Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article explores educative experiences we had as doctoral students in a community of knowledge inside the University of Barcelona. We deepen understandings around the process we lived for five years, as well as we point out theoretical and methodological aspects that framed the process itself. Embracing narrative inquiry as methodology, we enhance the need of shifting some of the doctoral training practices that traditional academic systems still hold. Through our stories, we show bumps and tensions that might emerge in living and working in a community of knowledge. We also raise challenges that beginning researchers are currently facing in the educational landscape. Those challenges are related to the ways in which we inquire, approach, attend to, and name the research experience in the context of increasingly high academic demands.

Relationships between mortality and morbidity are long established within geo-spatial modelling and GIS-based analyses. While there has always been a strong associational relationship between the two measures, this has been less tested at an aggregate areal scale than one might expect. From a geographical perspective this has been in part because access to data at meaningful spatial scales, especially for mortality, can be difficult.This paper presents newly collected data from Ireland on mortality and maps cross-sectional associations with self-reported health and limiting long-term illness and disability conditions (LLTC) for the first time at an intermediate level geography. Data is also available for two different time-periods from administrative records and from five-yearly censuses. Mortality data was collected at a newly-created intermediate level geography (IA, n=410, average population=10,900) while the self-reported health/LLTC data was collected at a long-standing administrative scale (ED, n=3409, average population=1,350). Given there was a nested relationship between the two scales, redistricting techniques were used in GIS to enable direct comparisons. Mortality data was available for all deaths (SMR) and premature death (ASR), as well as for four different causes of death. Self-reported health was mapped in three ways; as a combined rate for poor health status; as a weighted health score and as a combined rate for LLTC. The associations were derived from correlation/regression modelling at the smaller IA scale. The results identified that the associations were statistically significant and of mixed magnitude, but had relatively low r-squared values. The associations were strongest for premature (under 75) mortality, while additional correlations for cause of death were lower again. From this, we concluded that the self-reported health/LLTC statistics, while of some potential explanatory value, were not especially useful as predictive variable. Suggestions for improvement would be to weight the self-reported health data by age and additionally to take into account deprivation as a second explanatory factor operating within cross-sectional work. Finally, modelling at different spatial scales might act as a useful guide for comparative analysis in Andalucía and other regions of Spain, where spatial scales may be similar in terms of size and scale.

In the last decades, cultural tourism has become an alternative to other tourist typologies, since a more complementary offer is necessary. This expansion of culture as a tourism product has led to the proliferation of routes and tourist-cultural itineraries, promoted by regional, national and international organizations. These tourist realities have generated a multitude of definitions by organisms and authors, giving rise to a debate on two concepts that although they share similarities can be considered different. In the diffusion, creation and recognition of routes and itineraries, the different Spanish autonomous governments play a fundamental role. In this sense, through the creation of official websites, the Autonomous Communities try to publicize their culture and their tourism products. On the one hand, the objective of this work is to analyze the concepts of cultural tourism route and itinerary, on the other hand the dissemination of tourist routes and the treatment of itineraries by the Autonomous Communities in their official portals will be studied.

The primary aim of this paper is to analyze the scientific literature of soil water erosion research in Andalusia by means of bibliometric indicators. The period under consideration runs from 1964 to 2008, representing a total of 433 works published in international (135 references) and national (99) journals, national (83) and international (21) conferences proceedings, book chapters (54), books (18), doctoral thesis (16) and other documents (7). Bibliographic information was collected from Bib-Eron, a bibliographic database on soil erosion. The analysis was based on the scientific documents encoded in the database. Bibliometric indicators have been employed in order to establish the number of documents published by year of publication, distribution of documents by research topics, characteristics of contributions published in national and international journals, geographical distribution of scientific production, institutional affiliation of authors, institutional productivity and interinstitutional collaboration.

A better knowledge of the territory facilitates an adequate management of it. Some areas belonging to the Mediterranean area show great diversity (natural, human, cultural, etc.), complexity and fragile equilibria. Providing a geographical delimitation that facilitates the study of such issues, especially those with cultural and patrimonial interest. The delimitation of the Ricote Valley, in the Region of Murcia, can contribute to a better management of such complexities, fragilities and diversities. Being such a delimitation the objective of this investigation, which can serve for future delimitations of similar territories. The geographic information of interest, obtained from different sources, according to their presence and qualification in different catalogs, is analyzed and valued. Surveys are also conducted to residents and non-residents, reinforcing this research as a whole. This procedure allows to advance in the delimitation of singular territories with cultural and patrimonial interest.

The objective of this paper is to estimate the willingness to pay (DAP) by the inhabitants of the municipality of Almoloya del Rio, state of Mexico in exchange for receiving a quality drinking water service, as well as the generation of actions for the conservation and recovery of bodies of water of the locality. For such purposes, the Contingent Valuation procedure has been used, which is based on the creation of a simulated market through surveys, which is ideal to estimate the economic value of a good that has no market, in this case the water service valued as a scarce and indispensable asset. The work concentrated field phase and the design of econometric models, applied to environmental assessment techniques, the Logit model of the SAS statistical program was used. As a result of the research, a considerably low DAP was obtained, which highlights the Income and Education variables, which were statistically significant.