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Biomedical research reporting guidelines provide a framework by which journal editors and the researchers who conduct studies can ensure that the reported research is both complete and transparent. With more than 16 different guidelines for the 11 major study types of medical and health research, authors need to be familiar with journal reporting standards. To assess the current endorsements of reporting guidelines for biomedical and health research, this study examined the instructions for authors (IFAs) of 559 biomedical journals by 11 prominent publishers that publish original research or systematic reviews/meta-analyses. Data from the above original sources were cleaned and restructured, and analyzed in a database and text miner. Each journal's instructions or information for authors were examined to code if any of five prominent reporting guidelines were mentioned and what form the guideline adherence demonstration took. Seventeen journals published the reporting guidelines. Four of the five reporting guidelines listed journals as endorsers. For journals with open peer review reports, a sample of journals and peer reviews was analyzed for mention of adherence to reporting guidelines. The endorsement of research guidelines by publishers and their associated journals is inconsistent for some publishers, with only a small number of journals endorsing relevant guidelines. Based on the analysis of open peer reviews, there is evidence that some reviewers check the adherence to the endorsed reporting guidelines. Currently, there is no universal endorsement of reporting guidelines by publishers nor ways of demonstrating adherence to guidelines. Journals may not directly inform authors of their guideline endorsements, making it more difficult for authors to adhere to endorsed guidelines. Suggestions derived from the findings are provided for authors, journals, and reporting guidelines to ensure increased adequate use of endorsed reporting guidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journals that adopt open peer review (OPR), where review reports of published articles are publicly available, provide an opportunity to study both review content characteristics and quantitative aspects of the overall review process. This study investigates two areas relevant to the quality assessment of manuscript reviews. First, do journal policies for reviewers to identify themselves influence how reviewers evaluate the merits of a manuscript based on the relative frequency of hedging terms and research-related terms appearing in their reviews? Second, is there an association between the number of reviews/reviewers and the manuscript's research impact once published as measured by citations? We selected reviews for articles published in 17 OPR journals from 2017 to 2018 to examine the incidence of reviewers' uses of hedging terms and research-related terms. The results suggest that there was little difference in the relative use of hedging term usage regardless of whether reviewers were required to identify themselves or if this was optional, indicating that the use of hedging in review contents was not influenced by journal requirements for reviewers to identify themselves. There was a larger difference observed for research-related terminology. We compared the total number of reviews for a manuscript, rounds of revisions, and the number of reviewers with the number of Web of Science citations the article received since publication. The findings reveal that scrutiny by more reviewers or conducting more reviews or rounds of review do not result in more impactful papers for most of the journals studied. Implications for peer review practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the information needs and seeking behaviors of African refugees in the Midwest United States. The research also investigates the sources participants consulted and their satisfaction with their information seeking and the information found. Design/methodology/approach: This qualitative research study recruited 18 African refugees to participate in one or more data collection modes used in the study (questionnaire, interview, focus group). The data were analyzed using qualitative open, axial and selective coding approaches to identify themes. Findings: The analysis of the data collected provides evidence that refugees had specific information needs centered on housing, health care, employment and education. They were not necessarily satisfied with the information they were able to find. Participants reported initially relying heavily on their caseworkers as sources of information when they first arrived in the United States until they were able to establish larger networks of contacts, which then expanded their information behaviors. Research limitations/implications: The number of participants and regional focus of the study do not allow for generalization of the findings to all African refugees in the United States. Still, the findings shed light on how to better serve the information needs of African refugees to help them adjust to life in their new environment. Practical implications: The findings of the study provide guidance for agencies that assist African refugees in adjusting to life in the United States. Originality/value: This study represents one of the few investigations of the information needs and seeking behaviors of African refugees in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platforms, search engine transaction logs, Web portal transaction logs, large text corpora, and other data sources offer users a variety of invaluable data sources. Data generated based on social media platforms and other data sources have become important sources of big data for researchers in information science. Big data provide not only challenges but also opportunities for information science. Emerging big data trends inevitably have an impact on research methods in information science. The authors of this paper discuss the impact of big data on research methods in information science. This paper addresses these challenges and opportunities through the lens of research methods, ranging from data processing, to sampling, to information visualization, to temporal analysis, to sentiment analysis, to correlation, to cause-effect relationship, to data accessibility, to data privacy, and data ethics issues. The discussions on related aspects of research methods provoke a healthy reflection and debate for the information science research community, which can help researchers in the field produce sound research designs for big data-oriented research studies and assist information practitioners in solving problems they face in the big data age. Research methods are fundamental and essential for any research studies. Big data analysis has a natural relationship with research methods. The paper discusses an emerging and important research topic big data from the unique angle of research methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three months of server transaction logs containing complete clickstream data for an image collection digital library were analysed for usage patterns to better understand user searching and browsing behaviour in this environment. Eleven types of user actions were identified from the log content. The study is novel in its combined analytical techniques and use of clickstream data from an image-based digital library. Three analytical techniques were used to analyse the data: (a) network analysis to better understand the relationship between sequential actions; (b) sequential pattern mining to identify frequent action sequences; and (c) k-means cluster analysis to identify groups of session patterns. The analysis revealed strong ties between several pairs of actions, relatively short pattern sequences that frequently duplicate previous actions and largely uniform session behaviour with little individual item browsing within sessions, indicating users are primarily engaged in purposeful and directed searching. Developers of image-based digital libraries should consider design features that support rapid browsing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As ALISE moves into its second century, the Board of Directors has been strategizing about how to continue to keep ALISE relevant and make it more visible and nimble in an environment of increasing competition for association membership and research publications. We would like to report on several developments within the Association this past year regarding our publications and the ALISE Annual Meeting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to analyze the visibility and international impact of Latin American scientific papers in Metric Studies of Information published from 2011 to 2016. It identifies the most productive countries, the journals that disseminated this research, the intensity of their scientific impact, and characterizes the scope of citations received at the national, regional and global level by applying citer analysis. As a research procedure, 1,115 papers were retrieved from the Scopus database, with at least one author from Latin America We focused on 1,107 papers produced by the 10 most productive. We identified 474 journals that published these papers. The journal core comprises 20 journals responsible for the dissemination of 380 (34%) of the paper corpus. Cluster analysis was used to understand the relationships among the 10 most productive countries. In order to verify the range of the science produced by the countries analyzed, country-based citer analysis was used. The cluster analysis revealed three groups of more homogenous countries regarding the volume and impact of research production and two isolated countries - Brazil and Peru. We concluded that the Latin American research is carried out by half of these countries, especially Brazil, accounting for more than half of this production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data citation, where products of research such as data sets, software, and tissue cultures are shared and acknowledged, is becoming more common in the era of Open Science. Currently, the practice of formal data citation—where data references are included alongside bibliographic references in the reference section of a publication—is uncommon. We examine the prevalence of data citation, documenting data sharing and reuse, in a sample of full text articles from the biological/biomedical sciences, the fields with the most public data sets available documented by the Data Citation Index (DCI). We develop a method that combines automated text extraction with human assessment for revealing candidate occurrences of data sharing and reuse by using terms that are most likely to indicate their occurrence. The analysis reveals that informal data citation in the main text of articles is far more common than formal data citations in the references of articles. As a result, data sharers do not receive documented credit for their data contributions in a similar way as authors do for their research articles because informal data citations are not recorded in sources such as the DCI. Ongoing challenges for the study of data citation are also outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the content of questions and responses about the Zika virus on Yahoo! Answers as a recent example of how public concerns regarding an international health issue are reflected in social media. We investigate the contents of posts about the Zika virus on Yahoo! Answers, identify and reveal subject patterns about the Zika virus, and analyze the temporal changes of the revealed subject topics over 4 defined periods of the Zika virus outbreak. Multidimensional scaling analysis, temporal analysis, and inferential statistical analysis approaches were used in the study. A resulting 2‐layer Zika virus schema, and term connections and relationships are presented. The results indicate that consumers' concerns changed over the 4 defined periods. Consumers paid more attention to the basic information about the Zika virus, and the prevention and protection from the Zika virus at the beginning of the outbreak of the Zika virus. During the later periods, consumers became more interested in the role that the government and health organizations played in the public health emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The large scale of scholarly publications poses a challenge for scholars in information seeking and sensemaking. Bibliometric, information retrieval (IR), text mining, and natural language processing techniques can assist to address this challenge, but have yet to be widely used in digital libraries (DL). This special issue on bibliometric-enhanced information retrieval and natural language processing for digital libraries (BIRNDL) was compiled after the first joint BIRNDL workshop that was held at the joint conference on digital libraries (JCDL 2016) in Newark, New Jersey, USA. It brought together IR and DL researchers and professionals to elaborate on new approaches in natural language processing, information retrieval, scientometric, and recommendation techniques that can advance the state of the art in scholarly document understanding, analysis, and retrieval at scale. This special issue includes 14 papers: four extended papers originating from the first BIRNDL workshop 2016 and the BIR workshop at ECIR 2016, four extended system reports of the CL-SciSumm Shared Task 2016 and six original research papers submitted via the open call for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to contribute to the discussion on authorship in contemporary science from Foucauldian and Kuhnian perspectives, highlighting the social aspects of science and the role of authorship in scientific revolutions. Thus, it describes the functions of the 'author' discussed by Foucault that can assist to reveal the characteristics of the scientific practice and examples of how theories are materialized. As a result, it identifies the ways in which modern science is developed and how knowledge is construed by multiple authors, group authors, the merit that is attributed by citations, etc. This article highlights the complexity of authorship attribution and the need to rethink generalized bibliometric techniques to evaluate science considering other aspects that go beyond the mere listing of the authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report discusses the Overcoming Barriers to Information Access (B2A) program. This is a doctoral cohort program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The program has focused on educating the next generation of doctoral graduates in library and information science with an emphasis on the theme of overcoming barriers to information access. Fellows were provided resources to support their educational activities, research and instructional experiences. In this paper the principal investigator for the program and the B2A Fellows reflect on the challenges and the rewards of their experiences in the program. Key findings that emerged include the importance of building community throughout the program and exposure to diverse perspectives. This initiative shows that although funding packages provide important resources to students, they do not buy extra time. The reflections in this paper provide insights into the doctoral student experience that can benefit other library and information science doctoral programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]