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Cost overruns, delays, and poor quality are frequent in public investment projects under the contract modality, executed by the Executing Unit: Special Project Huallaga Central and Bajo Mayo (PEHCBM). The purpose of this research is to identify the factors that affect the fulfillment of contracts for the execution of public works in the PEHCBM. This research includes the determination of the most influential factors using the relative importance index (RII), as well as surveys administered to a sample of 25 experts. A total of 91 articles from 48 academic journals were selected. With the application of the RII, 21 factors were determined, distributed among the dimensions of cost, time, and quality, and validated by the experts with a Spearman’s coefficient of value 0.521. In the case study, seven relevant factors were determined in PEHCBM execution contracts, identifying overtime between 4.7% and 524.2%, as well as a cost increase between 8.8% and 52.2%. Similarly, adverse situations detected by the Comptroller’s Office were determined, with an accumulated economic damage of about PEN 19 million, determining the high influence of the cost, time, and quality dimensions on them. In conclusion, this study shows the high overtime and the deficient quality of the works carried out by the contracting modality, which generated economic damage to the State. Full article

(1) Background: In recent years, medical institutions across the U.S. have implemented a points system based on the Educational Value Unit (EVU) to assess and reward faculty for their educational efforts. The purpose of this narrative review is to summarize the current literature on EVU systems and to evaluate their utility in the U.S. healthcare system. (2) Methods: We searched the Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science, and PubMed databases to identify literature describing the inception of EVU systems and current systems implemented by U.S. academic medical centers and medical schools. In total, a combined 48 studies and abstracts pertaining to EVU systems were reviewed, and a combined 26 published studies and abstracts from 1999 to 2022 pertaining to EVU systems were included. (3) Results: To our knowledge, at least 40 U.S. academic medical centers have used an educational metrics system, of which 21 institutions have published studies describing EVU systems in one or more of their medical departments. The outcomes associated with these self-described EVU systems are the focus of this study. EVU systems increase the number of faculty who meet baseline educational requirements, promote educational productivity, redistribute educational burden and funding among faculty members, and shift physician priorities towards education. The monetary reward associated with EVU systems is unlikely to be a significant factor contributing to these changes; instead, intrinsic motivation and a sense of academic responsibility play a larger role. (4) Conclusions: EVU systems are an effective way to evaluate and reward individual and departmental educational efforts in U.S. academic medical centers and medical schools. The adoption of EVUs will likely become more commonplace as U.S. academic medical centers and medical schools place additional emphasis on medical education. Full article

Given the interest in the study of metadiscourse as the communication of ideas and the way people use language in different communicative situations, this paper attempted to find the degree of confluence between metadiscourse markers from different studies and to show how patterns of metadiscourse analysis based on various written genres can be applied to a wider range. The mean values for the frequency of marker use and their respective deviations were determined by comparing a significant number of studies on metadiscourse elements. To ensure comparability, those following Hyland’s model were chosen. The units of analysis were grouped into two broad categories based on discursive characteristics: Academic genres (research articles, theses, and textbooks) and non-academic genres, which included documents ranging from newspaper editorials or opinion columns to Internet texts and other forms of digital communication. The results of our study highlight that the disparity in interactive markers between academic and non-academic texts is relatively small. This difference has been identified by previous studies, and it is confirmed herein that the difference may be related to the use of academic language, the topic, or the object of study. In contrast, the mean values of the interactive markers in non-academic texts are considerably higher than those in academic texts. At the same time, the texts seem to be organised along two axes (interactional and interactive) in distinct areas. Despite our initial assumptions that the data would be subject to individual variations, that differences would be found between different sections of the same genre within the same academic discipline, and that the results would vary if certain texts were added or excluded, we observed certain trends in the behaviour of the documents, although it prevailed that, within each category, the texts should be studied individually. Full article