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The purpose of this paper is to present the results of studies on the reaction of metal oxides such as Cr₂O₃ and Al₂O₃ with Na₂SO₄ in flowing SO₂ (g) at 1,100 and 1,200 K.

The oxides chosen for the studies were initial scaling products during the oxidation of industrial alloys and invariably are involved in hot‐corrosion reactions in the presence of molten salts. The thermo‐gravimetric studies for the system were carried out as a function of Na₂SO₄ in the mixture. The different constituents in the reaction products were identified by XRD analysis and morphologies of the reaction products were discussed on the basis of optical metallography and scanning electron microscopic studies. The pH and conductivity of the aqueous solutions of reaction products were measured and an attempt made to functionalize these parameters with Na₂SO₄ concentration in the mixture. Quantitative estimation of the soluble metal was carried out using an atomic absorption spectrophotometer. The formation of products was investigated by thermodynamic computation of free energies of the reactions and the study of relevant phase stability diagrams.

Looking at the complex nature of the reactions, it is difficult to generalize the conductance studies, as many complex species are liable to hydrolyze in the aqueous solution. However, the break in few curves at certain mole fraction of Na₂SO₄ indicates the presence of soluble complex species.

The paper provides information regarding the reaction between a pertinent oxide and Na₂SO₄ and proper identification of reaction products, useful for understanding the occurrence and importance of fluxing reactions and in the interpretation of hot corrosion mechanism and the development of new protective materials.

This chapter of the book seeks to use famous mathematical functions (statistical distribution functions) in evaluating and analyzing supply chain network data related to supply chain management (SCM) elements in organizations. In other words, the main purpose of this chapter is to find the best-fitted statistical distribution functions for SCM data. Explaining how to best fit the statistical distribution function along with the explanation of all possible aspects of a function for selected components of SCM from this chapter will make a significant attraction for production and services experts who will lead their organization to the path of competitive excellence. The main core of the chapter is the reliability values related to the reliability function calculated by the relevant chart and extracting other information based on other aspects of statistical distribution functions such as probability density, cumulative distribution, and failure function. This chapter of the book will turn readers into professional users of statistical distribution functions in mathematics for analyzing supply chain element data.

In recent years, determining the effective and suitable supplier in the supply chain management (SCM) has become a key strategic consideration to the success of any manufacturing organization in terms of business intelligence (BI), as many quantitative and qualitative critical factors are measured from big data. In today’s competitive business scenario, the main purpose of this study is to determine suitable and sustainable suppliers during supplier selection process is to reduce the risk of investment along with maximize overall value to the customer and develop closeness and long-term relationships between customers and suppliers to build a resilient SCM to mitigate uncertainty for automotive organizations.

As these types of decisions generally involve more than a few criteria and often necessary to compromise among possibly conflicting factors, the multiple-criteria decision-making becomes a useful approach to solve this kind of problem. Considering both tangible and intangible criteria, the aim of this paper is the presentation of a new integrated fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy additive ratio assessment method with fuzzy entropy using linguistic values to solve the supplier selection problem to build the resilient SCM under uncertain data. Fuzzy entropy is used to obtain the entropy weights of the criteria.

Organizations gather massive amounts of information known as BD on the basis of historical records of uncertainties from several internal and external sources to manage uncertainty to improve the overall performance of organizations using BI strategy for analyzing and making effective decision to support the managements of automotive manufacturing organizations in an information system.

Although this study tries to represent a full analysis on suitable and resilient global supplier selection under various types of uncertainty, still there are some improvements that can be made in the future by developing a more refined and more sophisticated approach to further enhance the performance of the proposed scheme to calculate overall rating scores of the alternatives.

The novelty of this paper is to propose a framework of BI in SCM to determine a suitable and resilient global supplier where all the meaningful information, relevant knowledge and visualization retrieved by analyzing the huge and complex set of data or data streams, i.e. BD based on decision-making, to develop any manufacturing organizational performance worldwide.

This research addresses the pressing need for comprehensive studies in the rapidly evolving field of city tourism. This study aims to understand the overall performance of the International Journal of Tourism Cities (IJTC), the structure of knowledge in city tourism research and the prevalent themes and trends arising from IJTC.

A bibliometric analysis was conducted to scrutinize the publication patterns in IJTC. This involved examining parameters such as the annual count of published articles, the keywords used in them and their respective authors.

The findings reveal that IJTC has a growing and diverse publication output, establishing itself as a reputable and influential publication within urban tourism research. The results reflect various aspects and themes in city tourism research.

The study has certain limitations. The data used for analysis was obtained exclusively from the Scopus database. The analysis was conducted using only one software package, Bibliometrix. Other software packages may offer different features for bibliometric analysis. The study relied exclusively on quantitative methods for data analysis. Qualitative methods could have provided more nuanced interpretations of the data.

Comparative analyses could be conducted between IJTC and other journals within urban tourism or related disciplines. Such research would yield valuable insights into the current state of the field and aid in identifying areas warranting further investigation.

The findings from this study can inform the decisions and actions of various stakeholders involved in urban tourism. Practitioners and policymakers can draw from this research to make informed decisions. Existing and emerging authors can identify relevant topics for their research. Readers can access pertinent information for their needs.

This study offers a unique contribution by thoroughly comprehending the performance of IJTC between 2015 and 2023. It progresses the existing body of knowledge on city tourism research by examining its current status and future trends.

For strategic and competitive insights, the purpose of this paper is to measure and benchmark the comparative operating efficiencies of Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) major airlines and present a new interpretation along with managerial implications.

This research statistically tests returns to scale and the equality of mean efficiencies for 15 ASEAN airlines covering the period 2010-2014. The disaggregate input efficiency of ASEAN airlines is computed by comparing the target and actual inputs.

The disaggregate input efficiency of ASEAN airlines shows that aircraft efficiency is the lowest, operating cost efficiency is better, and available seat efficiency is the best.

This paper applies data envelopment analysis models, disaggregated input efficiency measures, and bootstrapping approaches to compute the operational efficiency of ASEAN airlines. Strategic suggestions are made to improve the operational efficiency of ASEAN airlines.

The chapter aims to investigate the link between COVID-19 and Islamic finance, investigating how Islamic countries respond to the impact of the pandemic and how Islamic banks have responded in consideration of their financial statements. The study proposes a novel perspective based on thematic analysis of blogs and newspapers to validate the relevant literature. Moreover, the documentary analysis will allow researchers to investigate Islamic banks' financial statements. We find that Islamic countries have used extraordinary Sukuk issuances both at government and cross-border level. Moreover, traditional instruments such as the Zakat have been converted for even more social uses. Concerning the literature, we find that there have been temporary tax suspensions and commodity supply measures to deal with the pandemic crisis's uncertainty. Finally, financial statements analysis reveals prudent behaviour with decreases in profits aimed at increasing risk provisions. The results provide theoretical evidence to researchers and practical evidence to policymakers, public policy investors and citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive analysis of the current status and development of the digital journalism field from 1987 to 2021 using the Dimensions database.

Using the Dimensions.ai database, 1734 articles were identified through search strategies which were published from 1987 to 2021. The downloaded results were analysed using specific parameters with the help of bibliometric and science mapping tools: Biblioshiny, VOSviewer and CiteSpace. The key contributions of the present comprehensive bibliometric study of the digital journalism field can be seen in terms of the following aspects: (1) Publication analysis from the perspectives of publication growth, key journals, contributing authors, institutions and countries done through Biblioshiny package. (2) Citation network analysis from the perspective of co-citation structure of papers, authors, countries and institutions done through VOSviewer. (3) Timeline analysis and keywords burst detection to identify hotspots and research trends in digital journalism with the help of CiteSpace.

The first paper with the keyword digital journalism was published in the year 1989. From 2011 onwards, there has been growth in digital journalism literature. The most popular journal in digital journalism studies is Digital Journalism, Journalism, Journalism Practice, Journalism Studies. Lewis, S.C. has contributed the most number of papers in digital journalism. Further, authors from the countries the USA, Spain, Brazil and UK have contributed immensely. The citation network of authors, institutions and countries contributing to digital journalism studies has also been explored in the study. Through burst analysis, hot topics in digital journalism were identified.

The paper provides a complete overview of the growth of digital journalism literature published from 1987 to 2021. The originality of this work lies in the triangulation of Biblioshiny, VOSviewer and CiteSpace software to present various aspects of bibliometric study. Findings of the study can help the researchers to identify areas as well as journals, authors, institutions working actively in the field of digital journalism.

This study aims to evaluate in situ oxidative polymerization of aniline (Ani) as a post-processing method to promote extrusion-based 3D printed parts, made from insulating polymers, to components with functional properties, including electrical conductivity and chemical sensitivity.

Extrusion-based 3D printed parts of polyethylene terephthalate modified with glycol (PETG) and polypropylene (PP) were coated in an aqueous acid solution via in situ oxidative polymerization of Ani. First, the feedstocks were characterized. Densely printed samples were then used to assess the adhesion of polyaniline (PAni) and electrical conductivity on printed parts. The best feedstock candidate for PAni coating was selected for further analysis. Last, a Taguchi methodology was used to evaluate the influence of printing parameters on the coating of porous samples. Analysis of variance and Tukey post hoc test were used to identify the best levels for each parameter.

Colorimetry measurements showed significant color shifts in PP samples and no shifts in PETG samples upon pullout testing. The incorporation of PAni content and electrical conductivity were, respectively, 41% and 571% higher for PETG in comparison to PP. Upon coating, the surface energy of both materials decreased. Additionally, the dynamic mechanical analysis test showed minimal influence of PAni over the dynamic mechanical properties of PETG. The parametric study indicated that only layer thickness and infill pattern had a significant influence on PAni incorporation and electrical conductivity of coated porous samples.

Current literature reports difficulties in incorporating PAni without affecting dimensional precision and feedstock stability. In situ, oxidative polymerization of Ani could overcome these limitations. However, its use as a functional post-processing of extrusion-based printed parts is a novelty.

Classical models of data envelopment analysis (DEA) calculate the efficiency of decision-making units do not differentiate between efficient units. The purpose of this paper is to present a new method for ranking efficient units and compare it with the other methods presented in this field.

In this paper, a new method is presented for ranking efficient units. To validate the proposed method, a real case, which was studied by Li et al. (2016) is examined and the rankings of the efficient units are compared with four other methods including the Andersen and Petersen’s super-efficiency, game theory and the concept of Shapley value and the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution methods.

The results show that there is a high correlation between the rankings of efficient units obtained by the new proposed method and the other methods such as Andersen and Petersen’s super-efficiency, game theory and Shapley value methods.

The problem of ranking efficient units with the DEA method is an important issue for researchers. Extensive studies have been proposed to provide methods for ranking efficient units. This paper proposes a simple and fast method for ranking efficient units that achieves better results.

Performance assessment of microfinance institutions (MFIs) has long been a question of considerable research interest. The dual goals – financial performance and social performance of MFIs widely studied yet remain unsolved in the existing literature. To assess the knowledge structure of research in this area and to aid future research, we review the literature with bibliometric analysis.

Our study has used bibliographic data of 1,252 scientific documents indexed in the Scopus database from 1995 to 2020 (June 05). We have used the “bibliometrix” package in R language to analyze the data and illustrate the findings.

We find that there has been an increasing trend in publications, especially from 2006 onwards. Various bibliometric indicators allow us to follow the progression of knowledge along with identifying the most contributing and impactful authors, publication sources, institutions and countries. We illustrate the major research themes and identify that “poverty alleviations”, “group lending” and “credit scoring” are the major emerging and specialized themes besides the basic research evolved around “microfinance” or “microcredit”. Our further analysis of thematic evolution over different time frames reveals that “financial performance” aspect is getting more attention in recent times in evaluating the performance of MFIs.

The insights of knowledge accumulated from our bibliometric review and thematic analysis provide researchers with an efficient comprehension of the advancement of the research on microfinance performance and offer avenues for future scientific endeavors.