Associations between elevated atmospheric temperature and human mortality: a critical review of the literature

The effects of the anomalously warm European summer of 2003 highlighted the importance of understanding the relationship between elevated atmospheric temperature and human mortality. This review is an extension of the brief evidence examining this relationship provided in the IPCC’s Assessment Reports. A comprehensive and critical review of the literature is presented, which highlights avenues for further research, and the respective merits and limitations of the methods used to analyse the relationships. In contrast to previous reviews that concentrate on the epidemiological evidence, this review acknowledges the inter-disciplinary nature of the topic and examines the evidence presented in epidemiological, environmental health, and climatological journals. As such, present temperature–mortality relationships are reviewed, followed by a discussion of how these are likely to change under climate change scenarios. The importance of uncertainty, and methods to include it in future work, are also considered.

MOOCs: a systematic study of the published literature 2008-2012

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a recent addition to the range of online learning options. Since 2008, MOOCs have been run by a variety of public and elite universities, especially in North America. Many academics have taken interest in MOOCs recognising the potential to deliver education around the globe on an unprecedented scale; some of these academics are taking a research-oriented perspective and academic papers describing their research are starting to appear in the traditional media of peer reviewed publications. This paper presents a systematic review of the published MOOC literature (2008-2012): Forty-five peer reviewed papers are identified through journals, database searches, searching the Web, and chaining from known sources to form the base for this review. We believe this is the first effort to systematically review literature relating to MOOCs, a fairly recent but massively popular phenomenon with a global reach. The review categorises the literature into eight different areas of interest, introductory, concept, case studies, educational theory, technology, participant focussed, provider focussed, and other, while also providing quantitative analysis of publications according to publication type, year of publication, and contributors. Future research directions guided by gaps in the literature are explored.

Environmental and ecological economics in the 21st century: an age adjusted citation analysis of the influential articles, journals, authors and institutions

We investigate the influence of articles, authors, journals and institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics. We depart from studies that investigated the literature until 2001 and include a time period that has witnessed an enormous increase of importance in the field. We adjust for the age effect given the huge impact of the year of an article's publication on its influence and we show that this adjustment does make a substantial difference — especially for disaggregated units of analysis with diverse age characteristics such as articles or authors. We analyse 6597 studies on environmental and ecological economics published between 2000 and 2009. We provide rankings of the influential articles, authors, journals and institutions and find that Ecological Economics, Energy Economics and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management have the most influential articles, they publish very influential authors and their articles are cited most. The University of Maryland, Resources for the Future, the University of East Anglia and the World Bank appear to be the most influential institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics.

Challenges in conducting and publishing research on the Middle East and Africa in leading journals

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons for the lack of research attention paid to the Middle East (ME) and Africa regions. In particular, this study seeks to identify the reasons for and implications of the paucity of ME- and Africa-based studies in high-quality international journals in the marketing field with a specific focus on the challenges in conducting and publishing research on these regions. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a systematic review of the literature on the ME and Africa regions to identify papers published in 23 high-quality marketing, international business, and advertising journals. This search resulted in 301 articles, among which 125 articles were based on primary or secondary data collected from a local source in those regions. The authors of these 125 articles constitute the Delphi study sample. These academics provided input in an effort to reach a consensus regarding the two proposed models of academic research in both regions. Findings – This paper differs from previous studies, where academic freedom emerged as the most important inhibitor to conducting and publishing research. The most frequently mentioned challenges in conducting research in Africa were access to data, data collection issues, diversity of the region, and lack of research support infrastructure. For the ME, the most often described challenges included validity and reliability of data, language barriers, data collection issues, and availability of a network of researchers. Editors’ and reviewers’ low interest and limited knowledge were ranked high in both regions. South Africa, Israel, and Turkey emerged as outliers, in which research barriers were less challenging than in the rest of the two regions. The authors attribute this difference to the high incidence of US-trained or US-based scholars originating from these countries. Originality/value – To the best of the knowledge, no marketing studies have discussed the problems of publishing in high-quality international journals of marketing, international business, and advertising for either region. Thus, most of the issues the authors discuss in this paper offer new insightful results while supplementing previous research on the challenges of conducting and publishing research on specific world regions.

PLEASE CITE THIS: an exploratory paper on citations, impacts and the social accounting literature

This paper seeks to use the increasingly influential citation and impact data to explore the contours of the social and environmental accounting (SEA) literature. Our ambitions are fourfold. First, we offer a more nuanced understanding of the journals in which we tend to publish SEA research. Second, we tease out what might plausibly be thought to be one indication of the ‘most influential’ SEA papers. Third, we offer a substantive cautionary note about the dangers of the careless use of citations as singular measures of ‘quality’ or ‘importance’, etc. Finally, we place the growing SEA literature in a wider context which both flatters and challenges the community that SEAJ seeks to serve.

Environmental and ecological economics in the 21st century: an age adjusted citation analysis of the most influential articles, journals, authors and institutions

We investigate the influence of articles, authors, journals and institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics. We depart from studies that investigated the literature until 2001 and include a time period that has witnessed an enormous increase of importance in the field. We adjust for the age effect given the huge impact of the year of an article's publication on its influence and we show that this adjustment does make a substantial difference — especially for disaggregated units of analysis with diverse age characteristics such as articles or authors. We analyse 6597 studies on environmental and ecological economics published between 2000 and 2009. We provide rankings of the influential articles, authors, journals and institutions and find that Ecological Economics, Energy Economics and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management have the most influential articles, they publish very influential authors and their articles are cited most. The University of Maryland, Resources for the Future, the University of East Anglia and the World Bank appear to be the most influential institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics.