Marta Fana, Sergio Torrejón Perez, Enrique Fernández-Macías
We contribute to the assessment of the employment implications of the COVID crisis by classifying economic sectors according to the confinement decrees of three European countries (Germany, Spain and Italy). The analysis of these decrees can be used to make a first assessment of the implications of the COVID crisis on labour markets, and also to speculate on mid and long-term developments, since the most and least affected sectors are probably going to continue to operate differently until a vaccine or other long-term solution is found. Using an ad-hoc extraction of EU-LFS data, we apply this classification to the analysis of employment in Germany, Italy and Spain but also UK, Poland and Sweden, in order to cover the whole spectrum of institutional labour market settings within Europe. Our results, in line with recent literature, show that the employment impact is asymmetric within and between countries. In particular, the countries that are being hardest hit by the pandemic itself (Spain and Italy, and also the UK) are the countries more likely to suffer the worst employment implications of the confinement, because of their productive specialisation and labour market institutions. Indeed, these were also the labour markets that were more vulnerable before the crisis: characterised by high unemployment and precarious work (especially temporary contracts).
Background Circular economy (CE) is a development priority of the European Union and it is part of the EU industrial strategy. The transition to a more circular economy is an essential contribution to the EU’s efforts to develop a sustainable, low carbon, resource-efficient and competitive economy. The author focuses her CE-related reflections and research in this paper on the macro-level (research subjects: 28 EU countries), the level which is least represented in scholarly publications addressing CE (as follows from the analysis of literature in the Scopus database). This study aims to fill this gap partially. The aim of this paper is to identify and group the EU-28 countries according to their advancement towards circular economy. CE indicators proposed by the European Commission were used for the analysis. Given the research subjects and after an analysis of the literature they were concluded to be the most adequate. The theoretical part was based on an analysis of the literature, whereas the empirical work used the principal components analysis, hierarchical and k-means clustering and a grade correspondence-cluster analysis. Results On the basis of the research, the existence of a “two-speed Europe” was identified in terms of EU countries’ advancement towards CE. Leading countries, those most advanced in pursuing operation according to CE principles, include Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The second pole accommodates EU countries in which transformation towards CE is happening at the slowest pace. This group includes mainly countries of the Central and Eastern Europe and the countries of the south of Europe. Conclusions Differentiated levels of advancement of individual countries towards CE result inter alia from the adoption by some of the latter of different development strategies for their economies’ transitioning to circular economy (according to recommendations of EU ministers at the Environment Council in June 2016) and also from the differences occurring in social and economic development (it is mostly noticeable between the EU-15 and the EU-13 countries). Unfortunately, as can be concluded from the effects obtained so far, only a few of the adopted development strategies may be considered effective in meeting the challenges of circular economy according to the European Union’s standards.
Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows from developed to developing countries may increase carbon emissions in developing countries as developing countries are seen as pollution havens due to their lenient environmental regulations. On the other hand, FDI flows from the developed world may improve management practices and advanced technologies in developing countries, and an increase in FDI flows reduces carbon emissions. Most of the existing studies examine the relationship between FDI flows and carbon emissions by using aggregate FDI flows; however, this paper contributes to the literature by analyzing the impact of FDI flows on carbon emissions in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) between 1993 and 2012 using bilateral FDI flows from eleven OECD countries. According to our empirical results, from which OECD country FDI flows to BRICS countries matters for carbon emissions in BRICS countries. Our results confirm that FDI flows to BRICS countries from Denmark and the UK increase carbon emissions in BRICS countries, confirming the pollution haven hypothesis. On the other hand, FDI that flows from France, Germany, and Italy reduced carbon emissions in the BRICS countries, confirming the pollution halo effect. FDI flows from Austria, Finland, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland have no significant impact on carbon emissions in BRICS countries. The BRICS countries should promote clean FDI flows by reducing environmental damages, and investing countries should be rated based on their environmental damage in the host countries.
Context: Change mining enables organizations to understand the changes that occurred in their business processes. This allows them to enhance their business processes and adapt to dynamic environments. Therefore, change mining is becoming a topic of interest for researchers, scholars, and practitioners. Objective: Motivated by the goal of establishing the state of the art in this area, this paper aims to investigate the literature in change logging and mining in process-aware information systems, provide an overview of the methods that are used in the existing publications, and identify gaps in the research on the topic of logging and mining process changes. Method: A literature review is conducted with the objective to identify and define methods to mine, store, and record changes in business processes. From 1136 publications, we selected 6 papers related to changes in business process and extended the list to 9 papers by including the relevant articles referenced by the papers that we selected originally. Results: In answer of our research questions, we have identified two classes of change mining methods, two ways of recording the changes into change logs, five formats for change log representation, and four objectives to be learned from changes. Conclusion: The literature review provides a summary of existing change mining and logging methods in process-aware information systems and identifies a number of research gaps in the area.
This work presents a Biomedical Literature Question Answering (Q&A) system based on a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, designed to improve access to accurate, evidence-based medical information. Addressing the shortcomings of conventional health search engines and the lag in public access to biomedical research, the system integrates diverse sources, including PubMed articles, curated Q&A datasets, and medical encyclopedias ,to retrieve relevant information and generate concise, context-aware responses. The retrieval pipeline uses MiniLM-based semantic embeddings and FAISS vector search, while answer generation is performed by a fine-tuned Mistral-7B-v0.3 language model optimized using QLoRA for efficient, low-resource training. The system supports both general medical queries and domain-specific tasks, with a focused evaluation on breast cancer literature demonstrating the value of domain-aligned retrieval. Empirical results, measured using BERTScore (F1), show substantial improvements in factual consistency and semantic relevance compared to baseline models. The findings underscore the potential of RAG-enhanced language models to bridge the gap between complex biomedical literature and accessible public health knowledge, paving the way for future work on multilingual adaptation, privacy-preserving inference, and personalized medical AI systems.
Gregory Hok Tjoan Go, Khang Ly, Anders Søgaard
et al.
The rapid growth of scientific publications has made it increasingly difficult to keep literature reviews comprehensive and up-to-date. Though prior work has focused on automating retrieval and screening, the writing phase of systematic reviews remains largely under-explored, especially with regard to readability and factual accuracy. To address this, we present LiRA (Literature Review Agents), a multi-agent collaborative workflow which emulates the human literature review process. LiRA utilizes specialized agents for content outlining, subsection writing, editing, and reviewing, producing cohesive and comprehensive review articles. Evaluated on SciReviewGen and a proprietary ScienceDirect dataset, LiRA outperforms current baselines such as AutoSurvey and MASS-Survey in writing and citation quality, while maintaining competitive similarity to human-written reviews. We further evaluate LiRA in real-world scenarios using document retrieval and assess its robustness to reviewer model variation. Our findings highlight the potential of agentic LLM workflows, even without domain-specific tuning, to improve the reliability and usability of automated scientific writing.
We propose an automated pipeline for performing literature reviews using semantic similarity. Unlike traditional systematic review systems or optimization based methods, this work emphasizes minimal overhead and high relevance by using transformer based embeddings and cosine similarity. By providing a paper title and abstract, it generates relevant keywords, fetches relevant papers from open access repository, and ranks them based on their semantic closeness to the input. Three embedding models were evaluated. A statistical thresholding approach is then applied to filter relevant papers, enabling an effective literature review pipeline. Despite the absence of heuristic feedback or ground truth relevance labels, the proposed system shows promise as a scalable and practical tool for preliminary research and exploratory analysis.
In well-being research the term happiness is often used as synonymous with life satisfaction. However, little is known about lay people's understanding of happiness. Building on the available literature, this study explored lay definitions of happiness across nations and cultural dimensions, analyzing their components and relationship with participants' demographic features. Participants were 2799 adults (age range = 30–60, 50% women) living in urban areas of Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, Hungary, India, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, and United States. They completed the Eudaimonic and Hedonic Happiness Investigation (EHHI), reporting, among other information, their own definition of happiness. Answers comprised definitions referring to a broad range of life domains, covering both the contextual-social sphere and the psychological sphere. Across countries and with little variation by age and gender, inner harmony predominated among psychological definitions, and family and social relationships among contextual definitions. Whereas relationships are widely acknowledged as basic happiness components, inner harmony is substantially neglected. Nevertheless, its cross-national primacy, together with relations, is consistent with the view of an ontological interconnectedness characterizing living systems, shared by several conceptual frameworks across disciplines and cultures. At the methodological level, these findings suggest the potential of a bottom-up, mixed method approach to contextualize psychological dimensions within culture and lay understanding.
Grazia Dicuonzo, F. Donofrio, Simona Ranaldo
et al.
Purpose This paper aims to investigate if and to what extent environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices are influenced by innovation, measured by investment in research and development (R&D) and the number of patents developed by companies. Design/methodology/approach To test this hypothesis, the authors estimated a regression model for the panel data considering a time horizon of eight years. The analysis was conducted on a sample of listed firms operating in the industrial sector in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the USA. Findings The empirical analysis shows that there is a positive and significant relationship between ESG practices and innovation. Companies investing more in R&D and patents have better ESG performance. Originality/value This study contributes to the existing literature by improving the understanding of the importance of innovation in improving ESG practices for firms in the industrial sector. Furthermore, it provides empirical evidence of the ability of innovation to be a valuable tool for sustainable industry development through R&D investment and patent development.
This study focuses on the development of a macroeconomic model for assessing the financial potential of small enterprises, in particular in the context of their impact on value added. Most enterprises need financing for their current operations, acquisition of fixed assets and implementation of growth strategies. However, the existing assessment methods in the scientific literature are limited in their comprehensive reflection of the impact of entropy. In our study, we applied linear multivariate regression, which made it possible to describe the impact of financial capacity on small business development, in particular, in terms of added value. The results of the study are particularly relevant for small businesses in countries such as Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Portugal, and Slovakia, where the model demonstrates efficiency. We have noted that in Ukraine, on the contrary, efficiency is modelled primarily due to the weaker correlation of indicators. That is why additional factors, including non-economic factors from the informal sector (e.g., shadow financial flows, information asymmetry, poor infrastructure, corruption, etc.), were extremely helpful in assessing the financial potential and impact on small businesses in Ukraine.
We proudly welcome you to our prestigious scientific journal, Turistica - Italian Journal of Tourism. This publication represents a beacon of knowledge in the vast universe of tourism, offering a unique opportunity to explore the challenges, innovations, and trends in this ever-changing industry. Turistica is a publication of great tradition and prestige in tourism studies. Founded over thirty years ago by Prof. Emilio Becheri, the journal has pioneered in promoting high-quality research and providing a platform for exchanging ideas between academics, researchers, and tourism professionals. His legacy of excellence continues to be our strength. We are aware of the importance of the international perspective on tourism. For this reason, our journal is published in English, allowing researchers, scholars, and professionals worldwide to access our content and contribute to the global discussion on tourism. Turistica is a journal open to all who share our interest in tourism. We welcome contributions from emerging researchers, industry experts and professionals eager to share their findings, innovative solutions, and policy approaches. The diversity of perspectives enriches our debate. I am honored to be president of SISTUR, and I guarantee my enthusiasm and commitment to directing this journal, allowing us to deepen our understanding of tourism and contribute to its sustainable growth. Our first issue is dedicated to the theme of resilience in tourism, a topic of great importance in a world that continues to be plagued by challenges and changes. This is just the beginning of our journey, and we expect to explore many other crucial issues in the coming issues. We invite you to join us on this exciting journey of knowledge and discovery. Your voice is crucial to the journal’s success. By contributing your articles, research, and experiences, we can all help shape the future of tourism. We look forward to working with you and exploring the many facets of tourism through the pages of Turistica - Italian Journal of Tourism. Prof. Fabrizio Antolini SISTUR - PresidentTURISTICA - Editor in Chief Introduction Welcome to the “Tourism Resilience” special Italian Journal of Tourism issue. In a world marked by dynamic changes, from the challenges posed by climate change to the recent disruptions caused by the global pandemic, the tourism industry is continually evolving to adapt and recover. This special issue focuses on various aspects of tourism resilience, drawing insights from research. The open article Resilience Frameworks in Tourism Studies provides a literature review of resilience frameworks. A comprehensive overview of the studies in this field is provided by summarising key findings and research directions related to tourism resilience. This review is a valuable resource for future research on resilience in the tourism sector. The following article examines cultural routes as social innovation projects that promote tourism development in marginal areas. Cultural routes are shown to have the potential to build resilience, and their role in preserving cultural heritage, fostering community engagement, and driving economic growth is highlighted. Challenges in effectively implementing these routes are also identified in the study. The concept of authenticity in historical art cities is explored in Authenticity in Historical Art Cities. The study examines the correlation between authenticity, cultural motivation, and loyalty, highlighting how mass tourism can threaten authenticity and be employed as a strategy to build resilience in heritage cities. Destination managers can benefit from the valuable insights the research provides, which aim to preserve cultural identity. Sustainable Tourism and Resilience are connected. A Composite Index for European Destinations comprehensively reviews sustainable tourism indicators in European Union (EU) countries. The importance of sustainability in tourism and its impact on destination competitiveness are highlighted. This study presents a framework for policymakers and stakeholders to make informed decisions on resource allocation and policy development, emphasizing the importance of tailored approaches to address specific destination challenges. Another investigation point is the proximity tourism in Spain, focusing on how tourist flows changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. It introduces the concept of proximity tourism, emphasizing its relevance in a post-pandemic world and its potential to support local destinations. The study utilizes an Origin-Destination Matrix approach to analyse tourism dynamics within Spain. The Regenerative Tourism Approach for Marginalized Areas explores the concept of regenerative tourism and its potential to transform marginalized areas. By examining two best practices in Southern Italy, the paper illustrates how regenerative tourism can create net positive effects by reinvigorating local communities and economies. It emphasizes these practices; role in enhancing such areas tourist attractiveness. Finally, the last contribution focuses on the influence of socio-demographic factors such as nationality, age, gender, and education on tourists’ attachment, involvement, loyalty attitudes, and environmentally responsible behaviour toward a cultural Italian destination. It sheds light on how these factors affect tourists; perceptions and behaviour, providing valuable insights for cultural tourism marketing and management. Throughout this special issue, you will find diverse perspectives and insights on tourism resilience, ranging from sustainability and socio-demographic influences on regenerative tourism practices to the importance of authenticity in heritage cities. We hope these contributions will inspire new approaches and strategies to navigate the ever-changing landscape of the tourism industry. Prof. Giovanni Ruggieri Special Issue Editor
João Gabriel Pacetti Capobianco, Júlia Gomes, Hadassa Carvalho Victorino
et al.
Background: Sjögren’s syndrome (SS) is considered a chronic, multisystemic condition, which is characterized by dysfunction and abnormalities of the glands and exocrine organs, one of whose characteristics is lymphocytic infiltration, leading these organs to loss of function and triggering a case of xerostomia and xerophthalmia.It affects around 2.7% of the population and the prevalence is 9 women for every man aged approximately 50 years.The association of this syndrome with facial nerve paralysis is a rare condition.Objective: To carry out a systematic review of the literature on the association between Sjögren’s syndrome and the clinical manifestation of peripheral facial paralysis. Methods: A systematic review was developed based on the PRISMA recommendation.The search was carried out in the databases PubMed, Scielo, Scopus, Portal Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde (VHL) and Cochrane Library.The search strategy used was: (Sjogren’s Syndrome OR Sicca Syndrome ) AND (Facial Paralysis OR Facial Palsy OR Bell´s Palsy) Inclusion criteria: primary studies, published in English, Portuguese and Spanish,published in the last five years, human patients over 18 years of age.Data analysis was carried out using the qualitative metasynthesis technique. Results: After analysis and application of the review criteria, 7 studies were included in the final sample. One was published in 2019, three in 2020, two in 2021 and one in 2022. The studies came from Italy (n=1), France (n=1), Saudi Arabia (n=1), United Kingdom (n=1), Germany (n=1), USA (n=1) and China (n=1). Regarding the study design, (n=3) were case reports with literature review, (n=3) were case reports and (n=1) were case series. The analytical themes identified were: involvement of the central and peripheral nervous system, first manifestation of sjogren’s syndrome and treatment/prognosis. Discussion: Despite the scarcity of data considering the rarity of this presentation, the sample analyzed followed the recommendations for diagnosis and treatment of SS with systemic characteristics. Serological tests was performed based on specific autoantibodies - anti-SSA/antiSSB and exclusion of Guillain-Barrè syndrome. The treatments carried out in the identified studies were based on the treatment of SS in the acute phase, including: intravenous human immunoglobulin, pulse therapy with methylprednisolone, cyclophosphamide and mycophenolate mofetil. The prognosis varied in the sample analyzed, ranging from clinical improvement between two weeks and two months. Conclusion: Peripheral facial paralysis associated with Sjogren’s Syndrome is an uncommon pathological condition, rarely reported in the scientific literature. There is no specific consensus for the diagnosis and treatment of this condition, and future studies are needed to determine the prognostic relationships of this condition in relation to other systemic manifestations of Sjogren’s syndrome.
Digitalis purpurea L. (foxglove) is an important medicinal plant belonging to the Scrophulariaceae family. It is native to northern Africa (i.e., Morocco) and Europe (i.e. Denmark, France, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain). Its leaves have cardio-tonic, diuretic, sedative, hemostatic, antipyretic properties etc., and are used for the treatment of left ventricular hypertrophy of the heart, palpitations, ascites, epistaxis, hemoptysis, menorrhagia, epilepsy, pneumonia, chronic pleurisy, wounds, and burns. A variety of phytoconstituents are isolated from Digitalis, which include glycosides, saponins, flavonoids, organic acids, tannins, mucilage etc. Various pharmacological studies on the plant have been done, like cardiovascular, hepatoprotective, antidiabetic, insecticidal, antioxidant, etc. The aim of the paper is to highlight the therapeutic applications as described in Unani literature and scientific studies done on Digitalis purpurea.
Purpose This paper aims to investigate the sentiment connectedness among 10 European stock markets between January 2020 and July 2022, associating such connectedness with the level of the geopolitical risk index. Design/methodology/approach For this purpose, a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive connectedness framework is used. Findings Results show a high degree of sentiment connectedness. Overall, the sentiments of Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Italy are net transmitters of shocks while those of Poland, Sweden, Norway and Romania are net receivers. Additional evidence indicates that when geopolitical risks increase, the sentiment connectedness tends to decrease. However, the reverse holds under extremely high levels of geopolitical risks. Originality/value Overall, this study provides some significant contributions to the literature. First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is among the first few studies to examine the dynamic connectedness among stock market sentiment across countries. This issue needs special consideration for European countries because of their close geographical distance and strong integration due to the European Union’s co-development strategies. Second, the association of sentiment connectedness with geopolitical risk is examined for the first time. This is even more meaningful in the context of growing geopolitical risks stemming from the Ukraine war, which could affect international financial markets.
Biomedical literature is a rapidly expanding field of science and technology. Classification of biomedical texts is an essential part of biomedicine research, especially in the field of biology. This work proposes the fine-tuned DistilBERT, a methodology-specific, pre-trained generative classification language model for mining biomedicine texts. The model has proven its effectiveness in linguistic understanding capabilities and has reduced the size of BERT models by 40\% but by 60\% faster. The main objective of this project is to improve the model and assess the performance of the model compared to the non-fine-tuned model. We used DistilBert as a support model and pre-trained on a corpus of 32,000 abstracts and complete text articles; our results were impressive and surpassed those of traditional literature classification methods by using RNN or LSTM. Our aim is to integrate this highly specialised and specific model into different research industries.
Introduction: Thorough maintenance of the scientific record is needed to ensure the trustworthiness of its content. This can be undermined by a stealth correction, which is at least one post-publication change made to a scientific article, without providing a correction note or any other indicator that the publication was temporarily or permanently altered. In this paper we provide several examples of stealth corrections in order to demonstrate that these exist within the scientific literature. As far as we are aware, no documentation of such stealth corrections was previously reported in the scientific literature. Methods: We identified stealth corrections ourselves, or found already reported ones on the public database pubpeer.com or through social media accounts of known science sleuths. Results: In total we report 131 articles that were affected by stealth corrections and were published between 2005 and 2024. These stealth corrections were found among multiple publishers and scientific fields. Conclusion: and recommendations Stealth corrections exist in the scientific literature. This needs to end immediately as it threatens scientific integrity. We recommend the following: 1) Tracking all changes to the published record by all publishers in an open, uniform and transparent manner, preferably by online submission systems that log every change publicly, making stealth corrections impossible; 2) Clear definitions and guidelines on all types of corrections; 3) Support sustained vigilance of the scientific community to publicly register stealth corrections.
Citations allow quickly identifying related research. If multiple publications are selected as seeds, specific suggestions for related literature can be made based on the number of incoming and outgoing citation links to this selection. Interactively adding recommended publications to the selection refines the next suggestion and incrementally builds a relevant collection of publications. Following this approach, the paper presents a search and foraging approach, PUREsuggest, which combines citation-based suggestions with augmented visualizations of the citation network. The focus and novelty of the approach is, first, the transparency of how the rankings are explained visually and, second, that the process can be steered through user-defined keywords, which reflect topics of interests. The system can be used to build new literature collections, to update and assess existing ones, as well as to use the collected literature for identifying relevant experts in the field. We evaluated the recommendation approach through simulated sessions and performed a user study investigating search strategies and usage patterns supported by the interface.