bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Rise in higher education researchers and academic publications
Authors: To W.M. , Yu Billy T.W. 
Published: January 2024

Background: How many higher education researchers are there in the world? How many academic articles are published by researchers each year? This paper aims to answer these two questions by tracking the number of higher education teachers and the number of publications over the past four decades.
Methods: We collected data on the number of higher education institutions and researchers from the United Nations, the World Bank, and the US, China, and UK governments (three countries with the largest number of academic publications in recent years). We used Scopus to obtain the number of publications per year. The growth of higher education researchers and academic publications were characterized using 4-parameter logistic models.
Results: The number of higher education teachers-cum-researchers increased from 4 million in 1980 to 13.1 million in 2018 worldwide. Concurrently, the number of academic publications increased from 0.65 million in 1980 to 3.16 million in 2018 based on data from Scopus. At the country level, the number of academic publications from the USA increased from 0.15 million in 1980 to 0.70 million in 2018, while that from China increased by almost 1,000 times from 629 in 1980 to 0.60 million in 2018.
Conclusions: The number of higher education researchers would reach 13.6 million and they would publish 3.21 million academic articles in 2020, imposing enormous pressure to publishers, peer-reviewers, and people who want to understand emerging scientific development. Additionally, not all academic publications are easily assessable because most articles are behind pay-walls. In addition, unethical research practices including falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, slicing publication, publication in a predatory journal or conference, etc. may hinder scientific and human development.
Secondary school teachers' perception of quality management practices in Ethiopia: implications for quality education for all
Authors: Alemu Aklilu 
Published: January 2024

Background: Most children in low-income countries complete their elementary education with low competency in essential reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. Besides, about 250 million students are not learning the basics, most of whom have spent at least four years in school, and this failure is coined the global learning crisis. This study aimed to examine educational quality management practices perceived by secondary school teachers.
Methods: The study employed a multilevel mixed-method design. Employing a simple random sampling technique, the researcher selected 251 teachers from 10 secondary schools in the research regions. He collected data through a researcher-designed questionnaire, school standards, and student achievement records from November 2018 to March 2019. He analyzed data from a questionnaire using frequency, percentage, mean, Pearson correlation, and exploratory factor analysis. The document review concerning quality management was analyzed using content analysis to triangulate the quantitative findings.
Results: At the school level, the study revealed the impracticality of laboratories. Besides, incompetent and unmotivated teachers and students ran the education business from the input side. At the same level, principals' management practices on staff development and encouraging parents to support their schools were low. The principals' management practices in the teaching-learning process were also undesirable at the classroom level. Overall, the study revealed incredibly insufficient input, process, and output management in the study context.
Conclusion: Hence, the study concluded that it is difficult to achieve the very objectives of producing creative, critical, and problem-solving individuals through this type of educational provision and its management. Due to this, it is not easy to achieve quality education for all goals.
Experiences and perspectives regarding challenge-based learning in online sustainability education
Authors: Kasch Julia , Bootsma Margien , Schutjens Veronique , van Dam Frans , Kirkels Arjan , Prins Frans , Rebel Karin 
Published: January 2024

In this opinion article, the authors share their experiences with and perspectives on course design requirements and barriers when applying challenge-based learning (CBL) in an online sustainability education setting. CBL is an established learning approach for (higher) sustainability education. It enables teachers to engage students with open, real-life grand challenges through inter-/transdisciplinary student team collaboration. However, empirical research is scarce and mainly based on face-to-face CBL case studies. Thus far, the opportunities to apply CBL in online educational settings are also underinvestigated.Using the TPACK framework, the authors address technological, pedagogical and content knowledge related to CBL and online sustainability education. The integration of the different components is discussed, providing teachers and course designers insight into design requirements and barriers.This paper supports the promising future of online CBL for sustainability education, especially in the context of inter-/national inter-university collaboration, yet emphasizes the need for deliberate use of online collaboration and teaching tools.
COVID-19 lockdown controls and human rights abuses: the socioeconomic and social marketing implications
Authors: Odigbo Ben , Eze Felix , Odigbo Rose , Kajang Joshua 
Published: January 2024

Background: This work is a situation analysis of reported human rights abuses that have characterized the COVID-19 controls and lockdown in some countries of the world. This is as documented by reliable mass media sources, relevant international organizations and human rights non-governmental organizations between January 2020 to April 2020.
Methods: A combined content analysis, critical analysis, and doctrinal method is applied in this study in line with the reproducible research process. It is a secondary-data-based situation analysis study, conducted through a qualitative research approach.
Findings: The findings revealed among other things that: COVID-19 lockdowns and curfews' enforcement by law enforcement officers contravened some people's fundamental human rights within the first month. Security forces employed overt and immoderate forces to implement the orders. The lockdown and curfew enforcements were not significantly respectful of human life and human dignity. The COVID-19 emergency declarations in some countries were discriminatory against minorities and vulnerable groups in some countries.
Research limitations/implications: This report is based on data from investigative journalism and opinions of the United Nations and international human rights organizations, and not on police investigations or reports. The implication of the study is that if social marketing orientations and risk communication and community engagement attitudes were given to the law enforcement officers implementing the COVID-19 lockdowns and or curfews, the human rights and humanitarian rights breaches witnessed would have been avoided or drastically minimized.
Originality: The originality of this review is that it is the first to undertake a situation analysis of the COVID-19 lockdowns and curfews human rights abuses in some countries. The study portrayed the poor level of social marketing orientations and risk communication and community engagement attitudes amongst law enforcement officers, culminating in the frosty police-public relationships.
Success of the “first-time first-line manager”: model development and validation
Authors: Raulgaonkar Haresh 
Published: January 2024

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors involved in the success of a ‘first-time first-line Manager’ (FTFLM), and establish a model for the success of a FTFLM using these identified factors.
Methods: Empirical factors influencing the success of a first-line manager were gathered through the literature review and an experience survey of managers. Based on these factors, a questionnaire for primary research was developed and used for the survey. An exploratory factor analysis of the collected data yielded a nine-factor model which was validated using confirmatory factor analysis.
Findings: A major portion (74%) of the FTFLM’s success factors are under the direct control of the FTFLM. The remaining portion (26%) are influenced by the organization’s procedures and policies for grooming the FTFLM and the attitude and behaviour of management towards the FTFLM.
Reconnecting with nature: developing urban spaces in the age of climate change
Authors: Lehmann Steffen 
Published: January 2024

Climate change is occurring around us and impacting on our daily lives, meaning that we have to deal with our cities in a different way. There is also increasing awareness of the need for daily contact with green spaces and the natural environment in order to live a happy, productive and meaningful life.
This reflective essay tells the narrative of how urbanisation has been disconnecting humans from nature. Non-sustainable, non-resilient patterns of urbanisation, along with the neglect of inner-city areas, have resulted in fragmentation and urban decline, led to a loss of biodiversity, and caused the deterioration of ecosystems and their services. Urban regeneration projects allow us to “repair” and restore some of this damage whilst enhancing urban resilience. Connecting existing and enhanced ecosystems, and re-establishing ecosystems both within cities and at the peri-urban fringe is vital for strengthening ecosystem resilience and building adaptive capacity for coping with the effects of climate change.
Cities worldwide need to look for suitable solutions to increase the resilience of their urban spaces in the face of climate change. This essay explores how this can be achieved through the integration of nature-based solutions, the re-greening of neighbourhoods and by correctly attributing value to natural capital. Transforming existing cities and neighbourhoods in this way will enable ecosystems to contribute their services towards healthier and more liveable cities.
The unplanned city: public space and the spatial character of urban informality
Authors: Lehmann Steffen 
Published: January 2024

The “unplannable” is a welcomed exception to the formal order of urban planning. This opinion article explores some examples of informal urbanism and discusses its ambiguous relationship to public space and unplanned activities in the city. The informal sector offers important lessons about the adaptive use of space and its social role. The article examines the ways specific groups appropriate informal spaces and how this can add to a city’s entrepreneurship and success. The characteristics of informal, interstitial spaces within the contemporary city, and the numerous creative ways in which these temporarily used spaces are appropriated, challenge the prevalent critical discourse about our understanding of authorised public space, formal place-making and social order within the city in relation to these informal spaces.
The text discusses various cases from Chile, the US and China that illustrate the dilemma of the relationship between informality and public/private space today. One could say that informality is a deregulated self-help system that redefines relationships with the formal. Temporary or permanent spatial appropriation has behavioural, economic and cultural dimensions, and forms of the informalare not always immediately obvious: they are not mentioned in building codes and can often be subversive or unexpected, emerging in the grey area between legal and illegal activities.
Estimation of annual average daily traffic (AADT) data for low-volume roads: a systematic literature review and meta-analysis
Authors: Baffoe-Twum Edmund , Asa Eric , Awuku Bright 
Published: January 2024

Background: The annual average daily traffic (AADT) data from road segments are critical for roadway projects, especially with the decision-making processes about operations, travel demand, safety-performance evaluation, and maintenance. Regular updates help to determine traffic patterns for decision-making. Unfortunately, the luxury of having permanent recorders on all road segments, especially low-volume roads, is virtually impossible. Consequently, insufficient AADT information is acquired for planning and new developments. A growing number of statistical, mathematical, and machine-learning algorithms have helped estimate AADT data values accurately, to some extent, at both sampled and unsampled locations on low-volume roadways. In some cases, roads with no representative AADT data are resolved with information from roadways with similar traffic patterns.
Methods: This study adopted an integrative approach with a combined systematic literature review (SLR) and meta-analysis (MA) to identify and to evaluate the performance, the sources of error, and possible advantages and disadvantages of the techniques utilized most for estimating AADT data. As a result, an SLR of various peer-reviewed articles and reports was completed to answer four research questions.
Results: The study showed that the most frequent techniques utilized to estimate AADT data on low-volume roadways were regression, artificial neural-network techniques, travel-demand models, the traditional factor approach, and spatial interpolation techniques. These AADT data-estimating methods' performance was subjected to meta-analysis. Three studies were completed: R squared, root means square error, and mean absolute percentage error. The meta-analysis results indicated a mixed summary effect: 1. all studies were equal; 2. all studies were not comparable. However, the integrated qualitative and quantitative approach indicated that spatial-interpolation (Kriging) methods outperformed the others.
Conclusions: Spatial-interpolation methods may be selected over others to generate accurate AADT data by practitioners at all levels for decision making. Besides, the resulting cross-validation statistics give statistics like the other methods' performance measures.
Estimating annual average daily traffic (AADT) data on low-volume roads with the cokriging technique and census/population data
Authors: Baffoe-Twum Edmund , Asa Eric , Awuku Bright 
Published: January 2024

Background: Geostatistics focuses on spatial or spatiotemporal datasets. Geostatistics was initially developed to generate probability distribution predictions of ore grade in the mining industry; however, it has been successfully applied in diverse scientific disciplines. This technique includes univariate, multivariate, and simulations. Kriging geostatistical methods, simple, ordinary, and universal Kriging, are not multivariate models in the usual statistical function. Notwithstanding, simple, ordinary, and universal kriging techniques utilize random function models that include unlimited random variables while modeling one attribute. The coKriging technique is a multivariate estimation method that simultaneously models two or more attributes defined with the same domains as coregionalization.
Objective: This study investigates the impact of populations on traffic volumes as a variable. The additional variable determines the strength or accuracy obtained when data integration is adopted. In addition, this is to help improve the estimation of annual average daily traffic (AADT).
Methods procedures, process: The investigation adopts the coKriging technique with AADT data from 2009 to 2016 from Montana, Minnesota, and Washington as primary attributes and population as a controlling factor (second variable). CK is implemented for this study after reviewing the literature and work completed by comparing it with other geostatistical methods.
Results, observations, and conclusions: The Investigation employed two variables. The data integration methods employed in CK yield more reliable models because their strength is drawn from multiple variables. The cross-validation results of the model types explored with the CK technique successfully evaluate the interpolation technique's performance and help select optimal models for each state. The results from Montana and Minnesota models accurately represent the states' traffic and population density. The Washington model had a few exceptions. However, the secondary attribute helped yield an accurate interpretation. Consequently, the impact of tourism, shopping, recreation centers, and possible transiting patterns throughout the state is worth exploring.
Growing your own in times of crisis: the role of home food growing in perceived food insecurity and well-being during the early COVID-19 lockdown
Authors: Mead Bethan R. , Davies Jessica A.C. , Falagán Natalia , Kourmpetli Sofia , Liu Lingxuan , Hardman Charlotte A. 
Published: January 2024

Household food insecurity and poor well-being have increased during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and resulting lockdown measures. Home food growing has been associated with improved food access and well-being, but it is unknown what role it plays during food supply crises and lockdown. It is also unclear how home food growing and social restrictions may affect opinions about growing food in urban areas (i.e. urban agriculture; UA).

A cross-sectional online survey was conducted during the UK national lockdown in March-April 2020 to measure home food growing, perceived food insecurity, well-being, and opinions of UA. The participants were 477 UK-based adults (369 female, mean age 39.57 years ± 13.36); 152 participants were engaged in home food growing prior to the pandemic. Responses were compared to data collected from a separate sample of participants before the pandemic (N=583) to explore potential shifts in opinions about UA.

Participants who engaged in home food growing had lower levels of food insecurity (U­=19894.50, z=−3.649, p<0.001, r=−0.167) and higher well-being (U=19566.50, z=−3.666, p<0.001, r=−0.168) than those not engaged in home food growing. Perceived food insecurity partially mediated the relationship between home food growing and well-being; home food growing was associated with less food insecurity, which in turn was associated with better well-being. There were no differences in opinions of UA compared to the sample of participants from before the pandemic.
Home food growing may have had a protective effect over perceived food security and well-being in the early stages the pandemic. Opinions of UA were positive and unchanged compared to data collected pre-pandemic. Policies that support home food growing and access to suitable growing spaces and resources may be beneficial for food system resilience and well-being.
Determinants of perception of climate change and adaptation strategies of coffee-based agroforestry farmers in western Ethiopia
Authors: Chemeda Beshea Abdissa , Wakjira Feyera Senbeta , Birhane Emiru 
Published: January 2024

Background: A range of local social and environmental factors has an impact on farmers' views of climate change and choices on the use of coping mechanisms. This study examines the factors that are limiting farmers' perceptions of climate change and their coping mechanisms in Gimbi district, Western Ethiopia.
Methods: A household survey and focus group discussion were employed to collect relevant data. A total of 402 randomly selected households and six focus group discussions containing 72 participants were used to gather data. Binary logit models were used to analyze the collected data.
Results: Farmers noted that some of the signs of climate change included increasing temperature, erratic rainfall, late onset of rainfall, and early cessation of rainfall. We discovered that there are three distinct sets of climate adaption strategies used by farmers: crop management, soil and water conservation and intensive farm management. The primary determinants of farmers' perceptions of climate change and adaptation techniques were household head age, education, soil fertility, market access, and agricultural training. Age, education, and soil fertility level were the characteristics that significantly impacted farmers' perspectives and coping mechanisms among the primary drivers evaluated in the area. Use of agroforestry, shifting planting dates, and fertilizer application were all essential farming practices used as climate adaptation measures.
Conclusions: Both socioeconomic and environmental factors have found to affect farmers' perceptions of climate change in the area. The existing socioeconomic and environmental factors, in turn, affect their choice of strategies to adapt to climate change. When implementing climate change adaption strategies, it is critical to assess farmers' level of awareness of climate change and their coping strategies, as well as the factors limiting their ability to adapt to climate change.
Reflections on developing a collaborative multi-disciplinary approach to embedding education for sustainable development into higher education curricula
Authors: Strachan Scott , Logan Louise , Willison Debra , Bain Rod , Roberts Jennifer , Mitchell Iain , Yarr Roddy 
Published: January 2024

As higher education institutions (HEIs) have increasingly turned to consider sustainability over the last decade, education for sustainable development (ESD) has emerged as a way of imbuing students with the skills, values, knowledge, and attributes to live, work, and create change in societies facing complex and cross-cutting sustainability challenges. However, the question of how HEIs can actively embed ESD more broadly in and across curricula is one that continues to challenge institutions and the HE sector as a whole. While traditional teaching practices and methods associated with subject-based learning may be suitable for educating students about sustainable development, a re-orientation towards more transformational, experiential and action-oriented methods is required to educate for sustainable development. The need for educators to share their practices and learn lessons from each other is essential in this transformation.
This paper presents a selection of practical examples of how to embed a range of interactive, exploratory, action-oriented, problem-based, experiential and transformative ESD offerings into HE teaching practice and curricula. Presented by a group of academics and professional services staff at the University of Strathclyde who lead key modules and programmes in the institution’s ESD provision, this paper reflects on five approaches taken across the four faculties at Strathclyde (Humanities and Social Sciences, Science, Engineering and the Strathclyde Business School) and examines the challenges, practicalities and opportunities involved in establishing a collaborative programme of ESD.