Social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and Crowdrise offer new ways for nonprofits to engage the community in fundraising efforts. This study employs data from Facebook Causes to examine the nature and determinants of charitable giving in social networking environments. Our findings suggest donations on these sites are not driven by the same factors as in “off-line” settings. Instead, a social network effect takes precedence over traditional economic explanations. Facebook donors do not seem to care about efficiency ratios, their donations are typically small, and fundraising success is related not to the organization’s financial capacity but to its “Web capacity.” Moreover, online donors are prone to contribute to certain categories of causes more than others, especially those related to health. Given the growth in social media-driven fundraising—and the increase in crowdfunding, slacktivism, impulse donating, and other new practices this entails—these findings carry notable theoretical and practical implications.

International research collaboration plays an important role in the social construction and evolution of science. Studies of science increasingly analyze international collaboration across multiple organizations for its impetus in improving research quality, advancing efficiency of the scientific production, and fostering breakthroughs in a shorter time. However, long-run patterns of international research collaboration across scientific fields and their structural changes over time are hardly known. Here we show the convergence of international scientific collaboration across research fields over time. Our study uses a dataset by the National Science Foundation and computes the fraction of papers that have international institutional coauthorships for various fields of science. We compare our results with pioneering studies carried out in the 1970s and 1990s by applying a standardization method that transforms all fractions of internationally coauthored papers into a comparable framework. We find, over 1973–2012, that the evolution of collaboration patterns across scientific disciplines seems to generate a convergence between applied and basic sciences. We also show that the general architecture of international scientific collaboration, based on the ranking of fractions of international coauthorships for different scientific fields per year, has tended to be unchanged over time, at least until now. Overall, this study shows, to our knowledge for the first time, the evolution of the patterns of international scientific collaboration starting from initial results described by literature in the 1970s and 1990s. We find a convergence of these long-run collaboration patterns between the applied and basic sciences. This convergence might be one of contributing factors that supports the evolution of modern scientific fields.

The impact of the scientific output produced by different nations in different fields varies extensively. In this article, we apply bibliometric and econometric analysis to identify which countries are producing research with relatively higher scientific influence, and to understand what factors lead to higher citation impact. We focus specifically on the Global South because countries in this group are starting to converge in terms of output with the Global North. We find that previous citation impact, level of international collaboration and total publications in a specific scientific field are important determinants of citation impact among all nations. Yet, specialisation in particular scientific fields seems significantly more important in the Global South than in the Global North. We propose possible explanations for the patterns found and derive some policy implications.

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Using a keyword mining approach, this paper explores the interdisciplinary and integrative dynamics in five nano research fields. We argue that the general trend of integration in nano research fields is converging in the long run, although the degree of this convergence depends greatly on the indicators one chooses. Our results show that nano technologies applied in the five studied nano fields become more diverse over time. One field learns more and more related technologies from others. The publication and citation analysis also proves that nano technology has developed to a relatively mature stage and has become a standardized and codified technology.

The pattern and impact of scientific collaborations depends on a country’s or region’s development stage. Prior to promoting scientific collaborations, it is crucial to understand what types of collaboration are more beneficial. By taking the stage of regional scientific development into consideration, this paper investigates the effect of various collaborations on regional scientific output. Our results highlight the differences between collaboration effects across regions at various capability levels. Scientifically weak regions benefit from more concentrated collaboration, in particular with advanced domestic regions. However, scientifically strong regions can benefit from a centrally located position in a broader collaboration network. Findings from this analysis indicate that international collaborations might not be beneficial a priori. Whether or not one region benefits from international collaborations depends on this region’s local capacity. Being embedded in a broad network structure can help increase one region’s publication output. However, such benefit is limited only to regions that have relatively higher research capacity.

The rapid development of flexible electronics, human–computer interaction, wireless technology, the Internet of Things, and internet health is promoting fast-past innovation in the field of wearable medical devices. Wearable devices are a category of personalized devices that include specialized sensors, which can make conformal contact with the human body or tissue to collect biochemical or electrophysiological signals. Hence, the development of high-precision flexible devices is attracting increasing interest as they can provide real-time medical data for monitoring the physiological state of patients and their diagnosis and treatment, as well as help individuals to pursue a healthier lifestyle. This Perspective reviews the developments and requirements of wearable flexible electronic devices in medical monitoring and then discusses the possible applications and challenges of using flexible sensor technology for point-of-care devices. Finally, an up-to-date discussion of the flexible sensor, its future prospects, and solutions it could provide in medical and diagnostic equipment are summarized.