Many insects have a mating system where males transfer nutrients to females at mating, which are often referred to as ‘nuptial gifts ’. Among butterflies, some of the characteristic features of these species are polyandry (females mate multiple times), and relatively large male ejaculates. When males produce part of the resources used for offspring, the value of body size might then increase fo...

While nuptial food gifts come in various forms in arthropods, their evolutionary origins are unclear. A previous study on insects has shown that such gifts may arise as a sensory trap that exploits a female's underlying motivation to feed. Here I present independent evidence of a sensory trap in spiders. In certain visually oriented spiders, I suggest that males initially exploit the maternal c...

Some real-world authorship analysis applications require techniques that scale to thousands of documents with little or no a priori information about the number of candidate authors. While there is extensive research on identifying authors given a small set of candidates and ample training data, almost none is based on real-world applications of clustering documents by authorship, independent o...

IF YOU ARE READING THIS COMMENTARY, the title probably irked your professional sensibilities. That’s good. During 32 years of publishing, I’ve experienced two authorship disputes. Both of these problems have demonstrated to me that there is a disturbing and pervasive lack of understanding of what authorship on scientific papers means, of the responsibilities that it conveys, and of how it is de...

On the basis of an empirical investigation of archaeological information work, this paper discusses the interplay of authorship of documents and documentary boundary objects, and the practical authorship of social situations and identities and how a closer look at the authorship (as understood in the contemporary authorship literature) can be helpful in elaborating our understanding of the maki...

BACKGROUND Clinician surveys provide critical information about many facets of health care, but are often challenging to implement. Our objective was to assess use by participants and non-participants of a prepaid gift card incentive that could be later reclaimed by the researchers if unused. METHODS Clinicians were recruited to participate in a mailed or online survey as part of a study to c...

This article examines the diversity of methods in authorship attribution through a lens which focuses attention on a single common element. The current state of authorship attribution study is spread throughout so many academic and non -academic disciplines that it is nigh impossible to describe all of the various assumptions about language and authorship. The disciplines involved in authorship...