University-community partnerships are at the heart of community research and action. In these partnerships, university researchers work in collaboration with a variety of settings and programs, involving community leaders, agency staff, or members of grassroots and self-help groups. This chapter reviews the literature on university-community partnerships and provides a framework of 10 characteristics that are typical of successful partnership endeavors. We illustrate these principles with an example of a collaborative research project undertaken by a DePaul University research team that has engaged in a 10-year partnership with a community-based, self-run, residential substance abuse recovery program called Oxford House. Through a review of this collaborative effort, the authors examine the distinct opportunities and constraints in adopting unconventional methods of inquiry and action, highlighting a number of practical and theoretical issues that have been raised as the research team has striven to maintain a mutually beneficial alliance throughout the endeavor. The experience of the research team demonstrates the benefits to be gained from cultivating and maintaining collaborative university-community partnerships.The past 10 years have been marked by a new vision of how universities and communities work together. Institutions of higher education have become more concerned with providing learning experiences that link theoretical

The relatedness of research articles, patents, court rulings, webpages, and other document types is often calculated with citation or hyperlink-based approaches like co-citation (proximity) analysis. The main limitation of citation-based approaches is that they cannot be used for documents that receive little or no citations. We propose Virtual Citation Proximity (VCP), a Siamese Neural Network architecture, which combines the advantages of co-citation proximity analysis (diverse notions of relatedness / high recommendation performance), with the advantage of content-based filtering (high coverage). VCP is trained on a corpus of documents with textual features, and with real citation proximity as ground truth. VCP then predicts for any two documents, based on their title and abstract, in what proximity the two documents would be co-cited, if they were indeed co-cited. The prediction can be used in the same way as real citation proximity to calculate document relatedness, even for uncited documents. In our evaluation with 2 million co-citations from Wikipedia articles, VCP achieves an MAE of 0.0055, i.e. an improvement of 20% over the baseline, though the learning curve suggests that more work is needed.

This chapter represents some of the diverse voices of community agencies and self-help organizations. Our perspective has been largely absent from the literature, even from the related text by Tolan, Keys, Chertok, and Jason (1990). Therefore, our participation in this book signifies an advance in academicians' valuation of community expertise. This chapter offers a community perspective, tempered by personal and indirect experiences, of the contributions to participatory research presented in the preceding chapters. Our objective is to facilitate respectful and effective university-community collaborations for participatory community research and for program development. Several themes emerged from our considerations of the fit of participatory research methods and findings with the realities of social and economic problems, as experienced at the community level. These themes are the focus of this chapter. Community Consensus ThemesSix themes are of great importance to us: advocacy, topic selection, language, relationships, ethics, and funding and sustainability. Together, these individual themes speak to two values-concerns crucial to individuals and community groups: (a) the assistance of academia in solving community problems is welcome when researchers are committed to valuing the individual's real-world experience and. to being sensitive to cultural and personal differences and (b) research must contribute to the betterment of the participating community (i.e., the project should be meaningful to the community and provide useful information to operate and sustain program interventions).

Paul Molloy gives a clear and concise list of points to consider when organising your fundraising campaign.

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