Growth and development of biofeedback: a bibliographic update

Computerized literature searching techniques were used to examine publication patterns in the worldwide biofeedback literature. Searches were completed in the United States and in Japan for the years 1985 through 1987. The results were used to update the results of an earlier study that covered the years from 1964 through 1984. Publication growth curves were generated for several media, including scientific journal articles, books, doctoral dissertations, and popular magazine articles. Although publication of information about biofeedback remains active worldwide, there has been a declining trend in effect for the past several years. The American database grossly underestimated the number of Japanese biofeedback articles, and it is likely that the literatures of other countries outside of North America were similarly underestimated. Possible explanations for the various trends noted are discussed.     

Growth and development of biofeedback: a bibliographic analysis

A computerized search was performed, and a bibliography was prepared on the subject of biofeedback covering the years from 1964 to 1985. Growth curves were produced for various publication media. The search produced references to 2,431 journal articles, 102 books, 79 popular magazine articles, and 551 doctoral dissertations. The journal articles were sorted according to the country of publication, language, and primary topic of the journal. Citations were found from 35 countries, written in 18 languages. All the media studied showed a period of rapid growth during the early to middle 1970s, but there was a tendency for leveling off or slight decline during the early 1980s. Publication of articles in medical journals has shown the greatest growth, and more articles are published yearly in medical journals than in journals of any other discipline or all specialty journals combined. Publication in psychological journals has shown a decline since 1977. Dental, nursing, and educational journals have shown a low rate of publication of biofeedback articles, indicating little or no growth.     

Growth and development of biofeedback: A bibliographic analysis

A computerized search was performed, and a bibliography was prepared on the subject of biofeedback covering the years from 1964 to 1985. Growth curves were produced for various publication media. The search produced references to 2,431 journal articles, 102 books, 79 popular magazine articles, and 551 doctoral dissertations. The journal articles were sorted according to the country of publication, language, and primary topic of the journal. Citations were found from 35 countries, written in 18 languages. All the media studied showed a period of rapid growth during the early to middle 1970s, but there was a tendency for leveling off or slight decline during the early 1980s. Publication of articles in medical journals has shown the greatest growth, and more articles are published yearly in medical journals than in journals of any other discipline or all specialty journals combined. Publication in psychological journals has shown a decline since 1977. Dental, nursing, and educational journals have shown a low rate of publication of biofeedback articles, indicating little or no growth.We thank Ken Hartman for his assistance in performing this study.     

Response to the challenge: effective treatment of the elderly through thermal biofeedback combined with progression relaxation

This notes pursues the theme introduced in the first "Notes and Observations" publication: the effectiveness of biofeedback in treatment of the elderly. Current clinical results in progress are reported for a 76-year-old female hypertensive whose blood pressure has to date been lowered from 190/90 to 160/82 by means of thermal biofeedback in conjunction with progressive relaxation. These results are contrasted with reported failures in the headache study of elderly patients (Blanchard, Andrasik, Evans, & Hillhouse 1985). Results of this study are reinterpreted in terms of biofeedback modality rather than age of subjects.     

Response to the challenge: Effective treatment of the elderly through thermal biofeedback combined with progression relaxation

This notes pursues the theme introduced in the first Notes and Observations publication: the effectiveness of biofeedback in treatment of the elderly. Current clinical results in progress are reported for a 76-year-old female hypertensive whose blood pressure has to date been lowered from 190/90 to 160/82 by means of thermal biofeedback in conjunction with progressive relaxation. These results are contrasted with reported failures in the headache study of elderly patients (Blanchard, Andrasik, Evans, & Hillhouse 1985). Results of this study are reinterpreted in terms of biofeedback modality rather than age of subjects.     

Rising Publication Delays Inflate Journal Impact Factors

Journal impact factors have become an important criterion to judge the quality of scientific publications over the years, influencing the evaluation of institutions and individual researchers worldwide. However, they are also subject to a number of criticisms. Here we point out that the calculation of a journal’s impact factor is mainly based on the date of publication of its articles in print form, despite the fact that most journals now make their articles available online before that date. We analyze 61 neuroscience journals and show that delays between online and print publication of articles increased steadily over the last decade. Importantly, such a practice varies widely among journals, as some of them have no delays, while for others this period is longer than a year. Using a modified impact factor based on online rather than print publication dates, we demonstrate that online-to-print delays can artificially raise a journal’s impact factor, and that this inflation is greater for longer publication lags. We also show that correcting the effect of publication delay on impact factors changes journal rankings based on this metric. We thus suggest that indexing of articles in citation databases and calculation of citation metrics should be based on the date of an article’s online appearance, rather than on that of its publication in print.     

Scientific and clinical biofeedback in the USSR

This paper describes the history of biofeedback research and application in the USSR. The approach of USSR scientists to the study of basic mechanisms of biofeedback and the status of clinical applications of biofeedback in the Soviet Union are described. Trends in the publication of biofeedback-related papers in Russian are presented, and the present state of the art described. Promising prospects for biofeedback research and application are discussed.     

PUBLICATION ETHICS AND THE GHOST MANAGEMENT OF MEDICAL PUBLICATION

It is by now no secret that some scientific articles are ghost authored – that is, written by someone other than the person whose name appears at the top of the article. Ghost authorship, however, is only one sort of ghosting. In this article, we present evidence that pharmaceutical companies engage in the ghost management of the scientific literature, by controlling or shaping several crucial steps in the research, writing, and publication of scientific articles. Ghost management allows the pharmaceutical industry to shape the literature in ways that serve its interests. This article aims to reinforce and expand publication ethics as an important area of concern for bioethics. Since ghost‐managed research is primarily undertaken in the interests of marketing, large quantities of medical research violate not just publication norms but also research ethics. Much of this research involves human subjects, and yet is performed not primarily to increase knowledge for broad human benefit, but to disseminate results in the service of profits. Those who sponsor, manage, conduct, and publish such research therefore behave unethically, since they put patients at risk without justification. This leads us to a strong conclusion: if medical journals want to ensure that the research they publish is ethically sound, they should not publish articles that are commercially sponsored.     

Dermanyssus gallinae in non-avian hosts: A case report in a dog and review of the literature

Non-avian attacks of the worldwide distributed mite Dermanyssus gallinae are occasionally reported. However, it is widely accepted that their occurrence is underestimated. The present study aims to describe the first Italian case of dermanyssosis in a dog, to molecularly characterize the mites collected from the patient and the animal enclosure, where poultry and dog were confined, and to review the current literature on the non-avian attacks by D. gallinae. The dog was successfully treated with an oral sarolaner-based product, followed by a spot-on formulation of imidacloprid and moxidectin. The infestation source was likely attributable to poultry and confirmed by molecular identification of D. gallinae sensu strictu.Ten articles on non-avian D. gallinae attacks in domestic animals and wildlife were retrieved, pointing out the need for more awareness amongst practitioners. The therapeutic effect of available antiparasitic drugs, currently used off-label, should also be better explored in non-avian hosts.     

中国荔波世界自然遗产地动物模式标本名录

了解荔波世界自然遗产地动物模式标本分类学研究历史, 可为遗产地履行联合国教科文组织世界遗产中心的要求以及生物多样性保护工作提供参考。本文采用内容分析法, 对采自该遗产地并确立为模式种的物种, 收集相关文献并进行整理和分析, 编制了中国荔波世界自然遗产地动物模式标本名录。结果表明: (1)荔波世界自然遗产地动物模式标本共有204种, 隶属于3门6纲22目60科; (2)动物模式标本物种采集最早可追溯到1955年, 最近为2013年, 两者相隔58年, 而采集高峰期为1995-2004年; (3)以国内学者3人合力发表的物种最多(93种, 占总种数的45.59%); (4)模式物种的橱柜时间严重滞后, 从采集到发表滞后最长的达47年; (5)模式标本涉及66位采集人(或团队), 以国内学者居多(63位, 占总人数的95.45%); (6)遗产地动物模式标本被保存于27家国内外研究机构或私人收藏, 国内收藏1,504号标本, 国外收藏7号; (7)遗产地动物模式标本物种发表于169篇文献, 中文文献有155篇, 外文文献有14篇。随着研究的深入, 荔波世界自然遗产地有更多的新种不断被发现, 说明遗产地物种资源丰富, 生物多样性存在被低估的可能性, 暗示遗产地的物种分类研究工作仍需要投入大量的精力。     

High-Ranked Social Science Journal Articles Can Be Identified from Early Citation Information

Do citations accumulate too slowly in the social sciences to be used to assess the quality of recent articles? I investigate whether this is the case using citation data for all articles in economics and political science published in 2006 and indexed in the Web of Science. I find that citations in the first two years after publication explain more than half of the variation in cumulative citations received over a longer period. Journal impact factors improve the correlation between the predicted and actual future ranks of journal articles when using citation data from 2006 alone but the effect declines sharply thereafter. Finally, more than half of the papers in the top 20% in 2012 were already in the top 20% in the year of publication (2006).     

Biofeedback for Psychiatric Disorders: A Systematic Review

Biofeedback potentially provides non-invasive, effective psychophysiological interventions for psychiatric disorders. The encompassing purpose of this review was to establish how biofeedback interventions have been used to treat select psychiatric disorders [anxiety, autistic spectrum disorders, depression, dissociation, eating disorders, schizophrenia and psychoses] to date and provide a useful reference for consultation by clinicians and researchers planning to administer a biofeedback treatment. A systematic search of EMBASE, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and WOK databases and hand searches in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, and Journal of Neurotherapy, identified 227 articles; 63 of which are included within this review. Electroencephalographic neurofeedback constituted the most investigated modality (31.7 %). Anxiety disorders were the most commonly treated (68.3 %). Multi-modal biofeedback appeared most effective in significantly ameliorating symptoms, suggesting that targeting more than one physiological modality for bio-regulation increases therapeutic efficacy. Overall, 80.9 % of articles reported some level of clinical amelioration related to biofeedback exposure, 65.0 % to a statistically significant (p < .05) level of symptom reduction based on reported standardized clinical parameters. Although the heterogeneity of the included studies warrants caution before explicit efficacy statements can be made. Further development of standardized controlled methodological protocols tailored for specific disorders and guidelines to generate comprehensive reports may contribute towards establishing the value of biofeedback interventions within mainstream psychiatry.     

Reference bias in reports of drug trials.

Articles published before 1985 describing double blind trials of two or more non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in rheumatoid arthritis were examined to see whether there was any bias in the references they cited. Althogether 244 articles meeting the criteria were found through a Medline search and through examining the reference lists of the articles retrieved. The drugs compared in the studies were classified as new or as control drugs and the outcome of the trial as positive or not positive. The reference lists of all papers with references to other trials on the new drug were then examined for reference bias. Positive bias was judged to have occurred if the reference list contained a higher proportion of references with a positive outcome for that drug than among all the articles assumed to have been available to the authors (those published more than two years earlier than the index article). Altogether 133 of the 244 articles were excluded for various reasons--for example, 44 because of multiple publication and 19 because they had no references. Among the 111 articles analysed bias was not possible in the references of 35 (because all the references gave the same outcome); 10 had a neutral selection of references, 22 a negative selection, and 44 a positive selection--a significant positive bias. This bias was not caused by better scientific standing of the cited articles over the uncited ones. Thus retrieving literature by scanning reference lists may produce a biased sample of articles, and reference bias may also render the conclusions of an article less reliable.     

LitDB - Keeping Track of Research Papers From Your Institute Made Simple

Background

In science peer-reviewed publications serve as an important indicator of scientific excellence and productivity. Therefore, every scientist and institution must carefully maintain and update records of their scientific publications. However, in most institutions and universities articles are often managed in a redundant file-based and non-central way. Whereas excellent reference management software packages such as Zotero, Endnote or Mendeley exist to manage bibliographies and references when writing scientific articles, we are not aware of any open source database solution keeping track of publication records from large scientific groups, entire institutions and/or universities.

Results

We here describe LitDB, a novel open source literature database solution for easy maintenance of publication lists assigned to various topics. In the last 2 years more than 50 users have been using LitDB at our research institute. The LitDB system is accessed via a web browser. Publications can be uploaded through direct exports from reference manager libraries or by entering PubMed IDs. Single users or user groups can track their citation counts, h-index and impact factor statistics and gain insights into the publication records of other users. It offers various visualization functions like coauthor networks and provides ways to organize publications from dedicated projects and user groups. The latter is in particular beneficial to manage publication lists of large research groups and research initiatives through a “crowd-sourcing” effort.

Conclusions

Keeping track of papers authored and published by a research group, institute or university is an important and non-trivial task. By using a centralized web-based platform for publication management such as LitDB the compilation of project- and group-related publication lists becomes easily manageable and it is less likely that papers are forgotten along the way.

     

Effects of Biofeedback in Phonatory Disorders and Phonatory Performance: A Systematic Literature Review

The purpose of this article was to systematically review the literature on the effects of biofeedback therapy in the domain of phonatory disorders and phonatory performance, using studies in peer-reviewed journals. An extensive definition of biofeedback is given and its place in voice treatment is defined. Eighteen group or case studies or reports considering the effects of electromyographic, laryngoscopic and acoustic biofeedback in dysphonic patients (hyperfunctional voice disorders, hypofunctional voice disorders, psychogenic voice disorder, laryngeal trauma, total laryngectomy, vocal cord dysfunction) and participants with normal voices are included and an analysis of procedure as well as research design and results is presented. The usefulness of biofeedback in phonatory disorders and performance was to be interpreted based on tendencies, since there is a lack of randomized controlled efficacy studies. In only 3 of 18 studies (16.7%) did biofeedback therapy fail to improve voice quality or not result in better results than other forms of therapy. Recommendations for improved methodologies are made, which include the use of acoustic voice quality parameters.     

张氏红山茶——一个具有优先权的合法和正确名称

张氏红山茶Camellia changii Ye是1985年在广东省植物学年会上以抽印本先行发表的,依照国际植物命名法规第29.1条款,第30.4条款和第31.1条款,根据它刊印在广东省植物学会会刊第三期在发表时间上的说明以及1985年12月20日编印的广东省植物学会1985年年会论文目录,均表明张氏红山茶的学名是一个有效发表和合格发表的名称。C.azalea Wei是张氏红山茶的一个晚出异名,中国植物志合并了C.azalea Wei应是权威的选择,对此应该加以尊重。     

Three options for citation tracking: Google Scholar,Scopus and Web of Science

Background

Researchers turn to citation tracking to find the most influential articles for a particular topic and to see how often their own published papers are cited. For years researchers looking for this type of information had only one resource to consult: the Web of Science from Thomson Scientific. In 2004 two competitors emerged – Scopus from Elsevier and Google Scholar from Google. The research reported here uses citation analysis in an observational study examining these three databases; comparing citation counts for articles from two disciplines (oncology and condensed matter physics) and two years (1993 and 2003) to test the hypothesis that the different scholarly publication coverage provided by the three search tools will lead to different citation counts from each.

Methods

Eleven journal titles with varying impact factors were selected from each discipline (oncology and condensed matter physics) using the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). All articles published in the selected titles were retrieved for the years 1993 and 2003, and a stratified random sample of articles was chosen, resulting in four sets of articles. During the week of November 7–12, 2005, the citation counts for each research article were extracted from the three sources. The actual citing references for a subset of the articles published in 2003 were also gathered from each of the three sources.

Results

For oncology 1993 Web of Science returned the highest average number of citations, 45.3. Scopus returned the highest average number of citations (8.9) for oncology 2003. Web of Science returned the highest number of citations for condensed matter physics 1993 and 2003 (22.5 and 3.9 respectively). The data showed a significant difference in the mean citation rates between all pairs of resources except between Google Scholar and Scopus for condensed matter physics 2003. For articles published in 2003 Google Scholar returned the largest amount of unique citing material for oncology and Web of Science returned the most for condensed matter physics.

Conclusion

This study did not identify any one of these three resources as the answer to all citation tracking needs. Scopus showed strength in providing citing literature for current (2003) oncology articles, while Web of Science produced more citing material for 2003 and 1993 condensed matter physics, and 1993 oncology articles. All three tools returned some unique material. Our data indicate that the question of which tool provides the most complete set of citing literature may depend on the subject and publication year of a given article.

     

Analysis of acanthocephalan literature published since 1900.

The data for this study are based on more than 6000 articles that mention Acanthocephala. The results indicate: (1) the difficulty in being current on world literature. It took about 3 years beyond the date of publication to discover many articles. (2) Except for World Wars I and II there has been a sustained increase in the number of articles. At present this rate exceeds 1000 titles per 5-year period. (3) Investigator interest, as measured by multiple publications by a given author, has remained very small. (4) Most publications have originated in the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. followed by Great Britain and Germany. (5) Number of authors per title has increased dramatically. Currently, there are more four-author than single-author articles. (6) Fish are host animals most likely to be mentioned as containing acanthocephalans.     

Scientific and clinical biofeedback in the USSR

This paper describes the history of biofeedback research and application in the USSR. The approach of USSR scientists to the study of basic mechanisms of biofeedback and the status of clinical applications of biofeedback in the Soviet Union are described. Trends in the publication of biofeedback-related papers in Russian are presented, and the present "state of the art" described. Promising prospects for biofeedback research and application are discussed.