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This paper aims to analyze the relationships between discourse leading indicators and citations from perspectives of integrating altmetrics indicators and tries to provide references for comprehending the quantitative indicators of scientific communication in the era of open science, constructing the evaluation indicator system of the discourse leading for academic journals and then improving the discourse leading of academic journals.

Based on the theory of communication and the new pattern of scientific communication, this paper explores the formation process of academic journals' discourse leading. This paper obtains 874,119 citations and 6,378,843 altmetrics indicators data from 65 international multidisciplinary academic journals. The relationships between indicators of discourse leading (altmetrics) and citations are studied by using descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis, principal component analysis, negative binomial regression analysis and marginal effects analysis. Meanwhile, the connotation and essential characteristics of the indicators, the strength and influence of the relationships are further analyzed and explored. It is proposed that academic journals' discourse leading is composed of news discourse leading, social media discourse leading, peer review discourse leading, encyclopedic discourse leading, video discourse leading and policy discourse leading.

It is discovered that the 15 altmetrics indicators data have a low degree of centralization to the center and a high degree of polarization dispersion overall; their distribution patterns do not follow the normal distributions, and their distributions have the characteristics of long-tailed right-peaked curves. Overall, 15 indicators show positive correlations and wide gaps exist in the number of mentions and coverage. The academic journals' discourse leading significantly affects total cites. When altmetrics indicators of international mainstream academic and social media platforms are used to explore the connotation and characteristics of academic journals' discourse leading, the influence or contribution of social media discourse, news discourse, video discourse, policy discourse, peer review discourse and encyclopedia discourse on the citations decreases in turn.

This study is innovative from the academic journal level to analyze the deep relationships between altmetrics indicators and citations from the perspective of correlation. First, this paper explores the formation process of academic journals' discourse leading. Second, this paper integrates altmetrics indicators to study the correlation between discourse leading indicators and citations. This study will help to enrich and improve basic theoretical issues and indicators’ composition, provide theoretical support for the construction of the discourse leading evaluation system for academic journals and provide ideas for the evaluation practice activities.

It is a well-accepted note that to enhance safety performance in a project by preventing hazards, recognizing the safety leading indicators is of paramount importance.

In this research, the relationship between safety leading indicators is determined, and their impacts on the project are assessed and visualized throughout the time of the project in a proactive manner. Construction and safety experts are first interviewed to determine the most important safety leading indicators of the construction industry, and then the relationships that may exist between them are identified. Furthermore, a system dynamics model is generated using the interviews and integrated with an add-on developed on the building information modeling (BIM) platform. Finally, the impacts of the safety leading indicators on the project are calculated based on their time of occurrence, impact time and effective radius.

The add-on generates a heat-map that visualizes the impacts of the safety leading indicators on the project through time. Moreover, to assess the effectiveness of the developed tool, a case study is conducted on a station located on a water transfer line. In order to validate the results of the tool, a survey is also conducted from the project's staff and experts in the field. Previous studies have so far focused on active safety leading indicators that may result in a particular hazard, and the importance of the effects that safety leading indicators have on another is not considered. This study considers their effects on each other in a real-time manner.

Using this tool project's stakeholders and staff can identify the hazards proactively; hence, they can make the required decisions in advance to reduce the impact of associated events. Moreover, two other potentially contributions of the presented work can be enumerated as: firstly, the findings provide a knowledge framework of active safety leading indicators and their interactions for construction safety researchers who can go on to further study safety management. Secondly, the proposed framework contributes to encouragement of time-based location-based preventive strategies on construction sites.

Under the background of open science, this paper integrates altmetrics data and combines multiple evaluation methods to analyze and evaluate the indicators' characteristics of discourse leading for academic journals, which is of great significance to enrich and improve the evaluation theory and indicator system of academic journals.

This paper obtained 795,631 citations and 10.3 million altmetrics indicators data for 126,424 published papers from 151 medicine, general and internal academic journals. In this paper, descriptive statistical analysis and distribution rules of evaluation indicators are first carried out at the macro level. The distribution characteristics of evaluation indicators under different international collaboration conditions are analyzed at the micro level. Second, according to the characteristics and connotation of the evaluation indicators, the evaluation indicator system is constructed. Third, correlation analysis, factor analysis, entropy weight method and TOPSIS method are adopted to evaluate and analyze the discourse leading in medicine, general and internal academic journals by integrating altmetrics. At the same time, this paper verifies the reliability of the evaluation results.

Six features of discourse leading integrated with altmetrics indicators are obtained. In the era of open science, online academic exchanges are becoming more and more popular. The evaluation activities based on altmetrics have fine-grained and procedural advantages. It is feasible and necessary to integrate altmetrics indicators and combine the advantages of multiple methods to evaluate the academic journals' discourse leading of which are in a diversified academic ecosystem.

This paper uses descriptive statistical analysis to analyze the distribution characteristics and distribution rules of discourse leading indicators of academic journals and to explore the availability of altmetrics indicators and the effectiveness of constructing an evaluation system. Then, combining the advantages of multiple evaluation methods, The author integrates altmetrics indicators to comprehensively evaluate the discourse leading of academic journals and verify the reliability of the evaluation results. This paper aims to provide references for enriching and improving the evaluation theory and indicator system of academic journals.

Since the transportation sector plays an important role in the initiation and propagation of business cycles, in previous chapters we developed output [transportation services output (TSI)] and other indicators to construct an index of coincident indicators for the U.S. transportation sector to identify its current state. We defined the reference cycle, including both business and growth cycles for this sector beginning in 1979 using both the conventional National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) method and modern time series models. A one-to-one correspondence between cycles in the transportation sector and those in the aggregate economy was found; however, both business and growth cycles of transportation often start earlier and end later than those of the overall economy. Although the knowledge and inference based on coincident indicators can serve as an important reference for planning and other decision-making processes, these indicators are also subject to substantial lag due to data collection, processing and revision, underscoring the need to develop a system of leading indicators for the industry. Thus, in this chapter, we construct an index of leading indicators for the transportation sector as a forecasting tool using rigorous statistical procedures.

The purpose of this paper is to present a critical review of the use of safety performance indicators in the construction industry. The authors consider the strengths, limitations and managerial consequences associated with commonly used indicators.

The authors combine two separate data sets in this critical review. These include 32 semi-structured interviews with construction industry representatives involved in the collection and reporting of safety indicators, as well as a multi-level safety climate survey that was conducted at 12 construction sites across Australia.

The analysis provides new evidence that, in their current use, commonly used H&S indicators are subject to manipulation and misinterpretation. Their usefulness as tools to support safety management activities in construction projects and organisations needs to be understood in the context of their limitations. In particular, safety indicators do not reflect the full set of factors that affect workplace safety and there will always be disagreement about what should be counted and how.

As a result of the substantial shortcomings of safety indicators, great care needs to be taken when using them to determine or evaluate organisational safety policy and practices.

Cyclical fluctuations in the level and rate of growth of economic activity have long been a feature of the British economy. The ability to forecast “turning points” (peaks and troughs) in business activity is of crucial importance for changes in companies' stockholding policy, hiring policy, capital budgeting, and many other aspects of corporate appraisal.

Several developing economies witnessed a large number of systemic financial and currency crises since the 1980s that resulted in severe economic, social, and political problems. The devastating impact of the 1982 and 1994–1995 Mexican crises, the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian crisis, and the ongoing financial crisis of 2008–2009 suggests that maintaining financial sector stability through reduction in vulnerability is highly crucial. The world is now witnessing an unprecedented systemic financial crisis originated from the USA in September 2008 together with a deep worldwide economic recession, particularly in developed countries of Europe and North America. This calls for devising and using on a regular basis an appropriate and effective monitoring and policy formulation system for detecting and addressing vulnerabilities leading to crisis. This chapter proposes a macroprudential/financial soundness monitoring, analysis, and remedial policy formulation system that can be used by most developing countries with or without crisis experience as well as with limited data. It also discusses a process for identifying and compiling a set of leading macroprudential/financial soundness indicators. An empirical illustration using Philippines data is presented. There is an urgent need for increased coordination, collaboration, and partnership among central banks, banking and financial market supervision agencies, and ministries of finance, economic, and planning for proper macroprudential monitoring. A high-level national financial stability committee under the auspices of the head of the state as well as a ‘‘regional financial stability board’’ needs to be established to complement and support the activities of an “international stability board.”

This study aims to quantify the multifaceted relationship between lean implementation and occupational health and safety (OHS) performance. Hypotheses based on a set of antecedents (mediating factors) are built and quantitatively tested.

Data were collected through an international survey with responses from more than 20 countries. Partial least square-based structural equation modeling was used to test a theoretical framework derived from literature. Leading indicators (formative indices) were used to evaluate the four antecedents of OHS performance (mediating factors).

All the identified antecedents show a significant mediating role. Antecedents related to the working environment and organizational factors have the strongest mediating effect. Results support the importance of using OHS leading indicators to appropriately measure the impact of lean implementation on workers’ health and safety.

The proposed OHS leading indicators connecting lean practices to OHS performance antecedents are only explored in this study. Therefore, to establish a comprehensive, validated and practically usable set of leading indicators, further research is needed.

As there are some synergistic and trade-off relationships between lean and safety, the findings of this study will enable managers and organizations to leverage the positive effects of lean implementation on workers’ health and safety and mitigate the negative effects.

Several prior studies investigated the multifaceted link between lean and OHS; however, this is the first study that tested direct and mediated influence by defining a coherent set of antecedents. The results justify and strongly support the adoption of OHS leading indicators to measure the impact of lean implementation on OHS performance.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influences of the characteristics of procurement strategies, in this instance labour-only, on project performance concerning health and safety (H&S), a project performance indicator.

Using non-probability purposeful and snowballing sampling methods, questionnaires were used to collect data from construction professionals in Nigeria. This was then analysed using descriptive (frequency and mean scores) and inferential statistics (Mann–Whitney-U and Kendall's Tau_b tests).

The findings indicate a statistically significant negative correlation between ‘the level of client involvement and ‘fatalities' and a positive one with ‘conducting of health and safety risk assessment' and ‘conducting employee surveys on health and safety attitude’. Poor hygiene is found to be the worst lagging indicator, while conducting of inspection is the most adopted leading indicator of project health and safety performance. It also emerged that there is no significant difference in the health and safety performance of projects procured through the procurement strategy in urban and rural areas.

The study provides valuable insight into the complexities in H&S management due to the high level of client involvement in labour-only procurement system (LoPS) projects and the level of diversity in their responsibilities therein. It creates a fundamental direction for developing a detailed framework or guidance notes for client involvement in the integration of H&S into LoPS projects.

This is the first study that examines the influence of the characteristics of procurement strategy on project health and safety performance. Evidence in the literature shows that project delivery outcomes significantly improve if procurement is strategically used, including when it is considered early in projects. However, integrating H&S into procurement strategies has received little attention.