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A model is presented of the manifestation of the birth and development of a scientific specialty in a collection of journal papers. The proposed model, Cumulative Advantage by Paper with Exemplars (CAPE) is an adaptation of Price's cumulative advantage model (D. Price, 1976). Two modifications are made: (a) references are cited in groups by paper, and (b) the model accounts for the generation of highly cited exemplar references immediately after the birth of the specialty. This simple growth process mimics many characteristic features of real collections of papers, including the structure of the paper-to-reference matrix, the reference-per-paper distribution, the paper-per-reference distribution, the bibliographic coupling distribution, the cocitation distribution, the bibliographic coupling clustering coefficient distribution, and the temporal distribution of exemplar references. The model yields a great deal of insight into the process that produces the connectedness and clustering of a collection of articles and references. Two examples are presented and successfully modeled: a collection of 131 articles on MEMS RF (microelectromechnical systems radio frequency) switches, and a collection of 901 articles on the subject of complex networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaining a rapid overview of an emerging scientific topic, sometimes called research fronts, is an increasingly common task due to the growing amount of interdisciplinary collaboration. Visual overviews that show temporal patterns of paper publication and citation links among papers can help researchers and analysts to see the rate of growth of topics, identify key papers, and understand influences across subdisciplines. This article applies a novel network-visualization tool based on meaningful layouts of nodes to present research fronts and show citation links that indicate influences across research fronts. To demonstrate the value of two-dimensional layouts with multiple regions and user control of link visibility, we conducted a design-oriented, preliminary case study with 6 domain experts over a 4-month period. The main benefits were being able (a) to easily identify key papers and see the increasing number of papers within a research front, and (b) to quickly see the strength and direction of influence across related research fronts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it is commonly expected that the citation context of a reference is likely to provide more detailed and direct information about the nature of a citation, few studies in the literature have specifically addressed the extent to which the information in different parts of a scientific publication differs. Do abstracts tend to use conceptually broader terms than sentences in a citation context in the body of a publication? In this article, we propose a method to analyze and compare latent topics in scientific publications, in particular, from abstracts of papers that cited a target reference and from sentences that cited the target reference. We conducted an experiment and applied topical modeling techniques to full-text papers in eight biomedicine journals. Topics derived from the two sources are compared in terms of their similarities and broad-narrow relationships defined based on information entropy. The results show that abstracts and citation contexts are characterized by distinct sets of topics with moderate overlaps. Furthermore, the results confirm that topics from abstracts of citing papers have broader terms than topics from citation contexts formed by citing sentences. The method and the findings could be used to enhance and extend the current methodologies for research evaluation and citation evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central issue in evaluative bibliometrics is the characterization of the citation distribution of papers in the scientific literature. Here, we perform a large-scale empirical analysis of journals from every field in Thomson Reuters' Web of Science database. We find that only 30 of the 2,184 journals have citation distributions that are inconsistent with a discrete lognormal distribution at the rejection threshold that controls the false discovery rate at 0.05. We find that large, multidisciplinary journals are over-represented in this set of 30 journals, leading us to conclude that, within a discipline, citation distributions are lognormal. Our results strongly suggest that the discrete lognormal distribution is a globally accurate model for the distribution of “eventual impact” of scientific papers published in single-discipline journal in a single year that is removed sufficiently from the present date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A network is constructed by nodes and links, thus the node degree and the link strength appear as underlying quantities in network analysis. While the power-law distribution of node degrees is verified as a basic feature of numerous real networks, we investigate whether the link strengths follow the power-law distribution in weighted networks. After testing 12 different paper cocitation networks with 2 methods, fitting in double-log scales and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test ( K- S test), we observe that, in most cases, the link strengths also follow the approximate power-law distribution. The results suggest that the power-law type distribution could emerge not only in nodes and informational entities, but also in links and informational connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The journal structure in the China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database (CSTPCD) is analyzed from three perspectives: the database level, the specialty level, and the institutional level (i.e., university journals vs. journals issued by the Chinese Academy of Sciences). The results are compared with those for (Chinese) journals included in the Science Citation Index (SCI). The frequency of journal–journal citation relations in the CSTPCD is an order of magnitude lower than in the SCI. Chinese journals, especially high-quality journals, prefer to cite international journals rather than domestic ones; however, Chinese journals do not get an equivalent reception from their international counterparts. The international visibility of Chinese journals is low, but varies among fields of science. Journals of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have a better reception in the international scientific community than university journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four cases, illustrated by four examples, of duplicate or highly related publications can be distinguished and are analyzed here using citation data obtained from the Science Citation Index (SCI): (1) publication by different authors in the same journal; (2) the same author(s) publishing in different journals; (3) publication by different authors in different journals; (4) the same author(s) publishing highly related papers simultaneously in the same journal, often as part of a series of papers. Example 1, illustrating case 1, is an occurrence of highly related publications in mechanistic organic chemistry. Example 2, from analytical organic chemistry, contains elements of cases 2 and 3. Example 3, dealing solely with case 3, discusses two time-delayed publications from analytical biochemistry, which were highlighted by Garfield several times in the past to show how the SCI could be utilized to avoid duplicate publication. Example 4, derived from synthetic organic chemistry (total syntheses of taxol), contains elements of cases 1, 3, and 4 and, to a lesser extent, case 2. The citation records of the highly related or duplicate publications can deviate considerably from the journal impact factors; this was observed in three of the four examples relating to cases 2, 3, and 4. The examples suggest that citation of a paper may depend significantly on the journal in which it is published. As an indicator of this dependence, the journals in which the papers used in the present examples appeared were examined. Other factors such as key words in the paper title may also play a role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes ePaper, a research prototype system of a personalized newspaper on a mobile reading device. The ePaper aggregates content (i.e., news items) from various news providers, classifies the news items according to concepts from a news domain ontology, and delivers an electronic newspaper to each subscribed user (reader). The system personalizes the content of the newspaper according to the user's profiles and preferences by applying ontological content-based and collaborative filtering algorithms. The user's profile is updated implicitly and dynamically, based on the tracking of their reading. Beyond personalization, the ePaper can also provide the user with a “standard edition” of a selected newspaper, as well as browsing capabilities in a repository of news items. The layout of the newspaper is adapted to the specifications of the reading device and to the user's preferences. In this overview paper, we highlight the main research challenges involved in the development of ePaper and describe how we addressed them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are computer science papers extended after they are published? We have surveyed 200 computer science publications, 100 journal articles, and 100 conference papers, using self-citations to identify potential and actual continuations. We are interested in determining the proportion of papers that do indeed continue, how and when the continuation takes place, and whether any distinctions are found between the journal and conference populations. Despite the implicit assumption of a research line behind each paper, manifest in the ubiquitous 'future research' notes that close many of them, we find that more than 70% of the papers are never continued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International collaborative papers are increasingly common in journals of many disciplines. These types of papers are often cited more frequently. To identify the coauthorship trends within Library and Information Science (LIS), this study analyzed 7,489 papers published in six leading publications (ARIST, IP&M, JAMIA, JASIST, MISQ, and Scientometrics) over the last three decades. Logistic regression tested the relationships between citations received and seven factors: authorship type, author's subregion, country income level, publication year, number of authors, document type, and journal title. The main authorship type since 1995 was national collaboration. It was also the dominant type for all publications studied except ARIST, and for all regions except Africa. For citation counts, the logistic regression analysis found all seven factors were significant. Papers that included international collaboration, Northern European authors, and authors in high-income nations had higher odds of being cited more. Papers from East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Southern Europe had lower odds than North American papers. As discussed in the bibliometric literature, Merton's Matthew Effect sheds light on the differential citation counts based on the authors' subregion. This researcher proposes geographies of invisible colleagues and a geographic scope effect to further investigate the relationships between author geographic affiliation and citation impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hirsch's (2005) h index of scholarly output has generated substantial interest and wide acceptance because of its apparent ability to quantify scholarly impact simply and accurately. We show that the excitement surrounding h is premature for three reasons: h stagnates with increasing scientific age; it is highly dependent on publication quantity; and it is highly dependent on field-specific citation rates. Thus, it is not useful for comparing scholars across disciplines. We propose the scholarly “index of quality and productivity” (IQp) as an alternative to h. The new index takes into account a scholar's total impact and also corrects for field-specific citation rates, scholarly productivity, and scientific age. The IQp accurately predicts group membership on a common metric, as tested on a sample of 80 scholars from three populations: (a) Nobel winners in physics (n = 10), chemistry (n = 10), medicine (n = 10), and economics (n = 10), and towering psychologists (n = 10); and scholars who have made more modest contributions to science including randomly selected (b) fellows (n = 15) and (c) members (n = 15) of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. The IQp also correlates better with expert ratings of greatness than does the h index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces articles published in the October 2003 issue of the 'Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.' Trend toward electronic journals; Model for moving from paper to electronic journal; Effect of making electronic copies of journals on the use of paper copies of journals; Development of electronic resources.

Co-authorship in publications within a discipline uncovers interesting properties of the analyzed field. We represent collaboration in academic papers of computer science in terms of differently grained networks, namely affiliation and collaboration networks. We also build those sub-networks that emerge from either conference or journal co-authorship only. We take advantage of the network science paraphernalia to take a picture of computer science collaboration including all papers published in the field since 1936. Furthermore, we observe how collaboration in computer science evolved over time since 1960. We investigate bibliometric properties such as size of the discipline, productivity of scholars, and collaboration level in papers, as well as global network properties such as reachability and average separation distance among scholars, distribution of the number of scholar collaborators, network resilience and dependence on star collaborators, network clustering, and network assortativity by number of collaborators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study scientists were asked about their own publication history and their citation counts. The study shows that the citation counts of the publications correspond reasonably well with the authors' own assessments of scientific contribution. Generally, citations proved to have the highest accuracy in identifying either major or minor contributions. Nevertheless, according to these judgments, citations are not a reliable indicator of scientific contribution at the level of the individual article. In the construction of relative citation indicators, the average citation rate of the subfield appears to be slightly more appropriate as a reference standard than the journal citation rate. The study confirms that review articles are cited more frequently than other publication types. Compared to the significance authors attach to these articles they appear to be considerably “overcited.” However, there were only marginal differences in the citation rates between empirical, methods, and theoretical contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recently proposed fractional scoring scheme is used to attribute publications to percentile rank classes. It is shown that in this way uncertainties and ambiguities in the evaluation of specific quantile values and percentile ranks do not occur. Using the fractional scoring the total score of all papers exactly reproduces the theoretical value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2000, the Board of Directors of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) changed the name of the association by adding the words, “and Technology” (&T). Today this change may be considered minor, but for many involved at the time—it was a change that had purpose and meaning. A study was initiated to trace the society's transition toward a professional association more inclusive of practitioners and applied research. The study was conducted in two stages, using quantitative and qualitative methods. Stage 1 compared the research published in the conference proceedings both prior to and following the society's name change. Stage 2 built upon the assumption that a professional association is a reflection of its membership. The Stage 1 results offer both an aggregate and a comparative view of the papers accepted for and presented at the annual conference. The results suggest that as an association of researchers, the society may be moving toward a renewed focus on practical and applied information. The Stage 2 results suggest that some ASIS&T members welcome the increased focus on technology, applied research, and the topics of interest to practitioners. Others view the changes as negative, perhaps even undermining the value of ASIS. The practical implications suggest that an annual conference can be an association's most important branding opportunity. It should reflect the interests of its membership as well as attract new members. A clear vision, supported by the membership, will guide the activities of the society and, in turn, will effectively serve its members professional needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Research patterns could enhance understanding of the Information Systems (IS) field. Citation analysis is the methodology commonly used to determine such research patterns. In this study, the citation methodology is applied to one of the top-ranked Information Systems conferences—International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). Information is extracted from papers in the proceedings of ICIS 2000 to 2002. A total of 145 base articles and 4,226 citations are used. Research patterns are obtained using total citations, citations per journal or conference, and overlapping citations. We then provide the citation ranking of journals and conferences. We also examine the difference between the citation ranking in this study and the ranking of IS journals and IS conferences in other studies. Based on the comparison, we confirm that IS research is a multidisciplinary research area. We also identify the most cited papers and authors in the IS research area, and the organizations most active in producing papers in the top-rated IS conference. We discuss the findings and implications of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an introduction to the special topic issue of the "Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology." The special issue of the journal addresses significant research questions related to the broad research area of information seeking behavior. The international group of papers presented in this special issue of the journal provides a diverse range of studies and insights into the current state of theories and models of human information seeking. According to the author, information seeking is a complex information and communication activity requiring access to diverse sources of information to deal with personal, social, or work-related problems. However, with the proliferation of personal computers, the growth of the Internet and the accompanying development of information and communication services, information seekers have been provided with many new services and potential new channels of information access. New methods of data collection such as analyzing online query logs and new methodologies borrowed from other disciplines have lead to marked improvements in information seeking research in recent years.

The study of the citation histories and ageing of documents are topics that have been addressed from several perspectives, especially in the analysis of documents with “delayed recognition” or “sleeping beauties.” However, there is no general methodology that can be extensively applied for different time periods or research fields. In this article, a new methodology for the general analysis of the ageing and “durability” of scientific papers is presented. This methodology classifies documents into three general types: delayed documents, which receive the main part of their citations later than normal documents; flashes in the pan, which receive citations immediately after their publication but are not cited in the long term; and normal documents, documents with a typical distribution of citations over time. These three types of durability have been analyzed considering the whole population of documents in the Web of Science with at least 5 external citations (i.e., not considering self-citations). Several patterns related to the three types of durability have been found and the potential for further research of the developed methodology is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A brief communication appearing in this journal ranked UK-based LIS and (some) IR academics by their h-index using data derived from the Thomson ISI Web of Science™ (WoS). In this brief communication, the same academics were re-ranked, using other popular citation databases. It was found that for academics who publish more in computer science forums, their h was significantly different due to highly cited papers missed by WoS; consequently, their rank changed substantially. The study was widened to a broader set of UK-based LIS and IR academics in which results showed similar statistically significant differences. A variant of h, hmx, was introduced that allowed a ranking of the academics using all citation databases together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigate whether there is a need for the h index and its variants in addition to standard bibliometric measures (SBMs). Results from our recent study (L. Bornmann, R. Mutz, & H.-D. Daniel, 2008) have indicated that there are two types of indices: One type of indices (e.g., h index) describes the most productive core of a scientist's output and informs about the number of papers in the core. The other type of indices (e.g., a index) depicts the impact of the papers in the core. In evaluative bibliometric studies, the two dimensions quantity and quality of output are usually assessed using the SBMs “number of publications” (for the quantity dimension) and “total citation counts” (for the impact dimension). We additionally included the SBMs into the factor analysis. The results of the newly calculated analysis indicate that there is a high intercorrelation between “number of publications” and the indices that load substantially on the factor Quantity of the Productive Core as well as between “total citation counts” and the indices that load substantially on the factor Impact of the Productive Core. The high-loading indices and SBMs within one performance dimension could be called redundant in empirical application, as high intercorrelations between different indicators are a sign for measuring something similar (or the same). Based on our findings, we propose the use of any pair of indicators (one relating to the number of papers in a researcher's productive core and one relating to the impact of these core papers) as a meaningful approach for comparing scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jorge Hirsch (2005a, 2005b) recently proposed the h index to quantify the research output of individual scientists. The new index has attracted a lot of attention in the scientific community. The claim that the h index in a single number provides a good representation of the scientific lifetime achievement of a scientist as well as the (supposed) simple calculation of the h index using common literature databases lead to the danger of improper use of the index. We describe the advantages and disadvantages of the h index and summarize the studies on the convergent validity of this index. We also introduce corrections and complements as well as single-number alternatives to the h index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Co-occurrence matrices, such as cocitation, coword, and colink matrices, have been used widely in the information sciences. However, confusion and controversy have hindered the proper statistical analysis of these data. The underlying problem, in our opinion, involved understanding the nature of various types of matrices. This article discusses the difference between a symmetrical cocitation matrix and an asymmetrical citation matrix as well as the appropriate statistical techniques that can be applied to each of these matrices, respectively. Similarity measures (such as the Pearson correlation coefficient or the cosine) should not be applied to the symmetrical cocitation matrix but can be applied to the asymmetrical citation matrix to derive the proximity matrix. The argument is illustrated with examples. The study then extends the application of co-occurrence matrices to the Web environment, in which the nature of the available data and thus data collection methods are different from those of traditional databases such as the Science Citation Index. A set of data collected with the Google Scholar search engine is analyzed by using both the traditional methods of multivariate analysis and the new visualization software Pajek, which is based on social network analysis and graph theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web citations have been proposed as comparable to, even replacements for, bibliographic citations, notably in assessing the academic impact of work in promotion and tenure decisions. We compared bibliographic and Web citations to articles in 46 journals in library and information science. For most journals (57%), Web citations correlated significantly with both bibliographic citations listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index and the ISI's Journal Impact Factor. Many of the Web citations represented intellectual impact, coming from other papers posted on the Web (30%) or from class readings lists (12%). Web citation counts were typically higher than bibliographic citation counts for the same article. Journals with more Web citations tended to have Web sites that provided tables of contents on the Web, while less cited journals did not have such publicity. The number of Web citations to journal articles increased from 1992 to 1997. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past several years studies have started to appear comparing the accuracies of various science mapping approaches. These studies primarily compare the cluster solutions resulting from different similarity approaches, and give varying results. In this study we compare the accuracies of cluster solutions of a large corpus of 2,153,769 recent articles from the biomedical literature (2004-2008) using four similarity approaches: co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, direct citation, and a bibliographic coupling-based citation-text hybrid approach. Each of the four approaches can be considered a way to represent the research front in biomedicine, and each is able to successfully cluster over 92% of the corpus. Accuracies are compared using two metrics-within-cluster textual coherence as defined by the Jensen-Shannon divergence, and a concentration measure based on the grant-to-article linkages indexed in MEDLINE. Of the three pure citation-based approaches, bibliographic coupling slightly outperforms co-citation analysis using both accuracy measures; direct citation is the least accurate mapping approach by far. The hybrid approach improves upon the bibliographic coupling results in all respects. We consider the results of this study to be robust given the very large size of the corpus, and the specificity of the accuracy measures used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how varied damping factors in the PageRank algorithm influence the ranking of authors and proposes weighted PageRank algorithms. We selected the 108 most highly cited authors in the information retrieval (IR) area from the 1970s to 2008 to form the author co-citation network. We calculated the ranks of these 108 authors based on PageRank with the damping factor ranging from 0.05 to 0.95. In order to test the relationship between different measures, we compared PageRank and weighted PageRank results with the citation ranking, h-index, and centrality measures. We found that in our author co-citation network, citation rank is highly correlated with PageRank with different damping factors and also with different weighted PageRank algorithms; citation rank and PageRank are not significantly correlated with centrality measures; and h-index rank does not significantly correlate with centrality measures but does significantly correlate with other measures. The key factors that have impact on the PageRank of authors in the author co-citation network are being co-cited with important authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on information science, bibliographic citations, and peer review. It states that information science has evolved since the 1950s and includes such concepts as knowledge representation, information retrieval, user needs and behavior, information theory, bibliometrics, and scholarly communication. It comments on article submissions and on the metrics concerning the quality of an article. It mentions that while the number of citations a paper receives after its publication can be a useful metric of the value of a paper, quality is not synonymous with a high number of citations. It comments on various forms of peer review, including web-based open peer review and single-blind peer review.

This study explores the similarity among six types of scholarly networks aggregated at the institution level, including bibliographic coupling networks, citation networks, cocitation networks, topical networks, coauthorship networks, and coword networks. Cosine distance is chosen to measure the similarities among the six networks. The authors found that topical networks and coauthorship networks have the lowest similarity; cocitation networks and citation networks have high similarity; bibliographic coupling networks and cocitation networks have high similarity; and coword networks and topical networks have high similarity. In addition, through multidimensional scaling, two dimensions can be identified among the six networks: Dimension 1 can be interpreted as citation-based versus noncitation-based, and Dimension 2 can be interpreted as social versus cognitive. The authors recommend the use of hybrid or heterogeneous networks to study research interaction and scholarly communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This methods-oriented paper introduces visual methods and specifically photography to study immediate information space (Lee, ); that is, information-rich settings such as offices or homes. It draws upon the authors' firsthand ethnographic field experiences, a review of relevant theoretical and methodological literature, and an analysis of cases within information studies that have made use of visual and photographic techniques. To begin, the traditions of visual research within anthropology and sociology are traced and major epistemological, methodological, and disciplinary debates associated with visual scholarship are presented. Then, investigations of immediate information space that utilize photography are analyzed, including examples from the areas of personal information management, health informatics, information behavior, and computer-supported cooperative work. Moreover, a section entitled 'Applying Photographic Techniques...' supplies guidelines for employing photography in a research design, as well as a question-based research framework and tips for photographing information phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In bibliometrics, the association of 'impact' with central-tendency statistics is mistaken. Impacts add up, and citation curves therefore should be integrated instead of averaged. For example, the journals MIS Quarterly and Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology differ by a factor of 2 in terms of their respective impact factors (IF), but the journal with the lower IF has the higher impact. Using percentile ranks (e.g., top-1%, top-10%, etc.), an Integrated Impact Indicator ( I3) can be based on integration of the citation curves, but after normalization of the citation curves to the same scale. The results across document sets can be compared as percentages of the total impact of a reference set. Total number of citations, however, should not be used instead because the shape of the citation curves is then not appreciated. I3 can be applied to any document set and any citation window. The results of the integration (summation) are fully decomposable in terms of journals or institutional units such as nations, universities, and so on because percentile ranks are determined at the paper level. In this study, we first compare I3 with IFs for the journals in two Institute for Scientific Information subject categories ('Information Science & Library Science' and 'Multidisciplinary Sciences'). The library and information science set is additionally decomposed in terms of nations. Policy implications of this possible paradigm shift in citation impact analysis are specified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1975 Tefko Saracevic declared “the subject knowledge view” to be the most fundamental perspective of relevance. This paper examines the assumptions in different views of relevance, including “the system's view” and “the user's view” and offers a reinterpretation of these views. The paper finds that what was regarded as the most fundamental view by Saracevic in 1975 has not since been considered (with very few exceptions). Other views, which are based on less fruitful assumptions, have dominated the discourse on relevance in information retrieval and information science. Many authors have reexamined the concept of relevance in information science, but have neglected the subject knowledge view, hence basic theoretical assumptions seem not to have been properly addressed. It is as urgent now as it was in 1975 seriously to consider “the subject knowledge view” of relevance (which may also be termed “the epistemological view”). The concept of relevance, like other basic concepts, is influenced by overall approaches to information science, such as the cognitive view and the domain-analytic view. There is today a trend toward a social paradigm for information science. This paper offers an understanding of relevance from such a social point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses citations, from 1996 to 2007, to the work of 80 randomly selected full-time, information studies (IS) faculty members from North America to examine differences between Scopus and Web of Science in assessing the scholarly impact of the field focusing on the most frequently citing journals, conference proceedings, research domains and institutions, as well as all citing countries. Results show that when assessment is limited to smaller citing entities (e.g., journals, conference proceedings, institutions), the two databases produce considerably different results, whereas when assessment is limited to larger citing entities (e.g., research domains, countries), the two databases produce very similar pictures of scholarly impact. In the former case, the use of Scopus (for journals and institutions) and both Scopus and Web of Science (for conference proceedings) is necessary to more accurately assess or visualize the scholarly impact of IS, whereas in the latter case, assessing or visualizing the scholarly impact of IS is independent of the database used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amount of knowledge accumulated in published scientific papers has increased due to the continuing progress being made in scientific research. Since numerous papers have only reported fragments of scientific facts, there are possibilities for discovering new knowledge by connecting these facts. We therefore developed a system called BioTermNet to draft a conceptual network with hybrid methods of information extraction and information retrieval. Two concepts are regarded as related in this system if (a) their relationship is clearly described in MEDLINE abstracts or (b) they have distinctively co-occurred in abstracts. PRIME data, including protein interactions and functions extracted by NLP techniques, are used in the former, and the Singhal-measure for information retrieval is used in the latter. Relationships that are not clearly or directly described in an abstract can be extracted by connecting multiple concepts. To evaluate how well this system performs, Swanson's association between Raynaud's disease and fish oil and that between migraine and magnesium were tested with abstracts that had been published before the discovery of these associations. The result was that when start and end concepts were given, plausible and understandable intermediate concepts connecting them could be detected. When only the start concept was given, not only the focused concept (magnesium and fish oil) but also other probable concepts could be detected as related concept candidates. Finally, this system was applied to find diseases related to the BRCA1 gene. Some other new potentially related diseases were detected along with diseases whose relations to BRCA1 were already known. The BioTermNet is available at http://btn.ontology.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, many evaluations of Web sites have been conducted, and relevant researches have also been carried out in academic circles. Correspondence analysis is introduced in this paper to evaluate university library Web sites through building a correspondence analysis model. This paper gives suggestions as to how to construct university library Web sites based on analysis and summary of evaluation results, in a bid to strengthen the construction of university library Web sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part I. Examines the effect of a presentation of the Information Search Process (ISP) model by Carol Kuhlthau on the perception of students on research and research paper anxiety. Concept of ISP; Feedback of students on ISP; Effective approach for anxiety reduction.

The study on information science (IS) by Bates () is an important contribution to the literature on browsing in IS. It is explicitly based on 'behavioural science.' I use this article as the point of departure for demonstrating how more social and interpretative understandings may provide fruitful improvements for research in information seeking, browsing, and related phenomena. It is part of my ongoing publication of articles about philosophical issues in IS and it is intended to be accompanied by analyses of other examples of contributions to core issues in IS. Although it is mainly formulated as a discussion based on a specific paper, it should be seen as part of a general discussion of the philosophical foundation of IS and as support for the emerging social paradigm in this field. The article argues that human browsing should not be conceptualized primarily in biological terms and should not be understood as random exploratory processes, but rather it should be seen as a kind of orienting strategy governed by people's metatheories or 'paradigms.' Information professionals should know how different metatheories are distributed in the information ecology and, thus, be able to help people developing fruitful browsing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scoring rules (or score-based rankings or summation-based rankings) form a family of bibliometric rankings of authors such that authors are ranked according to the sum over all their publications of some partial scores. Many of these rankings are widely used (e.g., number of publications, weighted or not by the impact factor, by the number of authors, or by the number of citations). We present an axiomatic analysis of the family of all scoring rules and of some particular cases within this family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the generalized Egghe-indices as a new family of scientific impact measures for ranking the output of scientific researchers. The definition of this family is strongly inspired by Egghe's well-known g-index. The main contribution of the paper is a family of axiomatic characterizations that characterize every generalized Egghe-index in terms of four axioms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present the results of a study that systematically explored “externalized knowledge” in the context of office work. The aim of the study was to investigate what knowledge information workers externalize into their physical environment (e.g., when shuffling or relocating paper documents on their desks) and how this knowledge is “encoded” in visual cues. Based on field data, categories of visual cues and semantic judgments were derived, a way to aggregate these categories into clusters was proposed, and a model of the relationships among cues and judgments was developed. We conclude that visual cues of physical documents represent, besides their content, information about the features of content and about different aspects of task context and overview. Three clusters outline the space of visual cues: (a) content that resides in (b) a holder that is (c) located somewhere in space. The three identified clusters of semantic judgments express three aggregation levels of one's work: (a) individual document, (b) the context of this document, and (c) an overview over someone's activities. The nature of the relationships among these clusters is reviewed through three aspects: content-dependence, flexibility, and effort. We conclude with implications of the results and future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Author cocitation analysis (ACA) has frequently been applied over the last two decades for mapping the intellectual structure of a research field as represented by its authors. However, what is mapped in ACA is actually the structure of intellectual influences on a research field as perceived by its active authors. In this exploratory paper, by contrast, we introduce author bibliographic-coupling analysis (ABCA) as a method to map the research activities of active authors themselves for a more realistic picture of the current state of research in a field. We choose the information science (IS) field and study its intellectual structure both in terms of current research activities as seen from ABCA and in terms of intellectual influences on its research as shown from ACA. We examine how these two aspects of the intellectual structure of the IS field are related, and how they both developed during the “first decade of the Web,” 1996–2005. We find that these two citation-based author-mapping methods complement each other, and that, in combination, they provide a more comprehensive view of the intellectual structure of the IS field than either of them can provide on its own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the analysis of citations in the scholarly literature is now an established and relatively well understood part of information science, not enough is known about citations that can be found on the Web. In particular, are there new Web types, and if so, are these trivial or potentially useful for studying or evaluating research communication? We sought evidence based upon a sample of 1,577 Web citations of the URLs or titles of research articles in 64 open-access journals from biology, physics, chemistry, and computing. Only 25% represented intellectual impact, from references of Web documents (23%) and other informal scholarly sources (2%). Many of the Web/URL citations were created for general or subject-specific navigation (45%) or for self-publicity (22%). Additional analyses revealed significant disciplinary differences in the types of Google unique Web/URL citations as well as some characteristics of scientific open-access publishing on the Web. We conclude that the Web provides access to a new and different type of citation information, one that may therefore enable us to measure different aspects of research, and the research process in particular; but to obtain good information, the different types should be separated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recently developed h-index has been applied to the literature produced by senior British-based academics in librarianship and information science. The majority of those evaluated currently hold senior positions in UK information science and librarianship departments; however, a small number of staff in other departments and retired “founding fathers” were analyzed as well. The analysis was carried out using the Web of Science (Thomson Scientific, Philadelphia, PA) for the years from 1992 to October 2005, and included both second-authored papers and self-citations. The top-ranking British information scientist, Peter Willett, has an h-index of 31. However, it was found that Eugene Garfield, the founder of modern citation studies, has an even higher h-index of 36. These results support other studies suggesting that the h-index is a useful tool in the armory of bibliometrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new document representation model is presented in this paper. This model is based on the idea of representing a document by two or more pictures of the document taken from different perspectives. It is shown that by applying the stereo representation model, enhanced textual retrieval performance is achieved because the new model improves the capability of capturing individual features of the document. Experiments have been conducted on two standard corpora, TIME and ADI, using the standard term vector method and the latent semantic indexing (LSI) method based upon both the stereo representation model and the traditional representation model. Statistical t-tests on the experimental results have convincingly illustrated that these methods achieve significant improvements in retrieval performances with the stereo representation model over those with the traditional representation model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of trust in building and maintaining consumer relationships in the online environment is widely accepted in the Information Systems literature. A key challenge for researchers is to identify antecedent variables that engender consumer trust in Internet shopping. This paper adopts a multidisciplinary approach and develops an integrative model of consumer trust in Internet shopping through synthesizing the three diverse trust literatures. The social psychological perspective guides us to include perceived trustworthiness of Internet merchants as the key determinant of consumer trust in Internet shopping. The sociological viewpoint suggests the inclusion of legal framework and third-party recognition in the research model. The views of personality theorists postulate a direct effect of propensity to trust on consumer trust in Internet shopping. The results of this study provide strong support for the research model and research hypotheses, and the high explanatory power illustrates the complementarity of the three streams of research on trust. This paper contributes to the conceptual and empirical understanding of consumer trust in Internet shopping. Implications of this study are noteworthy for both researchers and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As retrieval set size in information retrieval (IR) becomes larger, users may need greater interactive opportunities to determine for themselves potential relevance of the resources offered by a given collection. A parts-of-document approach, coupled with an interactive graphic interface and control panel, permits end users to tailor the information seeking (IS) session. Applying the model described by the author in a previous paper in this journal, this paper explores two issues: whether a group of information seekers in the same research domain will want to use this type of IR interaction, and whether such interaction is more successful than relevancy ranked lists, based on the general vector model. In addition, the paper proposes the use of gradient space as a means of capturing end users' cognitive states-decision-making points- during a parts-of-document-based lR session. It concludes that, for a group of biomedical researchers, a parts-of-document approach is preferred for certain IR situations and that gradient space provides designers of systems with empirical evidence suited for systems analysis.

This paper offers a new, nonlinear model of information-seeking behavior, which contrasts with earlier stage models of information behavior and represents a potential cornerstone for a shift toward a new perspective for understanding user information behavior. The model is based on the findings of a study on interdisciplinary information-seeking behavior. The study followed a naturalistic inquiry approach using interviews of 45 academics. The interview results were inductively analyzed and an alternative framework for understanding information-seeking behavior was developed. This model illustrates three core processes and three levels of contextual interaction, each composed of several individual activities and attributes. These interact dynamically through time in a nonlinear manner. The behavioral patterns are analogous to an artist's palette, in which activities remain available throughout the course of information-seeking. In viewing the processes in this way, neither start nor finish points are fixed, and each process may be repeated or lead to any other until either the query or context determine that information-seeking can end. The interactivity and shifts described by the model show information-seeking to be nonlinear, dynamic, holistic, and flowing. The paper offers four main implications of the model as it applies to existing theory and models, requirements for future research, and the development of information literacy curricula. Central to these implications is the creation of a new nonlinear perspective from which user information-seeking can be interpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revises David Ellis's information-seeking behavior model of social scientists, which includes six generic features: starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, and extracting. The paper uses social science faculty researching stateless nations as the study population. The description and analysis of the information-seeking behavior of this group of scholars is based on data collected through structured and semistructured electronic mail interviews. Sixty faculty members from 14 different countries were interviewed by e-mail. For reality check purposes, face-to-face interviews with five faculty members were also conducted. Although the study confirmed Ellis's model, it found that a fuller description of the information-seeking process of social scientists studying stateless nations should include four additional features besides those identified by Ellis. These new features are: accessing, networking, verifying, and information managing. In view of that, the study develops a new model, which, unlike Ellis's, groups all the features into four interrelated stages: searching, accessing, processing, and ending. This new model is fully described and its implications on research and practice are discussed. How and why scholars studied here are different than other academic social scientists is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the importance of conceptual and theoretical work in the design of information retrieval systems. Two epistemological positions leading to different solutions in digital library (DL) design are examined: the information transfer perspective and the social contructionist knowledge production perspective. The first section of the paper explores how the information transfer perspective affects the principles by which documents are organized in DLs. The second section analyzes the basic assumptions of the knowledge production perspective. The third section discusses how social constructionist ideas affect the design principles and information architecture of DLs. The authors suggest that, in the electronic information environment, traditional noun-based approaches can be replaced by solutions that combine verbs and nouns to visualize the structure of conversations concerning a particular issue or topic. Finally, the potentials and problems of building constructionist digital libraries are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article announces the topic of the next special topic issue of this periodical. Papers are being sought for the 2004 special issue, whose topic will be "Soft Power: Informational Ambiguities and Asymmetries in the Network Age." Guest editors for this issue will be Christopher Lueg and Blaise Cronin. Topics of interest that writers can choose to discuss in their papers are listed. The deadline for accepting manuscripts is October 31, 2002. Contact information is provided.