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Academic contention occurs when research evidence is amenable to more than one interpretation. China has a long tradition of Shang Que (商榷), in which authors argue for their preferred interpretation. The modern form of this tradition is the Shang Que article, which often takes the form of research papers in Chinese-language journals and which tends to be question-oriented. Shang Que articles usually take the views of a particular author or article as the focus of independent and complete criticism by another, independent, academic. This paper explains the role of Shang Que articles in Chinese scholarship and their influence on international academia.

A bibliometric analysis was used to explore the characteristics and evolution of Chinese Shang Que articles using 30,577 articles published between 1979 and 2018. Microsoft Excel and Gephi were used for data analysis and visualization.

Findings suggest a decline in the number of Shang Que articles and an increase in the number of co-authors. Shang Que articles remained particularly prominent in Philosophy and Humanities and Social Sciences, where they focused on local issues such as classical Chinese, the Sinicization of Marxism and Chinese literature. This suggests that the number of Shang Que articles is related to the degree of internationalization of a research field.

Shang Que articles, which have been influenced by academic paradigms in English, are a fusion of China's Shang Que tradition and of the modern academic system. Through considering Shang Que articles, this paper explores the benefits of local academic traditions in non-English-speaking cultures.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) prescriptions have always relied on the experience of TCM doctors, and machine learning(ML) provides a technical means for learning these experiences and intelligently assists in prescribing. However, in TCM prescription, there are the main (Jun) herb and the auxiliary (Chen, Zuo and Shi) herb collocations. In a prescription, the types of auxiliary herbs are often more than the main herb and the auxiliary herbs often appear in other prescriptions. This leads to different frequencies of different herbs in prescriptions, namely, imbalanced labels (herbs). As a result, the existing ML algorithms are biased, and it is difficult to predict the main herb with less frequency in the actual prediction and poor performance. In order to solve the impact of this problem, this paper proposes a framework for multi-label traditional Chinese medicine (ML-TCM) based on multi-label resampling.

In this work, a multi-label learning framework is proposed that adopts and compares the multi-label random resampling (MLROS), multi-label synthesized resampling (MLSMOTE) and multi-label synthesized resampling based on local label imbalance (MLSOL), three multi-label oversampling techniques to rebalance the TCM data.

The experimental results show that after resampling, the less frequent but important herbs can be predicted more accurately. The MLSOL method is shown to be the best with over 10% improvements on average because it balances the data by considering both features and labels when resampling.

The authors first systematically analyzed the label imbalance problem of different sampling methods in the field of TCM and provide a solution. And through the experimental results analysis, the authors proved the feasibility of this method, which can improve the performance by 10%−30% compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

This study aims to extract knowledge of ancient Chinese scientific and technological documents bibliographic summaries (STDBS) and provide the knowledge graph (KG) comprehensively and systematically. By presenting the relationship among content, discipline, and author, this study focuses on providing services for knowledge discovery of ancient Chinese scientific and technological documents.

This study compiles ancient Chinese STDBS and designs a knowledge mining and graph visualization framework. The authors define the summaries' entities, attributes, and relationships for knowledge representation, use deep learning techniques such as BERT-BiLSTM-CRF models and rules for knowledge extraction, unify the representation of entities for knowledge fusion, and use Neo4j and other visualization techniques for KG construction and application. This study presents the generation, distribution, and evolution of ancient Chinese agricultural scientific and technological knowledge in visualization graphs.

The knowledge mining and graph visualization framework is feasible and effective. The BERT-BiLSTM-CRF model has domain adaptability and accuracy. The knowledge generation of ancient Chinese agricultural scientific and technological documents has distinctive time features. The knowledge distribution is uneven and concentrated, mainly concentrated on C1-Planting and cultivation, C2-Silkworm, and C3-Mulberry and water conservancy. The knowledge evolution is apparent, and differentiation and integration coexist.

This study is the first to visually present the knowledge connotation and association of ancient Chinese STDBS. It solves the problems of the lack of in-depth knowledge mining and connotation visualization of ancient Chinese STDBS.

The objective of this study is to examine Chinese consumers' behavioural intentions to reduce restaurant food wastage (i.e. intentions to order moderate meal size, and to pack leftovers) in a group context from both psychological and cultural perspectives.

This paper used an online self-administered survey for data collection. The measurements were either adopted or adapted from prior studies on pro-environmental behaviours. Using data from 311 Chinese consumers, the authors analysed restaurant food wastage in China by utilising PLS-SEM.

By applying an extended value-attitude-behaviour (VAB) hierarchy with information publicity, it is found that materialism, frugality consciousness, information publicity and environmental concern are important factors in influencing individuals' behavioural intentions to reduce food waste in a group dining-out context.

Drawing upon perspectives of Chinese consumers, this paper outlines key promoters and barriers to food waste mitigation, and provides meaningful insights to policymakers, NGOs, industry stakeholders and even consumers on how to effectively overcome the food waste challenge at the consumption stage in the context of Chinese culture.

This study examines how informal business networks achieve marketing goals in socially uncertain contexts. Drawing from multiple historical sources, Shangbangs, a type of business network that thrived in pre-1949 China, are analyzed.

The Critical Historical Research Method (CHRM) undergirds a study of Shangbangs’ historicity (i.e. their socio-historically embedded multiplicity, including organizational forms, activities and connotations.

As informal regional, professional, project-based, special-product-based or mixed marketing networks, Shangbangs relied on “flexible specialization” and coupled multiple business needs to market goods and services, business organizations, specific social values and, when necessary, to debrand business rivals.

This analysis extends theories about marketing networks by probing their subtypes, diverse marketing activities, multipronged channels and relationship building with social entities (including underground societies, business associations and guilds) in response to pre-1949 China’s market uncertainties. Substantiating an alternative approach to “flexible specialization” and marketing innovations within the pre-1949 Chinese economy shows how a parallel theoretical framework can complement western-based marketing theories.

This first comprehensive analysis of Shangbangs, an innovative historical Chinese marketing network outside the conventional market-corporate dichotomy, can inform theory building for marketing strategy-making and management conditioned by social contexts.

To add new empirical knowledge to debates about social practices of peer production communities, and to conversations about bias and its implications for democracy. To help identify Wikipedia (WP) articles that are affected by systematic bias and hopefully help alleviate the impact of such bias on the general public, thus helping enhance both traditional (e.g. libraries) and online information services (e.g. Google) in ways that contribute to democracy. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objectives.

Quantitatively, the authors identify edit-warring camps across many conflict zones of the English language WP, and profile and compare success rates and typologies of camp edits in the corresponding topic areas. Qualitatively, the authors analyze the edit war between two senior WP editors that resulted in imbalanced and biased articles throughout a topic area for such editorial characteristics through a close critical reading.

Through a large-scale quantitative study, the authors find that winner-take-all camps exhibit biasing editing behaviors to a much larger extent than the camps they successfully edit-war against, confirming findings of prior small-scale qualitative studies. The authors also confirm the employment of these behaviors and identify other behaviors in the successful silencing of traditional medicinal knowledge on WP by a scientism-biased senior WP editor through close reading.

WP sadly does, as previously claimed, appear to be a platform that represents the biased viewpoints of its most stridently opinionated Western white male editors, and routinely misrepresents scholarly work and scientific consensus, the authors find. WP is therefore in dire need of scholarly oversight and decolonization.

The authors independently verify findings from prior personal accounts of highly power-imbalanced fights of scholars against senior editors on WP through a third-party close reading of a much more power balanced edit war between senior WP editors. The authors confirm that these findings generalize well to edit wars across WP, through a large scale quantitative analysis of unbalanced edit wars across a wide range of zones of contention on WP.

Acute and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a common and progressive lung disease that makes breathing difficult over time and can even lead to death. Despite this, there is no definitive treatment for it yet. This study aims to evaluate the studies on single and combined herbal interventions affecting COPD.

In this study, all articles published in English up to 2020 were extracted from the Web of Science (WoS) database and collected using Boolean tools based on keywords, titles and abstracts. Finally, the data required for bibliographic analysis, such as the author(s), publication year, academic journal, institution, country of origin, institution, financial institution and keywords were extracted from the database.

A total of 573 articles were analyzed. The number of papers in the lung disease field showed an upward trend from 1984 to 2021, and there was a surge in paper publications in 2013. China, Korea and Brazil published the highest number of studies on COPD, and Chinese medical universities published the most papers. Three journals that received the highest scores in this study were the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, International Immunopharmacology and Plos One. In the cloud map, expression, activation and expression were the most frequently researched subjects. In the plus and author keywords, acute lung injury was the most commonly used word. Inflammation, expression of various genes, nitric oxide-dependent pathways, NFkappa B, TNFalpha and lipopolysaccharide-dependent pathways were the mechanisms underlying COPD. Scientometric analysis of COPD provides a vision for future research and policymaking.

This study aimed to evaluate the studies on single and combined herbal interventions affecting COPD.

This study explores the influence of heritage brand extension on consumer purchase intention and analyses the effects of pop culture involvement. The extension of heritage brands is becoming increasingly difficult because such an extension needs to be consistent with the unique characteristics of brands and resonate with consumers. However, few scholars discuss the influence of consumers' level of pop culture involvement on brand extension and purchasing behaviour.

Taking time-honoured brands as an example, this study established a conceptual model based on a comprehensive review of the literature, and then tested the model using a sample of 255 respondents who were familiar with one of the selected Chinese time-honoured brands. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the relationships amongst brand extension fit, pop culture involvement, perceived value and purchase intention.

Time-honoured brand extension fit has a positive impact on consumer purchase intention, and this path is significantly influenced by the mediation mechanisms of perceived value. Situational pop culture involvement can significantly strengthen the relationship between time-honoured brand extension fit and perceived value, whereas enduring pop culture involvement does not.

The results clarify and expand on the different roles of cultural involvement in time-honoured brands and broaden research on the influence of cultural involvement in this regard. This study has significant theoretical value for the inheritance and revival of heritage brands and provides a reference for the practice of time-honoured brands.

A Casebook of Indigenous Business Practices in Africa is a collection of business case studies that expand understanding of how indigenous enterprises apply entrepreneurial practices embedded in culture to achieve success. Indigenous methods are part of Africa's social and economic fabric, and these cases identify concepts and models that can accelerate growth in Africa. The value of these practices across regions of Africa cannot be overemphasised despite the dominance of Western business methods, which, though beneficial, are yet to drive the continent's developmental agenda. By exploring indigenous business practices in Africa, students, educators, practitioners, entrepreneurs and government decision-makers will be introduced to unique and sustainable practices that can foster inclusive growth and social and economic empowerment when contextualised within the business landscape. Identification of relevant orientations in indigenous practices that will benefit contemporary business frameworks and actors is a significant contribution of the authors of this book. Incorporation of these indigenous methods into management teachings and business practices is essential to the continent's economic growth and socio-cultural progress.