Search

A quantitative investigation of information science publications indexed in Web of Science by scholars affiliated with Canadian institutions was conducted for the period 1989 to 2008 as a follow-up to a 1991 study conducted by Chu and Wolfram. The findings reveal essentially linear growth in the number of contributions, as institutions housing library and information science programs contribute the most publications. The largest growth was observed in the area of information behaviour, where greater levels of author and inter-institutional co-authorship have been observed in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two large data sets of queries submitted to the Excite search service were used to derive different distributions of query and search behaviours (query-term usage across queries, terms used per query, page requests per query, queries per user/ session, query frequency across users). The authors fitted each data set to theoretical models used in Informetric research, in additional to the standard Zipf model to which most frequency distributions of Internet usage phenomena are informally fitted. The generalized inverse Gaussian-Poisson distribution provided the best fits for the models tested. With more accurate models to represent observed Web usage behaviours, researchers will be better able to simulate user behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the impact of term frequencies, term distributions, and indexing exhaustivity on the representation of document spaces in a visual, vector-based retrieval environment. Comparison of document-space densities resulting from combinations of indexing characteristics with the inclusion or exclusion of index terms of a given frequency; Significance of information visualization techniques in information retrieval (IR) systems; Features of IR systems.