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Mental illness presents a huge individual, societal and economic challenges, currently accounting for 20% of the worldwide burden of disease. There is a gap between the need for and access to services. Digital technology has been proven effective in e-mental health for preventing and treating mental health problems. However, there is a need for cross-disciplinary efforts to increase the impact of e-mental health services. This paper aims to report key challenges and possible solutions for cross-disciplinary and cross-sectorial research teams within the domain of e-mental health.

The key challenges and possible solutions will be discussed in light of the literature on effective cross-disciplinary research teams.

Six topics have been key challenges in our cross-disciplinary and cross-sectorial research team: to develop a shared understanding of the domain; to establish a common understanding of key concepts among the project participants; to involve the end-users in the research and development process; to collaborate across sectors; to ensure privacy and security of health data; and to obtain the right timing of activities according to project dependencies.

This study focuses to increase knowledge and training in cross-disciplinary and cross-sectorial research, as this is often referred to as an important tool when developing sustainable solutions for major societal challenges.

This study needs to include theory and skills training in cross-disciplinary research in research training.

Cross-disciplinary teams have the potential to address major societal challenges, including more perspectives and more stakeholders than single disciplinary research teams.

Major societal challenges require complex and sustainable solutions. However, there is a lack of knowledge about how cross-disciplinary and cross-sectorial research teams may work productively to solve these challenges. This paper shares experiences regarding the challenges and possible solutions for productive collaboration in cross-disciplinary and cross-sectorial research teams within the domain of e-mental health services.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the usability of the National Library of Turkey website developed for all citizens in the country to retrieve information available in a wide range of areas.

The evaluation performed by 57 undergraduate university students involved the identification and analysis of usability problems in the selected website. The assessment process was mainly based on Nielsen’s Heuristics. The data obtained in the evaluation process were enriched using the System Usability Scale (SUS) and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to conduct a more detailed analysis.

The participants identified many usability problems concerning the evaluated website and considered it as having low usability characteristics. The most violated heuristic item was found to be “consistency and standards” whereas the least violated heuristic item was “match between system and the real world.” The total number of the usability problems in heuristic evaluation correlated significantly and negatively with the SUS and the NPS results indicating that the more participants identified usability problems, the less they considered the website as usable and recommendable.

The participants were not usability experts, however they were selected from among the students who received the Human Computer Interaction course to ensure that they had sufficient information and experience concerning the evaluation of a website with heuristics. Besides, the study was limited to a small number of university students. The implication is that results of this study have potential to guide libraries, which plan to adapt themselves to the digital world by delivering web services, by addressing critical points influencing users’ points of views toward library websites and their usability evaluation result.

Depending on the changes in user habits regarding the retrieval of information, libraries have made considerable investments in web technologies to meet their users’ demands, and recently, digital libraries have begun to take over physical libraries. Users always need to perform tasks efficiently, effectively and satisfactorily when using websites. As one of the most crucial sources of digital materials, library websites are expected to have usable characteristics that satisfactorily meet user requirements. Therefore, the practical implication is that the findings of the study will guide designers, developers and practitioners in the development of library websites.

In the context of usability evaluation of digital libraries, this is the first study to analyze effects of usability problems identified by users during the heuristic inspection on their overall evaluation score and willingness to recommend the website to their friends or colleagues.

This study aims to evaluate the interface of the mobile Centralized Doctor Appointment System (CDAS), the largest mobile e-government health application developed in Turkey to allow citizens to make medical appointments at public hospitals.

A total of 40 information systems engineers took part in the study. The evaluation process was mainly based on Nielsen’s heuristics. The data obtained in the evaluation process were enriched using system usability scale to conduct a more detailed analysis.

Based on the findings, problems related to the usability of the evaluated mobile health application were identified. The most violated heuristic items were found to be “error prevention” and “user control and freedom”, whereas the least violated heuristic item was “consistency and standards”. The participants generally categorized the usability problems they identified as “minor” or “major” according to their severity.

As a developing country, Turkey has made considerable investment in mobile e-government applications in recent years. It is equally important that mobile e-government services provided by public institutions have features that make these applications effective, efficient and satisfying for citizens. Therefore, the usability of mobile health applications in government services needs to be researched to improve their effectiveness and guide authorities, practitioners and designers.

Entrepreneurship is a politically charged discourse. It has positive aspects but also destabilises societal, economic and political power relations, and leads to various categories of inclusion and exclusion. Despite the Western governmental grand narrative that portrays a vision of society whereby the entrepreneurial values such as resourcefulness, risk-taking, self-efficacy, autonomy and confidence can be appropriated by everyone, regardless of their background and profile, entrepreneurship does not often elevate and liberate marginalised people who are in subordinate positions. Presupposed assumptions of entrepreneurship should be challenged when pursuing the lines of critical inquiry as advocated in this chapter. Entrepreneurship is not only a socio-economic process but also functions as a political ideology, which can be instrumental in reproducing and reinforcing conservative assumptions and actions and hence shape public policy and public perception in ways that serve conservative political or capitalist ends, as evident in the case of social enterprise and entrepreneurship in the UK. Therefore, policy implications of the intersection of diversity and entrepreneurship are fundamentally important.

Legibility, intelligibility, mental images and cognitive and syntactical mapping are significant issues that help expose the spatial knowledge necessary for effective urban design. They also help us understand how a city’s new image is forming. This paper aims to present a new holistic approach to define urban design strategies that improve a city’s imageability through cognitive and syntactic concepts.

The study establishes a coherent framework by including residents’ mental images and space syntax theory’s descriptors to understand how residents perceive their physical environment. Using a mixed-methods research design, the authors studied the Iskenderun city center’s image and spatial design. First, the authors used descriptive analysis techniques (questionnaires, verbal interviews and cognitive mapping) and consulted 110 Iskenderun residents. Second, the authors used analytical analysis techniques to investigate the structural relations among city elements with the help of space syntax descriptors.

The results demonstrated the importance of applying combined descriptive and analytic techniques to provide an understanding of the city’s image. The authors also offered a proposal including the appropriate urban design strategies to promote Iskenderun city center’s imageability.

Applying this new coherent framework can support design decision-making for redesigning cities at the micro level and for planning new cityscapes at the macro level.

This study aims to examine the effects of energy transition on pollution emissions in Africa. In addition, it explores the indirect channels through which energy consumption impacts environmental quality.

The study uses system Generalised Method of Moments approach for a panel of 51 developing African countries over the 1996–2020 period.

The results show that fossil fuel and renewable energy consumption increase pollution emissions. The environment-degrading effect of renewable energy in Africa is however counter-intuitive, though the results are robust across regional economic blocks and income groups except for upper-middle-income countries where energy consumption is environment enhancing. Moreover, the results show that the environmental impacts of non-renewable energy consumption are modulated through financial development and information and communication technology (ICT) adoption, leading to respective positive net effects of 0.04460796 and 0.07682873. This is up to respective policy thresholds of 203.265 and 137.105 of financial development and ICT adoption, respectively, when the positive net effects are nullified.

Contingent on the results, the study suggests the need for African countries to develop sound financial systems and encourage the use of green technologies, to ensure that energy transition effectively contributes to emissions reduction. Policymakers in Africa should also be aware of the critical levels of financial development and ICT, beyond which complementary policies are required for non-renewable energy consumption to maintain a negative impact on environmental degradation.

Firstly, extant studies on the nexus between energy transition and environmental degradation in Africa are very sparse. Therefore, this study fills the existing research gap by comprehensively examining the effects of energy transition on pollution emissions across 51 African economies. Additionally, besides accounting for the direct environmental effects of energy transition, the current study accounts for the indirect channels through which the environmental impacts of energy transition are modulated. Hence, this study provides critical thresholds for the policy modulating variables, which enlighten policymakers on the necessity of designing complementary policies once the modulating variables attain the established thresholds.

While the current knowledge in the field of educational leadership and management (EDLM) has been primarily based on research produced in English-speaking Western societies, there have been significant efforts by other societies to contribute to the knowledge production, especially during the past decade. The purpose of this paper is to identify the contribution of Turkey to the international EDLM literature by investigating the topical focus, conceptual frameworks and research designs of papers published by EDLM scholars from Turkey.

Descriptive content analysis method was employed to examine 315 empirical, review, conceptual and commentary papers published by Turkish scholars in core educational administration and Web of Science journals. The time period of the review left open-ended. However, in practical terms, it begins in the year 1994 when the first article from Turkey was published in any of the selected sources and ends at the end of 2018. Information relevant to the research was extracted from each article and was coded to facilitate quantitative analysis. Using Excel software, descriptive statistics including frequencies and percentages were provided for each research question.

Results show that Turkish EDLM scholars mostly rely on survey based quantitative research approach, employing advanced statistical techniques in the analysis of the data. However, mixed method and qualitative studies are relatively less common. Organizational behavior, school leadership and emotions stand out as most frequently used topics, while Turkish scholars are not interested in analyzing the educational outcomes such as student achievement and school improvement. Consistent with the findings related to topical foci, a large number of those who were interested in correlational studies examined the relationship between leadership roles and organizational behaviors.

The data set only included journal articles and excluded conference proceedings, books and theses/dissertations. Nevertheless, the authors believe this review adds significantly to previous reviews of local EDLM journals conducted by Turkish scholars. The authors concluded that the Turkish scholars should direct their future research to exploring and better understanding the practices of Turkish principals in schools by: diversifying their research topics; incorporating more qualitative and mixed-method designs; and taking into account specific features of the culture and educational system in Turkey.

Based on the current higher education context, reducing scholars’ teaching load, diversifying research funding opportunities, and modifying access to tenure tracks seem necessary interventions to support EDLM research with strong ties to practice and to the sociocultural context. In addition, policy changes aiming professionalization of administrative positions and establishing some forms of formal training for school principalship are needed. Such changes can help transfer the knowledge produced by the Turkish EDLM researchers to the practice and provide solutions to problems related to school administration.

This paper will add to recent effort to identify how a developing nation outside Western perspective approaches the field, and contributes to the global knowledge base.

Motivated by recent research indicating that the operational performance of an enterprise can be enhanced by building a supporting data-driven environment in which to operate, this paper presents a simulation framework that enables an examination of the effects of applying smart manufacturing principles to conventional production systems, intending to transition to digital platforms.

To investigate the extent to which conventional production systems can be transformed into novel data-driven environments, the well-known constant work-in-process (CONWIP) production systems and considered production sequencing assignments in flowshops were studied. As a result, a novel data-driven priority heuristic, Net-CONWIP was designed and studied, based on the ability to collect real-time information about customer demand and work-in-process inventory, which was applied as part of a distributed and decentralised production sequencing analysis. Application of heuristics like the Net-CONWIP is only possible through the ability to collect and use real-time data offered by a data-driven system. A four-stage application framework to assist practitioners in applying the proposed model was created.

To assess the robustness of the Net-CONWIP heuristic under the simultaneous effects of different levels of demand, its different levels of variability and the presence of bottlenecks, the performance of Net-CONWIP with conventional CONWIP systems that use first come, first served priority rule was compared. The results show that the Net-CONWIP priority rule significantly reduced customer wait time in all cases relative to FCFS.

Previous research suggests there is considerable value in creating data-driven environments. This study provides a simulation framework that guides the construction of a digital transformation environment. The suggested framework facilitates the inclusion and analysis of relevant smart manufacturing principles in production systems and enables the design and testing of new heuristics that employ real-time data to improve operational performance. An approach that can guide the structuring of data-driven environments in production systems is currently lacking. This paper bridges this gap by proposing a framework to facilitate the design of digital transformation activities, explore their impact on production systems and improve their operational performance.