PeerJ
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Early detection of social anxiety and loneliness might be useful to prevent substantial impairment in personal relationships. Understanding the way people use smartphones can be beneficial for implementing an early detection of social anxiety and loneliness. This paper examines different types of smartphone usage and their relationships with people with different individual levels of social anxiety or loneliness. ⋯ This paper finds that there exists certain correlation among smartphone usage and social anxiety and loneliness. The result may be useful to improve social interaction for those who lack social interaction in daily lives and may be insightful for recognizing individual levels of social anxiety and loneliness through smartphone usage behaviors.
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We apply a novel mistake index to assess trends in the proportion of corrections published between 1993 and 2014 in Nature, Science and PNAS. The index revealed a progressive increase in the proportion of corrections published in these three high-quality journals. The index appears to be independent of the journal impact factor or the number of items published, as suggested by a comparative analyses among 16 top scientific journals of different impact factors and disciplines. ⋯ According to the three categories established, 34.7% of the corrections were considered mild, 47.7% moderate and 17.6% severe, also differing among journals. Errors occurring during the printing process were responsible for 5% of corrections in Nature, 3% in Science and 18% in PNAS. The measurement of the temporal trends in the quality of scientific manuscripts can assist editors and reviewers in identifying the most common mistakes, increasing the rigor of peer-review and improving the quality of published scientific manuscripts.
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Problems in using p-curve analysis and text-mining to detect rate of p-hacking and evidential value.
Background. The p-curve is a plot of the distribution of p-values reported in a set of scientific studies. Comparisons between ranges of p-values have been used to evaluate fields of research in terms of the extent to which studies have genuine evidential value, and the extent to which they suffer from bias in the selection of variables and analyses for publication, p-hacking. ⋯ Furthermore, while studies with evidential value will usually generate a right-skewed p-curve, we cannot treat a right-skewed p-curve as an indicator of the extent of evidential value, unless we have a model specific to the type of p-values entered into the analysis. We conclude that it is not feasible to use the p-curve to estimate the extent of p-hacking and evidential value unless there is considerable control over the type of data entered into the analysis. In particular, p-hacking with ghost variables is likely to be missed.
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Current ovarian cancer treatment involves chemotherapy that has serious limitations, such as rapid clearance, unfavorable biodistribution and severe side effects. To overcome these limitations, drug delivery systems (DDS) have been developed to encapsulate chemotherapeutics for delivery to tumor cells. However, no systematic assessment of the efficacy of chemotherapy by DDS compared to free chemotherapy (not in a DDS) has been performed for animal studies. ⋯ Other subgroup analyses, such as targeted versus non-targeted DDS or IV versus IP administration route, did not identify specific characteristics of DDS that affected treatment efficacy. This systematic review shows the potential, but also the limitations of chemotherapy by drug delivery systems for ovarian cancer treatment. For future animal research, we emphasize that data need to be reported with ample attention to detailed reporting.
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Introduction. Researchers' productivity is usually measured in terms of their publication output. A minimum number of publications is required for some medical qualifications and professional appointments. ⋯ Types of publication by the prolific authors varied but included substantial numbers of original research papers (not simply editorials or letters). Conclusions. Institutions and funders should be alert to unfeasibly prolific authors when measuring and creating incentives for researcher productivity.