehicle, utilizing perception sensors and algorithms, and Electrical/Electronic (E/E) systems for situational awareness and response. ISO 21448 is the standard for Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF) that aims to ensure that the ADS operate safely within their intended functionality. SOTIF focuses on preventing or mitigating potential hazards that may arise from the limitations or failures of the ADS, including hazards due to insufficiencies of specification, or performance insufficiencies, as well as foreseeable misuse of the intended functionality. However, the challenge lies in ensuring the safety of vehicles despite the limited availability of extensive and systematic literature on SOTIF. To address this challenge, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on SOTIF for the ADS is performed following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The objective is to methodically gather and analyze the existing literature on SOTIF. The major contributions of this paper are: (i) presenting a summary of the literature by synthesizing and organizing the collective findings, methodologies, and insights into distinct thematic groups, and (ii) summarizing and categorizing the acknowledged limitations based on data extracted from an SLR of 51 research papers published between 2018 and 2023. Furthermore, research gaps are determined, and future research directions are proposed.
Following the historiographical shift that has influenced historical-educational research since the early 1990s – particularly inspired by the reflections of French historian Dominique Julia – Italy has witnessed a renewal in both research centers and school and education museums, within academic communities and beyond. Within this context, the Center for Documentation and Research on the History of School Textbooks and Children’s Literature and the “Paolo and Ornella Ricca” School Museum of the University of Macerata stand out as two institutions established between 2004 and 2009. This article traces their history and development over time, highlighting how they represent an emblematic example of the integration between scientific research, preservation, and dissemination of historical-educational heritage.
Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized scientific literature analysis. However, existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of LLMs in this domain, particularly in scenarios requiring higher-level abilities beyond mere memorization and the handling of multimodal data. In response to this gap, we introduce SciAssess, a benchmark specifically designed for the comprehensive evaluation of LLMs in scientific literature analysis. It aims to thoroughly assess the efficacy of LLMs by evaluating their capabilities in Memorization (L1), Comprehension (L2), and Analysis \& Reasoning (L3). It encompasses a variety of tasks drawn from diverse scientific fields, including biology, chemistry, material, and medicine. To ensure the reliability of SciAssess, rigorous quality control measures have been implemented, ensuring accuracy, anonymization, and compliance with copyright standards. SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs, highlighting their strengths and areas for improvement. We hope this evaluation supports the ongoing development of LLM applications in scientific literature analysis. SciAssess and its resources are available at \url{https://github.com/sci-assess/SciAssess}.
As the body of academic literature continues to grow, researchers face increasing difficulties in effectively searching for relevant resources. Existing databases and search engines often fall short of providing a comprehensive and contextually relevant collection of academic literature. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. This framework automates the retrieval, summarization, and clustering of academic literature within a specific research domain. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce CyLit, an NLP-powered repository specifically designed for the cyber risk literature. CyLit empowers researchers by providing access to context-specific resources and enabling the tracking of trends in the dynamic and rapidly evolving field of cyber risk. Through the automatic processing of large volumes of data, our NLP-powered solution significantly enhances the efficiency and specificity of academic literature searches. We compare the literature categorization results of CyLit to those presented in survey papers or generated by ChatGPT, highlighting the distinctive insights this tool provides into cyber risk research literature. Using NLP techniques, we aim to revolutionize the way researchers discover, analyze, and utilize academic resources, ultimately fostering advancements in various domains of knowledge.
Alioune Diallo, Jordan Samhi, Tegawendé Bissyandé
et al.
In developing countries, several key sectors, including education, finance, agriculture, and healthcare, mainly deliver their services via mobile app technology on handheld devices. As a result, mobile app security has emerged as a paramount issue in developing countries. In this paper, we investigate the state of research on mobile app security, focusing on developing countries. More specifically, we performed a systematic literature review exploring the research directions taken by existing works, the different security concerns addressed, and the techniques used by researchers to highlight or address app security issues. Our main findings are: (1) the literature includes only a few studies on mobile app security in the context of developing countries ; (2) among the different security concerns that researchers study, vulnerability detection appears to be the leading research topic; (3) FinTech apps are revealed as the main target in the relevant literature. Overall, our work highlights that there is largely room for developing further specialized techniques addressing mobile app security in the context of developing countries.
Literature reviews are a critical component of formulating and justifying new research, but are a manual and often time-consuming process. This research introduces a novel, generalizable approach to literature analysis called CEKER which uses a three-step process to streamline the collection of literature, the extraction of key insights, and the summarized analysis of key trends and gaps. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), this methodology represents a significant shift from traditional manual literature reviews, offering a scalable, flexible, and repeatable approach that can be applied across diverse research domains. A case study on unikernel security illustrates CEKER's ability to generate novel insights validated against previous manual methods. CEKER's analysis highlighted reduced attack surface as the most prominent theme. Key security gaps included the absence of Address Space Layout Randomization, missing debugging tools, and limited entropy generation, all of which represent important challenges to unikernel security. The study also revealed a reliance on hypervisors as a potential attack vector and emphasized the need for dynamic security adjustments to address real-time threats.
Scientific literature searches are often exploratory, whereby users are not yet familiar with a particular field or concept but are interested in learning more about it. However, existing systems for scientific literature search are typically tailored to keyword-based lookup searches, limiting the possibilities for exploration. We propose NLP-KG, a feature-rich system designed to support the exploration of research literature in unfamiliar natural language processing (NLP) fields. In addition to a semantic search, NLP-KG allows users to easily find survey papers that provide a quick introduction to a field of interest. Further, a Fields of Study hierarchy graph enables users to familiarize themselves with a field and its related areas. Finally, a chat interface allows users to ask questions about unfamiliar concepts or specific articles in NLP and obtain answers grounded in knowledge retrieved from scientific publications. Our system provides users with comprehensive exploration possibilities, supporting them in investigating the relationships between different fields, understanding unfamiliar concepts in NLP, and finding relevant research literature. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/NLP-Knowledge-Graph/NLP-KG-WebApp.
Abstract This article explores literature regarding the role of the desert in the broader ecological debate. In Western essentialist discourses, the equatorial forest has often been depicted in its exuberance, i.e., as the extreme opposite of the desert. Initially considered a contemplative and non-cultivated space, a place of absence in all its facets, the desert is accompanied by a metaphysical verticality that sets it apart from the excessive material vitality of the tropical forest. However, beyond their physiological antagonism, these two places share a common resistance to the Anthropocene, particularly to the various forms of colonialism. The novels, Désert (1980) by J.M.G. Le Clézio and Petroleum (2004) by Bessora, each construct a resistance narrative. The former resists the colonization of the Sahara Desert by French and Spanish conquistadors, while the latter resists the “Petrolization” of the Gabonese forest by Western geologists. Both can be placed within the ecological debate and within postcolonial and decolonial perspectives. Concern for the non-human environment is an integral part of the ethical dimension of both. Nature should no longer be perceived merely as a reality to be systematically subtracted but as a presence that “suggests that human history is an integral part of natural history.”
O. Lopez-Fernandez, A. Williams, M. D. Griffiths
et al.
Research investigating female gaming has begun to emerge despite gaming being traditionally more popular with males. Research in the 21st century has drawn attention to the role of women in culture, society, and technology, and female gaming is one of the growing phenomena not to have been researched in depth. The aim of the present paper was to review female gaming (i.e., the role of females within video game culture) and identify any associated psychopathological symptomatology. The review adapted the Sample, Phenomenon of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research (SPIDER) model in conducting a narrative literature review. A search of three scientific electronic databases yielded 49 papers for further evaluation. From a methodological perspective, studies had to fulfill the following criteria to be included: i) published between the years 2000 and 2018; ii) assessed female gaming or the female position within gaming culture, iii) contained quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods approaches to produce empirical data or discuss theoretical implications through reviews, iv) be retrievable as a full-text peer-reviewed journal paper, and v) published in English, German, Polish, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or French. Four categories emerged from the papers: i) the benefits of female gaming, ii) why women might play video games less than men, iii) perceptions and realities of female characters within video games, and iv) women’s position in gaming culture. The main findings showed playing video games has benefits for women in terms of enhancing cognitive, social, and physical abilities. However, they are less encouraged to play video games due to negative expectations based on gender and/or experiences during game play. Video games are associated with stereotypical male characteristics, such as being overly aggressive, and frequently contain sexualized content. Female gamers appear to require coping strategies to handle online harassment. Females look for different things in video games, which are not often included in game designs thereby limiting their abilities. For instance, female avatar representation—which is exaggerated and hypersexualized—can prompt social comparisons and lead to feelings of decreased self-esteem, depression, and other impacts on well-being. Overall, there are still obstacles for women playing video games even though they comprise half of the gaming population.
R. Shields, Edmar Joaquim Gomes da Silva, Thiago Lima e Lima
et al.
ABSTRACT Walkability has emerged as not only a set of indexes and metrics but a normative discourse. This review of walkability studies draws on English, Spanish and Portuguese literatures, as well as case studies evaluating pedestrian walking in cities. In recent literature reviews, a pattern emerges of studies agreeing on relatively consistent factors while identifying problems with metrics. However, these studies continue to operate on an aggregate level, often without differentiating pedestrians by gender, age, and ability. The lack of higher-order socioeconomic and affective factors such as social norms and comfort reflects a lack of attention to diversity. The ubiquitous importance of hand-held mobile devices, although undercut by the lack of a single mobile platform, suggests the possibility of crowd-sourced assessments. GIS and GPS tools allow emerging professional practices focused on walkability audits.
Astrid Johana Aristizábal Cardona, Janeth Maria Ortiz Medina
In a country struggling to emerge from the shadows of a relentless armed conflict, where media manipulation puts a stable reconciliation process at risk, foreign language educators are called on to act. This article presents the results of a study conducted with three foreign language students tudying in one of the sites of a public university in the Department of Antioquia, Colombia, located in a region affected by cultural, structural, direct, and ecological violence. The study resorted to critical peace education and critical media literacy theories as well as to local contributions from a pedagogy of memory to foster critical consciousness about the armed conflict in Colombia. Data collection methods included a survey, recordings of class discussions, samples of students' work, and individual and group interviews. Data showed that the participants reflected critically on the role of different war agents, increased their capacity to question media messages, recognized the relevance of including the victims’ voices, and created counter-texts to contest dominant narratives about the conflict. Findings confirm the urgent need to prepare future foreign language educators to respond to their learners’ harsh social realities and exert their agency to generate transformations. They also highlight the need to do more interdisciplinary work in ELT and to value the contributions of local knowledge that helps us both understand the dynamics of violence in our contexts and envision possibilities for peacebuilding in Colombia.
Philology. Linguistics, French literature - Italian literature - Spanish literature - Portuguese literature
Este artículo muestra el análisis multimodal de 156 carteles preventivos de salud creados por el Ministerio de Salud, la Caja Costarricense del Seguro Social y el Instituto sobre Alcoholismo y Farmacodependencia entre 2014 y 2018 en Costa Rica. La evaluación se realizó con MAXQDA 2020 y consta de la recolección, el análisis del corpus y el procesamiento de los resultados. Los modelos de análisis utilizados fueron las funciones comunicativas presentes en cada cartel, las relaciones entre palabras e imágenes según la propuesta de relaciones lógico-semánticas y estatus del Modelo Análisis de Géneros Multimodales (MAGEM, s.f.), y los procesos narrativos y conceptuales con sus participantes (Kress y van Leeuwen, 2006). El presente estudio permite observar el protagonismo del modo verbal en contraste con el visual en la mayoría de los carteles. Esto se comprueba, primero, con las relaciones entre palabras e imágenes, la mayoría de desigualdad; también con las relaciones lógico-semánticas, siendo las más sobresalientes en las que predomina lo verbal sobre lo visual. En segundo lugar, se comprueba por medio de los procesos dominantes: los narrativos verbales junto con sus participantes. En referencia a funciones comunicativas, la mayoría presenta acciones preventivas ante una enfermedad.
Este artículo tiene como objetivo aportar a la compresión acerca del surgimiento del terrorismo de Estado en la Argentina, a partir de dar cuenta de las condiciones de posibilidad del Operativo Independencia, campaña desarrollada en Tucumán desde febrero de 1975, donde el Ejército por primera vez de manera masiva ensayó esta tecnología represiva. Plantearé la hipótesis de que la desaparición forzada de personas se convirtió en la modalidad por excelencia del poder −y progresivamente fue desplazando a la prisión política y el asesinato por grupos (para)estatales− como resultado de la acumulación de experiencia represiva por parte de las Fuerzas Armadas. Antes que una aplicación mecánica y automática de la Doctrina de Seguridad Nacional y la contrainsurgente francesa, fue el resultado de un largo proceso represivo de impronta nacional, marcado por un juego complejo de ensayo y error, es decir, de puesta en práctica de distintas técnicas represivas en terreno.
French literature - Italian literature - Spanish literature - Portuguese literature, Social sciences (General)
Marilia Mastrocolla de Almeida Cardoso, L. Thabane, F. Romeiro
et al.
OBJECTIVE The objective of this review is to determine the costs and benefits of non-invasive liver tests versus liver biopsy in patients with chronic liver diseases. INTRODUCTION Hepatic diseases can lead to liver fibrosis, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma. In the past, liver biopsy was the only option for diagnosing fibrosis degree; however, it is an invasive procedure that depends on the sample size to be able to deliver an accurate diagnosis. In recent years, non-invasive liver tests have been increasingly used to estimate liver fibrosis degree, however, there is a lack of economic assessments of technology implementation outcomes. INCLUSION CRITERIA This review will include partial (cost studies) and complete economic evaluation studies on hepatitis B, hepatitis C, alcoholic liver disease, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease that compare non-invasive liver tests with liver biopsies. Studies published in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, or Portuguese will be included. No date limits will be applied to the search. METHODS This review will identify published and unpublished studies. Published studies will be identified using MEDLINE (PubMed), Cochrane Library (CENTRAL), Embase (Elsevier), Web of Science, Scopus, and LILACS. Sources of unpublished studies and gray literature will include sources from health technology assessment agencies, clinical practice guidelines, regulatory approvals, advisories and warnings, and clinical trial registries, as well as Google Scholar. Two independent reviewers will screen and assess studies, and extract and critically appraise the data. Data extracted from the included studies will be analyzed and summarized to address the review objective using narratives, tables, and the JBI dominance ranking matrix. REVIEW REGISTRATION PROSPERO CRD42023404278.
BACKGROUND There are limited published data on the burden of moderate/severe uncontrolled asthma. METHODS We conducted a systematic literature review to better understand the impact of moderate-to-severe asthma in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Japan, and Australia in terms of prevalence, clinical measures, health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and economic burden, for patients whose asthma is uncontrolled despite inhaled corticosteroid/long-acting β2-agonist (ICS/LABA) therapy. RESULTS The prevalence of uncontrolled asthma among patients with moderate/severe disease varied but was as high as 100% in some subgroups. Patients with uncontrolled asthma generally had poor lung function (mean/median pre-bronchodilator forced expiratory volume in 1 second [FEV1]: 1.69-2.45 L; mean/median pre-bronchodilator percent predicted FEV1: 57.2-79.7). There was also a substantial but variable exacerbation burden associated with uncontrolled asthma, with the annualised rate of exacerbations ranging from 1.30 to 7.30 when considering various patient subgroups. Furthermore, the annualised rate of severe exacerbations ranged from 1.66 to 3.60. The HRQoL burden measured using disease-specific and generic instruments consistently demonstrated substantial impairment of HRQoL for those with uncontrolled asthma; Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire scores ranged from 3.00 to 5.20, whilst EurQol-5 Dimensions index scores ranged from 0.53 to 0.59. Direct, indirect and total costs together with consumption of other healthcare resources associated with managing uncontrolled asthma were also substantial in the population studied; no caregiver burden was identified. CONCLUSIONS Our findings suggest that significant unmet needs exist for patients with uncontrolled asthma despite the availability of ICS/LABA therapy. Novel treatments are needed to help reduce the burden to patients, healthcare systems and society.
A comprehensive literature review has always been an essential first step of every meaningful research. In recent years, however, the availability of a vast amount of information in both open-access and subscription-based literature in every field has made it difficult, if not impossible, to be certain about the comprehensiveness of one's survey. This subsequently can lead to reviewers' questioning of the novelties of the research directions proposed, regardless of the quality of the actual work presented. In this situation, statistics derived from the published literature data can provide valuable quantitative and visual information about research trends, knowledge gaps, and research networks and hubs in different fields. Our tool provides an automatic and rapid way of generating insight for systematic reviews in any research area.