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This study aims to let researchers sort out the past, look to the future and boost further management research.

This paper takes the exploration of the application of AR in the field of management research as the starting point. Through the combing and induction of AR literature to accurately grasp the essential characteristics of AR, this paper analyzes the application prospects and possible difficulties of AR in the field of management research in China, puts forward specific suggestions and explores the specific path of the transformation of management academic research to practice from the perspective of research methods.

In research methods, empirical research and case studies have become the mainstream research methods, but there is a passive research limitation of “study what happens.” Action research is different from the standpoint of empirical research that is independent of the research object. It no longer simply treats managers as the “object of information acquisition,” but as the subject of participating in the research. Management should be oriented towards the transformation of practice, and action research (AR) that can organically integrate researchers and practitioners is just a “bridge” to break the gap between academia and business circles to establish a cooperative relationship.

This paper takes the exploration of the application of AR in the field of management research as the starting point. Through the combing and induction of AR literature to accurately grasp the essential characteristics of AR, this paper analyzes the application prospects and possible difficulties of AR in the field of management research in China, puts forward specific suggestions and explores the specific path of the transformation of management academic research to practice from the perspective of research methods.

Starting from corporate entrepreneurship, spin-off entrepreneurship and business model theory, this paper aims to examine the key influential factors and inherent mechanism in the process of business model transfer from parent enterprise to spin-off start-ups.

Grounded theory method is fit for constructing theoretical models, which can discover and interpret phenomenon and activities. According to the guidance of theoretical sampling and other core principles in grounded theory, this study extracts two parent enterprises named Haier and Phnix and lots of spin-offs derived from them.

This paper presents the theoretical framework that business models transfer from parents to spin-offs and probes into the embedding logic and connection relationship between factors and categories in this process, such as preconditions, incubation veins, business model elements, stripping mechanism and independent operations.

Although this study is focused on the manufacturing industry, the main characteristics, comparative advantages, governance rules summarized from transfer activities of business model in spin-off entrepreneurship can also bring inspirations to both parent enterprises and spin-off start-ups.

Excavates process and mechanism of business model transfer from internal to external, extends the theoretical perspectives about existing related theories such as corporate entrepreneurship, spin-off entrepreneurship and business model theory and reveals new approaches and methods on business model design, which is different from the past way.

This paper aims to investigate the dynamics of repurchase-based earnings management vis-à-vis other real activities manipulations during the 2007–2008 financial crisis.

This paper adopts a Probit model to regress alternate real earnings management (REM) methods on a dummy variable indicating whether a firm falls in the crisis event window or not, during our 15-year sample period. This paper also detects switches made by suspected firms from repurchasing to other REM tools such as reducing discretionary expenditures.

This paper provides solid evidence indicating that firms suspected of earnings management have the tendency to decrease accretive share repurchases after the onset of the crisis. Conversely, the above pattern is neither observed in non-suspect firms nor over non-crisis periods. A further investigation documents that firms that switch REM during crisis can be characterized by less cash holding, smaller size, more severe liquidity shortage and/or tighter financial constraint.

This paper contributes to the literature on understanding the respective and interactive implications of both share repurchases and global financial crisis on firms’ REM activities.

City wall is an important symbol of ancient Chinese cities with unique geographical and cultural characteristics. Thus, the preservation of this historic landmark is considered significantly important. However, numerous residential construction activities and changes in ecological environment have destructed a great portion of the city walls in recent years. This study looks into the preservation of the ancient city walls from the systematic perspective and in line with the actual characteristics of Longdong Region to provide guideline measures for the protection and restoration of such landmark. Cognition and preservation are adopted extensively to investigate the specific situation of and the factors that influence the ancient city walls in this region. Preservation strategies for the city walls, including the “Axis-Point” system, planning control, and authenticity readability, are presented. The ancient city walls in Longdong Region can be preserved by protecting the entire region, the city, and the main wall body. The systematic method and preservation strategies at the “macro perspective,” “medium perspective” and “micro perspective” levels can solve the preservation problems of the ancient city walls in Longdong Region effectively.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new aerodynamic parameter estimation methodology based on neural network and output error method, while the output error method is improved based on particle swarm algorithm.

Firstly, the algorithm approximates the dynamic characteristics of aircraft based on feedforward neural network. Neural network is trained by extreme learning machine, and the trained network can predict the aircraft response at (k + 1)th instant given the measured flight data at kth instant. Secondly, particle swarm optimization is used to enhance the convergence of Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) algorithm, and the improved LM method is used to substitute for the Gauss Newton algorithm in output error method. Finally, the trained neural network is combined with the improved output error method to estimate aerodynamic derivatives.

Neither depending on the initial guess of the parameters to be estimated nor requiring numerical integration of the aircraft motion equation, the proposed algorithm can be used for unstable aircraft and is successfully applied to extract aerodynamic derivatives from both simulated and real flight data.

The proposed method requires iterative calculation and can only identify parameters offline.

The proposed method is successfully applied to estimate aircraft aerodynamic parameters and can also be used as a new algorithm for other optimization problems.

In this study, the output error method is improved to reduce the dependence on the initial value of parameters and expand its application scope. It is applied in aircraft aerodynamic parameter identification together with neural network.

This study aims to analyse the geographical distribution of global research activities and to investigate the knowledge diffusion embodied in scientific papers.

The geographical summary of Frontiers articles displays the number of visits and categorizes where the visitors hail from. This study uses the records of 23,798 articles published in 16 Frontiers journals from 2007 to 2015 to analyse the geographical distribution of article visits at both country and city levels. The process of knowledge diffusion is investigated on the basis of the different visiting patterns of new and old papers.

Most article visits are concentrated around major metropolitan areas and some high-tech clusters. The top “visiting countries” include both developed countries and developing countries, and the USA and China are two major players. Publishing cities dominate article visits for new papers; as time passes, there is diffusion from the publishing cities to a broader area.

The data on visiting for open access articles may be generated from various repositories besides the publishers’ websites; these data are ignored, as they are not significant enough to have much influence. There is also a lack of a basic theory in the data processing of outliers in the data set. In addition, only static results are given in this paper, as the data were collected on one day, for one time. A longer time period is necessary to track the dynamic diffusion process of the observations.

Introduction of usage data will propose a novel way to analyse research activities and track knowledge diffusion.

The visiting data of articles offer a new way to investigate research activities at the city level in a detailed and timely manner, for the geographical distribution of research activities and the research resource allocation of a specific country to be explored.

This study measured the research activities of scientific papers by examining the usage data. Compared with previous studies that focused on the geographical distribution of scientific activities using publication data, citation data and even altmetrics data, usage data are at the forefront of this research. Therefore, usage data offer a fresh perspective on methodology, providing more detailed and real-time information.

Generally, the motion range of the micro scale operation is within several hundreds of microns, and the conventional joints cannot satisfy the requirements due to manufacturing and assembling errors, hysteresis and backlash in the joints. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The following issues should be considered: a micromanipulation stage should be designed using a small-dimensional scale driven by the small size of piezoelectric actuator and the components can be replaced due to fatigue failure caused by repeated cyclic loading. This paper proposes a modular design of a flexure-based 2-DOF precision stage made using aluminum (T6-7075) material and Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene plastic material. The piezoelectric actuator is adopted to drive the stage for the fast response and large output force. To compensate the stroke of piezoelectric actuator, a bridge-type amplifier is designed with optimized structure.

The simulation results validate the advantages of modular positioning stage fabricated by two different materials.

The stage can be used in micro scale precision’s applications. If it will be used in nanoscale precision, then some sensors in nanoscale of measurement should be used.

The designed stage can be used in biomedical engineering, such as cell injection testing, etc.

The designed stage will be used in micro/nanoengineering field, such as micro/nanomanufacturing or assembly, manipulation of cell, etc., which will push forward high technology to a higher level.

Two kinds of materials have been selected to make the positioning stage, which are seldomly found in literature on compliant mechanism field. A modular design concept is proposed for the positioning stage design.

Nanoparticles as the grease additives play an important role in anti-wear and friction-reducing property during the mechanical operation. To improve the lubrication action of grease, the tribological behavior of lithium-based greases with single (nanometer Al₂O₃ or nanometer ZnO) and composite additives (Al₂O₃–ZnO nanoparticles) were investigated in this paper.

The morphology and microstructure of nanoparticles were characterized by means of transmission electron microscope and X-ray diffraction. Tribological properties of different nanoparticles as additives in lithium-based greases were evaluated using a universal friction and wear testing machine. In addition, the friction coefficient (COF) and wear scar diameter were analyzed. The surface morphology and element overlay of the worn steel surface were analyzed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS), respectively.

The results show that the greases with nanometer Al₂O₃ or nanometer ZnO and the composite nanoparticles additives both exhibit lower COFs and wear scar diameters than those of base grease. And the grease with Al₂O₃–ZnO composite nanoparticles possesses much lower COF and shows much better wear resistance than greases with single additives. When the additives contents are 0.4 Wt.% Al₂O₃ and 0.6 Wt.% ZnO, the composite nanoparticles-based grease exhibits the lowest mean COF (0.04) and wear scar diameter (0.65 mm), which is about 160% and 28% lower than those of base grease, respectively.

The main innovative thought of this work lies in dealing with the grease using single or composite nanoparticles. And through a serial contrast experiments, the anti-wear and friction-reducing property with different nanoparticles additives in lithium grease are evaluated.

Precise vehicle localization is a basic and critical technique for various intelligent transportation system (ITS) applications. It also needs to adapt to the complex road environments in real-time. The global positioning system and the strap-down inertial navigation system are two common techniques in the field of vehicle localization. However, the localization accuracy, reliability and real-time performance of these two techniques can not satisfy the requirement of some critical ITS applications such as collision avoiding, vision enhancement and automatic parking. Aiming at the problems above, this paper aims to propose a precise vehicle ego-localization method based on image matching.

This study included three steps, Step 1, extraction of feature points. After getting the image, the local features in the pavement images were extracted using an improved speeded up robust features algorithm. Step 2, eliminate mismatch points. Using a random sample consensus algorithm to eliminate mismatched points of road image and make match point pairs more robust. Step 3, matching of feature points and trajectory generation.

Through the matching and validation of the extracted local feature points, the relative translation and rotation offsets between two consecutive pavement images were calculated, eventually, the trajectory of the vehicle was generated.

The experimental results show that the studied algorithm has an accuracy at decimeter-level and it fully meets the demand of the lane-level positioning in some critical ITS applications.

Finance is crucial to boosting agricultural development in developing countries. This paper aims to investigate the effects of rural formal and informal financial access on agricultural technical efficiency (TE) in China.

Based on the survey data of demonstrative family farms in Langxi county, Anhui province and Wuhan city, Hubei province in central China in 2017, this research assesses agricultural TE by using a three-stage DEA model. It adopts the tobit model to evaluate the effects of formal and informal financial access on TE, and to explore the heterogeneous effects by types, management states and scales. It uses the OLS regression and PSM method to check the robustness, and applies the IV-Tobit method to solve the endogeneity. The authors apply the mediation effect model to explore the channels through which financial access impacts TE.

Family farms' average TE reaches 13.9%, which shows much room for improvement under the given technical conditions and constant inputs. The research confirms the advantage of formal financial access in raising TE relative to informal financial access. The heterogeneous analysis documents more prominent effects of formal financial access on enhancing TE of aquaculture, hybrid, demonstration and large farms. The mediating effect model reveals that the enhancing TE effect of formal financial access derives from improved machinery investment and family labor division rather than land circulation.

The research clarifies finance into formal and informal finance. The results have considerable policy implications for rural financial policies in China.