Medicine

This study aims to investigate the factors influencing value chain (VC) in pharmaceutical industry, as a very important sector in Iran. The research method is descriptive-analytical in term of method. The required data have been collected from the experts of a public joint stock company. Conducting the research, first the literature of VC is reviewed to identify the initial factors affecting on VC of pharmaceutical companies. In this Phase, 34 factors were identified in 8 categories including; institutional, industry, political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors. In the next step, a primal evaluation of the initial factors by 14 experts of the research, resulted to the 20 more important factors which were used in the modelling process. Due to the need for fuzzy logic regarding subjective judgments in cause-effect relationships between factors, the fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) method in FCM expert software is used to visualize the relationships among these factors. The results show that technological capabilities, government policies, company resilience, financial strength, medicine price, sustainable waste management, cost of raw materials, production technology, cost of energy, R&D, operational efficiency, recycling capabilities, transportation cost, VC governance (coordination/ partnerships/ integration), consumer behavior and social (market) trends, environmental concerns about waste disposal internet of things (IoT) and connected devices, non-value-adding activities, import limitations and skilled human resources, respectively are the most influencing factors on pharmaceutical VC.

The present research studied the disciplinary use of cohesive devices across academic writing, comparing Native English Writers (NEW) with Arab Writers of English (AEW). It centers around the research articles in the fields of Medicine and Education. The researchers adopted corpus-based analysis, presented by Halliday and Hasan's framework, 1976, in the exploration of cohesive device types—grammar and lexical ones—while considering frequencies along with discourse contexts. The results indicated significant disciplinary differences in cohesive strategies use among the NEW, i.e. additive conjunctions, which appear in the educational writing and facilitate argument development and logical flow between ideas (e.g., and, further); the collocations in medical writing reflect the exactitude of the subject and clarity to be expected in any sort of scientific discourse, no less with causal conjunctions. AEW also exhibited discipline-specific patterns, but their cohesive strategies are colored by the Arabic rhetorical traditions. AEW in education relied heavily on repetition to achieve thematic unity, which sometimes results in redundancy by the norms of English academic writing. AEW in medicine make more use of additive and causal conjunctions to achieve logical relations, although overuse sometimes led to long, unwieldy sentences. These findings have significant pedagogical implications for EAP instruction. They call for training in cohesive strategies specific to disciplines, especially for learners from an Arab background, as this helps learners adjust their writing practices in ways that will meet expectations in the English academic conventions while managing cultural influences.