Search

This article defines and explores the direct citations between citing publications (DCCPs) of a publication. We construct an ego-centred citation network for each paper that contains all of its citing papers and itself, as well as the citation relationships among them. By utilising a large-scale scholarly dataset from the computer science field in the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG-CS) dataset, we find that DCCPs exist universally in medium and highly cited papers. For those papers that have DCCPs, DCCPs do occur frequently; highly cited papers tend to contain more DCCPs than others. Meanwhile, the number of DCCPs of papers published in different years does not vary dramatically. This paper also discusses the relationship between DCCPs and some indirect citation relationships (e.g. co-citation and bibliographic coupling).

The purpose of this research is to map and analyse the conceptual and thematic structure of library and information science (LIS) research from the perspective of the co-word analysis. The bibliographical records consist of all the research papers published in the LIS core journals between 1990 and 2016 and indexed in Web of Science. ‘CiteSpace’ was used to visualise the co-word network of LIS studies. The frequency of co-occurrence and centrality scores in the overall structure of the field showed that the word ‘Science’ is the most significant and pivotal keyword among the nodes in the co-word network of LIS literature, and in this respect, the word ‘Library’ is in the second place. However, the results of the social network analysis uncovered that in spite of the high frequency of the word ‘library’, the pivotal role of the term has been exposed to decline over the time. The results of the analysis of co-word clusters showed that ‘information seeking and retrieval’ is the most important research focus in the intellectual structure of LIS literature during 1990–2016. Also, analysis of the hot spots of the LIS research based on Kleinberg algorithm indicated that the words ‘Internet’ and ‘World Wide Web’ have attracted the most attention by LIS scholars during the years under study.

Traditionally, publication citation networks are regarded as acyclic, that is, no loops in the network as an earlier published article cannot cite a later published article. However, due to the accessibility of pre-print versions of articles, there might be some loops in a publication citation network. This article presents a descriptive statistic on loops in publication citation networks of computer science and physics by employing a network-based indicator, namely, strongly connected component (SCC). By employing computer science and physics disciplines publications from the Web of Science database as examples, this article examines the count of loops, how the count changes over time and how the count relates to the published year difference between publications within the loop in the citation network. Some common structural patterns are also extracted and analysed; we observe that the two disciplines share the most frequent patterns though there exist some minor differences. Moreover, we find that self-citations in terms of authors, authors’ institutions and journals contribute to the formation of loops in publication citation networks.

This article presents results from a survey of faculty in North American Library and Information Studies (LIS) schools about their attitudes towards and experience with open-access publishing. As a follow-up to a similar survey conducted in 2013, the article also outlines the differences in beliefs about and engagement with open access that have occurred between 2013 and 2018. Although faculty in LIS schools are proponents of free access to research, journal publication choices remain informed by traditional considerations such as prestige and impact factor. Engagement with open access has increased significantly, while perceptions of open access have remained relatively stable between 2013 and 2018. Nonetheless, those faculty who have published in an open-access journal or are more knowledgeable about open access tend to be more convinced about the quality of open-access publications and less apprehensive about open-access publishing than those who have no publishing experience with open-access journals or who are less knowledgeable about various open-access modalities. Willingness to comply with gold open-access mandates has increased significantly since 2013.

This paper attempts to examine the e-libraries, digital libraries, electronic libraries, and online libraries employing bibliometric study techniques from 1971 to 2020. It focuses to consolidate the published documents on the library indexed in Web of Science. It has been observed that we found 4266 published documents employing bibliometric analysis. The study findings show that digital libraries are the top topic, proceeding paper is the top type of document, and most are published in the English language. Similarly, the year 2006 to 2010 has the highest number of published documents, top author Fox EA, Dept. Comp Sci top organisation, United States top country, and digital libraries as a top keyword has been found. Further, the name of Liu et al. has been at the top of the author’s list. Moreover, the results are presented in tables and figures to show the trend of data.

There is an established research agenda on dissecting an article’s components and their association with a journal’s prestige. However, journals’ titles and their overview, aim and scope (i.e. journal’s mission statement – JMS(s)) have not been investigated with the same diligence. This study aims to conduct a comprehensive outlook of titles and JMSs’ lexical structure and identify significant differences between journals prestige and type of access and their JMS content in the field of business, management and accounting (BMA), considering the field’s experience in developing and applying mission statements. Titles and JMSs’ structural analysis reflected current and critical discussion in BMA: a predilection for counterintuitive findings and information and communication technology (ICT) tools. JMSs expressed primarily target customers and markets. JMSs from reputable journals showed a higher betweenness for key-terms related to rigorous features. In contrast, JMSs of lower reputable journals highlighted indexing attributes. The Wilcoxon rank-sum and the Kruskal–Wallis tests showed significant differences in the JMSs’ median diversity regarding the journal’s type of access and best quartiles.

Early- and mid-career researchers will shape the future of library and information science (LIS) research and it is crucial they be well placed to engage with the research impact agenda. Their understanding of research impact may influence their capacity to be returned to research excellence framework (REF), the UK’s research quality assessment tool, as well as their ability to access research funding. This article reports the findings of a qualitative study exploring how the research impact agenda is influencing early- and mid-career researcher behaviour. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 early- and mid-career researchers. While enthusiastic about creating lasting impact, participants lack effective institutional support to maximise their own research impact. Participants demonstrate uncertainty about what REF impact is. The authors conclude that while there is evidence LIS academics engage with practice to maximise impact, they lack support in building impact and the discipline needs to do more to create opportunities for the academy and the profession to coalesce to identify objects for and deliver impactful research.

The importance of demonstrating value for money in terms of academic research beyond the walls of institutions grows stronger as demonstrated by the inclusion of impact assessment in the 2014 REF (Research Excellence Framework) exercise for UK higher education institutions (HEIs). To understand if such focus is influencing the library and information science (LIS) discipline, this paper reports a critical examination of impact case studies submitted to REF 2014 under the Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management Unit of Assessment. Content analysis was conducted on 25 case studies submitted by 14 institutions, establishing the methodologies, impacts, beneficiaries, published outputs and corroborative evidence reported. The implications of impact assessment on future LIS researcher behaviour, in terms of research conceptualisation and design, were explored through nine qualitative telephone interviews. While individual researchers did not anticipate their behaviour to change due to the introduction of impact assessments, there are anticipated changes across the discipline including a greater focus on engaging with stakeholders and research beneficiaries at early stages of research design and an emphasis on mixed methodologies to maximise the power and consequences of research results.

This paper presents the inferential analysis of a systematic survey of North American library and information science (LIS) faculty awareness of, attitudes towards and experience with open-access scholarly publishing. The study reveals that engagement with open access is related to faculty rank and perceptions about tenure and promotion committee assessments of open-access publications. The perceived constraints of the tenure and promotion system within the academy impact LIS faculty engagement with open-access publishing in ways found in other academic disciplines. However, those who themselves engage with open access tend to assess publications in such venues more favourably than those without such publishing experience and are similarly more predisposed to believe that tenure and promotion committees would evaluate such publications favourably. Nonetheless, while in general it is clear that experience with open access reduces some of the concerns about the effects of this type of scholarly publishing on career opportunities, there remains a substantial amount of equivocacy among LIS faculty about open access.

The aim of this study was to conduct a unified investigation of various, previously mostly individually studied scientific article title characteristics, like: title length, type, amusement and pleasantness, and specific title ‘markers’ (e.g. colons, attention-grabbing words etc.) in relation to subsequent article citation and download rates. Based on a sample of 129 psychology ScienceDirect’s Top 25 Hottest Articles (i.e. highly downloaded articles) and 129 articles not appearing on the Top 25 list (i.e. less downloaded articles), we determined that the most relevant title characteristics were the title length and the title amusement/humour. The partial least squares model revealed that shorter titles were associated with more citations, but the effect was fully mediated by the journal impact, suggesting that the observed citational benefits of the shorter titles might be an artefact of some higher journal impact related attribute (perhaps editorial or peer review process). Title amusement level was slightly correlated with downloads, but with no association with citations. Additionally, downloads correlated positively with citations, and more amusing titles tended to be shorter. While these findings are limited to the psychology discipline only, our results suggest that the integrative structural approach is promising and that more research following this paradigm is needed before empirically grounded recommendations for good title writing can be given.

This issue of the Journal of Information Science celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the founding at the University of Sheffield of what was then called the Postgraduate School of Librarianship. The first member of staff, Professor Wilf Saunders, was appointed in April 1963, since when the School has changed its name on three occasions: to the Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science in 1967; then to the Department of Information Studies in 1981; and most recently to the Information School in 2011. These changes in name have been accompanied by substantial changes in the size and the composition of the School. By the late 1960s, it had seven academic staff (both full-time and part-time) teaching an annual cohort of around 35 postgraduate students on diploma programmes in Information Science and in Librarianship. Two decades later, when the School celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, it had 13 academic staff teaching an annual cohort of around 100 postgraduate students on master’s programmes in Information Management, Information Studies and Librarianship. The School has grown considerably in the succeeding quartercentury and in the current academic year (2011–2012) comprises 33 academic, administrative, secretarial and technical staff, and around 350 taught-course and 70 research students. There are approximately equal numbers of undergraduate and postgraduate students on a total of three undergraduate and eight postgraduate programmes, several of which are delivered in collaboration with other parts of the University of Sheffield (specifically the Department of Computer Science, the Management School, the School for Health and Related Research, and the School of Languages and Cultures). The most recent change of name, to the Information School, coincided with Sheffield becoming the first UK iSchool in 2010. The iSchool organization was founded in 2005 by a group of information schools, at that time all in the USA, that shared an interest in the relationships between information, people and technology, and that were dedicated to the advancement of the field. The iSchools have drawn on both new and established academic programmes in information technology, library science, informatics and information science, and there are now (mid-2012) 38 iSchools, covering not just North America but also Australia, Asia and Europe. There are no formal criteria attached to being an iSchool, but they are all characterized by a strong commitment to the information field in general and to research in information in particular, as demonstrated by substantial research-funding and research-training programmes [1, 2]. These iSchool characteristics certainly apply to Sheffield, where research has always played a key role in the School’s activities. A 1964 article by Saunders detailed his vision for the School [3]. While some of Saunders’s comments are now of historical interest only (most obviously those relating to the ready availability of research funding and to favourable staff–student ratios), those relating to research have proved to be of great importance to the School. He recognized the need for the new School to develop a range of research activities, a novel idea at a time when there was little academic research in the UK in library and information science (LIS). Within a few years, the School had a well-established research portfolio covering work in information retrieval, library management, and information-seeking behaviour, as summarized in a subsequent article by Saunders that was published to celebrate the School’s twenty-fifth anniversary [4]. This strong research focus was further strengthened by Tom Wilson, who became the School’s next head of department in 1982 and who held the position with great distinction until 1997. In addition to his international reputation for work on information-seeking behaviour, he pioneered our teaching and research in information management and was the cofounder of what is now the International Journal of Information Management. The School’s current research portfolio is

In order to analyse the development of a scientific journal in the academic periphery, a case study of the Raffles Bulletin of Zoology (RBZ), published in Singapore 1928–2008, was conducted. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was deployed. Quantitatively, statistics on various aspects of journal articles in RBZ were collected and analysed. Qualitatively, schematic structures of journal articles in the RBZ were coded and documented via Swales’s move analysis. It was found that the development of the RBZ could be divided into three stages: a rudimentary period, transitional period and current period. Various factors that shaped the evolution of RBZ for the past 80 years are discussed, including the social and political context of Singapore, changes in scientific perspectives, the efforts of editors, information organization and retrieval, as well as changing scientific communities. It is argued that a longitudinal study of journal articles in the academic periphery enhances our understanding of: (1) the adaptive nature of knowledge production, organization, use and retrieval in various knowledge domains; (2) the importance of understanding the interplay between social factors in the scientific communication process; and (3) the increasing demand for the provision of efficient and effective information systems to meet the pressing need of information organization and retrieval.

Import–export studies use citation data to describe the exchange of knowledge and ideas between different disciplines. This paper reports the use of journal impact factors (IF) to quantify the extent to which an individual discipline, specifically librarianship and information science (LIS), is able to export knowledge to other disciplines. Web of Science searches were used to identify citations to 232 high quality LIS publications extracted from submissions to the UK’s 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. These publications resulted in 1061 knowledge exports to 444 unique, non-LIS citing journals, for which IFs were taken from the Journal Citation Reports database and normalised in order to minimise inter-disciplinary differences in citation behaviour. Non-LIS citing journals are shown to have IFs that are above the average for their subject categories, with this pattern of behaviour being considerably more pronounced for citations to LIS research published in non-LIS, rather than LIS, journals.

We identified and analysed the 147 journals offering open access (OA) among the 2960 scholarly journals indexed by the Chinese National Knowledge Information (CNKI) database in the humanities and social sciences. Data were analysed concerning each journal’s organizer, discipline, publishing cycle, areas, regions or provinces covered, and first date that content was offered free of charge, together with the journal’s website construction, the way full text was accessed, and the time delay in publication. On the basis of the survey results, we identify key challenges and problems associated with OA journals in the humanities and social sciences in China, and we outline development strategies to address these issues, including actively promoting the transition of scholarly journals from print form to OA, speeding up network construction of OA journals, and enhancing the functionality of the OA journals’ websites.

The emergence of the iSchool movement and the establishment of iSchools have helped to reshape the landscape of the library and information science (LIS) discipline. In this article, based on a set of research questions focusing around the research and education efforts of about 25 iSchools, we performed a study using both quantitative and qualitative methods on publically available data obtained from the web. Our results show that iSchools share the same vision and mission of working on relationships between information, people and technology, and have established themselves as the appropriate institutions for researchers from diverse subject areas to study this interdisciplinary integration. Overall, we are seeing an emerging iSchool identity and a defining iField, but there are still many important developments to make.

Structured abstracts have been employed in biomedical journals for more than 20 years. Professor James Hartley in the School of Psychology, Keele University, UK has published over 25 research papers and conducted systematic studies on structured abstracts. This paper reviews this research from five perspectives: the advantages of structured abstracts over traditional ones, the typographic layout of structured abstracts, the content of structure abstracts, the application of structured abstracts to medical, non-medical and social science journals, and evaluating the quality of structured abstracts. Our aim is to achieve a fuller understanding of what is known about structured abstracts in this field by summarizing James Hartley’s research.

This study uses two bibliometric methods, direct citation and co-authorship, to investigate the interdisciplinary changes in information sciences during 1978—2007. The disciplines of references and co-authors from five information science journals were analysed. Furthermore, Brillouin’s Index was adopted to measure the degree of interdisciplinarity. The study revealed that information science researchers have cited the publications of library and information science (LIS) most frequently. The co-authors of information science articles are also primarily from the discipline of LIS, but the percentage of references to LIS is much higher. This indicates that information science researchers mainly rely on publications in LIS, and they often produce scientific papers with researchers from LIS. The discipline rankings generated by direct citation and co-authorship show a significant consistency via Spearman’s correlation coefficient test. The interdisciplinary degree of information science has displayed growth. In particular, the degree of interdisciplinarity for co-authors has grown.

This paper presents the results of a study examining the subject content of knowledge organization courses taught in ALA-accredited Library and Information Science (LIS) programmes. Close to 2000 course readings of introductory-level knowledge organization courses from 34 LIS schools in the USA and Canada were analysed and indexed. Results indicate that traditional bibliographic methods and practices remain at the core of knowledge organization courses. Findings also show that metadata has become a central component of course content and new topics from information architecture to markup languages and semantic web are becoming part of introductory-level knowledge organization education.

The IL-HUMASS survey on information literacy has been designed, based on and aimed to be applied to a population of students, teachers and librarians holding various degrees in social sciences and humanities at Spanish and Portuguese universities. The case-study method, experts’ opinions, and a literature review were used to prepare an initial version that was refined through student focus groups, interviews with librarians, and academics’ reports. A final version contained 26 items grouped into four categories (information search, assessment, processing and communication/dissemination) and three self-reporting dimensions (motivation, self-efficacy and favourite source of learning). The self-reporting nature of the IL-HUMASS survey involves a self-assessment approach that has until now been proposed rarely and only in a limited way. This will enable a better understanding of user groups through a mixed analysis including two quantitative dimensions (motivation and self-efficacy) and one qualitative dimension (the preferred source of learning).

The paper reports on the results of the project ‘Evaluating the usage and impact of e-journals in the UK’. Using deep log analysis techniques, we evaluated the use of the Oxford Journals database in regard to life sciences, economics and history by 10 major UK research institutions. The aim of the study was to investigate researchers’ digital behaviour, and to ascertain whether it varied by subjects and disciplines, or in relation to the institutions. The findings revealed significant subject and institutional differences. Life scientists were the biggest users. Economists made the greatest use of abstracts. Historians proved to be the most active searchers. Research intensive universities were characterized by high volume use and short session times, light sessions, and sessions which utilized few of the search functions available. Open access journals featured strongly in the ranked lists of life sciences and history; and Google was an extremely popular means of accessing journal content, especially so in the case of historians.

This study explores the extent to which `French theory' (Bourdieu, Derrida, Foucault et al.) has left its mark on the scholarly literature of information studies. A bibliometric analysis reveals which theorists (and which works) have been most highly cited over the course of the last four decades. The study also identifies the information studies journals and scholars who have been the most frequent citers of French theorists.

This paper reports an analysis of the websites of UK departments of library and information science. Inlink counts of these websites revealed no statistically significant correlation with the quality of the research carried out by these departments, as quantified using departmental grades in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise and citations in Google Scholar to publications submitted for that exercise. Reasons for this lack of correlation include: difficulties in disambiguating departmental websites from larger institutional structures; the relatively small amount of research-related material in departmental websites; and limitations in the ways that current web search engines process linkages to URLs. It is concluded that departmental-level webometric analyses do not at present provide an appropriate technique for evaluating academic research quality, and, more generally, that standards are needed for the formatting of URLs if inlinks are to become firmly established as a tool for website analysis.

This paper summarizes the historical development of the discipline that is now called `chemoinformatics'. It shows how this has evolved, principally as a result of technological developments in chemistry and biology during the past decade, from long-established techniques for the modelling and searching of chemical molecules. A total of 30 papers, the earliest dating back to 1957, are briefly summarized to highlight some of the key publications and to show the development of the discipline.

Bibliometrics has changed out of all recognition since 1958; becoming established as a field, being taught widely in library and information science schools, and being at the core of a number of science evaluation research groups around the world. This was all made possible by the work of Eugene Garfield and his Science Citation Index. This article reviews the distance that bibliometrics has travelled since 1958 by comparing early bibliometrics with current practice, and by giving an overview of a range of recent developments, such as patent analysis, national research evaluation exercises, visualization techniques, new applications, online citation indexes, and the creation of digital libraries. Webometrics, a modern, fast-growing offshoot of bibliometrics, is reviewed in detail. Finally, future prospects are discussed with regard to both bibliometrics and webometrics.

An attempt is made to discern the main research themes in British information science over the past half-century. Within these themes, emphasis is placed on research in the UK that has had some impact on the international information science community. The major factors that have influenced information science research in the UK are also briefly considered.

It is a great privilege to be asked to contribute some comments to this special issue of JIS. I have enjoyed reading these papers, and seeing how much our field has moved on since the Journal of Documentation attempted a similar historical survey in 1994 [1], just as the internet was ‘taking off’. My first thoughts were of Jason Farradane, who played such a big part in founding the Institute of Information Scientists in 1958. The IIS has now disappeared within CILIP, and Jason would have been very dismayed at this development. I first encountered him at the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference of 1948, where he spoke on ‘the scientific approach to documentation’. In 1952 he was one of the founder members of the Classification Research Group, where he was often defending a minority position, connected to his own ideas of relations between topics, to which Stella Dextre Clarke refers in her paper. He was a serious man, but the more I talked with him, and disagreed with him over many things, the more I liked him. In 1955, we were invited together to a meeting of the Aslib Aeronautical Group, at which Cyril Cleverdon spoke about his plans for retrieval evaluation (Cranfield1), which Stephen Robertson discusses in his paper. We spoke about faceted classification, and Cyril challenged us to prepare a scheme for aeronautics, that he could use in his test. With inordinate bravado, we accepted the challenge, and – after much advice from Cyril and his team – managed to produce one. In retrospect – given that it was compiled by two chemists – we were amazed that it performed at all. What else was happening around about 1958? There were printed publications of every kind. There were libraries – public, national, government, academic, institutional, industrial – and they were classified and had catalogues. We were much concerned with interlibrary loan, and Donald Urquhart had recently been told to drop all other work and start to plan a new national science lending library for the UK. There were printed indexing and abstracting periodicals, and bibliographies. An industrial firm might have, as well as a technical library, a centre for internal reports, a section dealing with patents, an ‘intelligence’ unit for commercial information, and a correspondence registry. Some of us were playing around with punched or edge-notched cards for ‘mechanized retrieval’. There were reported to be 1000 electronic computers in the USA, and 160 in Europe. Some firms were building structured computer files searched by ‘database management’ software.

A review of recent developments in electronic publishing, with a focus on Open Access (OA) is provided. It describes the two main types of OA, i.e. the `gold' OA journal route and the `green' repository route, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the two, and the reactions of the publishing industry to these developments. Quality, cost and copyright issues are explored, as well as some of the business models of OA. It is noted that whilst so far there is no evidence that a shift to OA will lead to libraries cancelling subscriptions to toll-access journals, this may happen in the future, and that despite the apparently compelling reasons for authors to move to OA, so far few have shown themselves willing to do so. Conclusions about the future of scholarly publications are drawn.

Our study examines the suitability of Scopus for bibliometric analyses in comparison with the Web of Science (WOS). In particular we want to explore if the outcome of bibliometric analyses differs between Scopus and WOS and, if yes, in which aspects. Since journal indicators vary among disciplines, we analysed only journals from the subject pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. Nonetheless, our study has also broader implications. Its major findings are: (a) Each top-100 JCR pharmacy journal was covered by Scopus. (b) The impact factor was higher for 82 and the immediacy index greater for 78 journals in Scopus in 2005. Pharmacy journals with a high impact factor in the JCR usually have a high impact factor in Scopus. (c) Several medium impact journals could be identified in Scopus which were not reported in JCR. (d) The two databases differed in the number of articles within a tolerable margin of deviation for most journals.

The present study examines whether the use of humor in scientific article titles is associated with the number of citations an article receives. Four judges rated the degree of amusement and pleasantness of titles of articles published over 10 years (from 1985 to 1994) in two of the most prestigious journals in psychology, Psychological Bulletin and Psychological Review. We then examined the association between the levels of amusement and pleasantness and the article's monthly citation average. The results show that, while the pleasantness rating was weakly associated with the number of citations, articles with highly amusing titles (2 standard deviations above average) received fewer citations. The negative association between amusing titles and subsequent citations cannot be attributed to differences in the title length and pleasantness, number of authors, year of publication, and article type (regular article vs comment). These findings are discussed in the context of the importance of titles for signalling an article's content.

Archival science, like other disciplines, is evolving into more specific interdisciplinary subfields. To determine this intellectual structure of archival science, the text mining method was used. The data were 432 articles from 2001 to 2004, and we produced 43 clusters of documents using the within-group average method in SPSS. Then we generated pathfinder networks of 43 clusters and grouped them into seven subject categories: digital libraries and digital archiving technologies, online resources and finding aids, archives and archivists, legal and political issues, electronic records and technical issues, records and information management, and e-mail and information professionals. Finally, these seven subject categories were merged into three sectors: digital library, archives and RIM (Business). This study describes dynamic change in the 2001—4 research themes from traditional single-subject areas to emerging, complex subject areas. These results also show that research areas in archival sciences have much growth potential and will continue to expand.

Longitudinal studies of web change are needed to assess the stability of webometric statistics and this paper forms part of an on-going longitudinal study of three national academic web spaces. It examines the relationship between university inlinks and research productivity over time and identifies reasons for individual universities experiencing significant increases and decreases in inlinks over the last six years. The findings also indicate that between 66 and 70% of outlinks remain the same year on year for all three academic web spaces, although this stability conceals large individual differences. Moreover, there is evidence of a level of stability over time for university site inlinks when measured against research productivity. Surprisingly, however, inlink counts can vary significantly from year to year for individual universities, for reasons unrelated to research which undermines their use in webometrics studies.

This paper compares two JISC-funded surveys. The first was undertaken by the Rights MEtadata for Open Archiving (RoMEO) project and focused on the rights protection required by academic authors sharing their research outputs in an open-access environment. The second was carried out by the Rights and Rewards project and focused on the rights protection required by authors sharing their teaching materials in the same way. The data are compared. The study reports confusion amongst both researchers and teachers as to copyright ownership in the materials they produced. Researchers were more restrictive about the permissions they would allow, but were liberal about terms and conditions. Teachers would allow many permissions, but under stricter terms and conditions. The study concludes that a single rights solution could not be used for both research and teaching materials.

An analysis is presented of the publications by, and citations to, 57 male and 48 female academics in five departments of librarianship and information science. After taking account of differences in subject and differences in numbers of academics, it is shown that male academics publish significantly more papers on average than do female authors, but that there is no significant difference in the numbers of citations to published papers.

This paper deals with a bibliometric analysis of data from the document delivery service Subito. After a short introduction, Subito will be presented briefly. The main part reports on the design and the results of the study, which covers the following major topics • distribution of article orders to journals, • identification of the core journals which contribute to most article supplies, • subject distribution of the most requested journals, • relation between the most requested (Subito) and the most cited journals (SCI), • differences in age of ordered and cited articles, and • dependency of journal requests on their subscription rates. As will be shown, most Subito article orders are covered by a relatively small number of journals, most of which are from life sciences, especially medicine. There is only a slight overlap between the most requested and the most cited journals suggesting that these two indicators represent different concepts. This is also confirmed by different obsolescence characteristics. The share of current publications is much higher among ordered than among cited articles. Finally, there was no evidence that articles of journals with higher subscription rates are ordered more often.

The paper reports on the methodology and results of a project on the perception and awareness of science, carried out by the Italian National Research Council, the British Council Italy and the Rosselli Foundation. The project, addressed to upper high school and university students, aims to clarify understanding of the interaction between science and society both by means of information and communication technologies (ICT) and by means of public debates with scientists. Different obstacles encountered by the actors involved in the project are also outlined. Three topics have been chosen to stimulate public debate: GMOs, electromagnetic pollution and space exploration. The authors discuss the innovative methodology and the key stages involved in this process of awareness. Each public debate envisages four key steps: (i) setting up and supplying students with scientific documentation on a selected topic in electronic format, in order to highlight the potential of the internet in the process of information dissemination and how it can be effective in a project of science communication to the public; (ii) informed debate in the classroom between teachers and students on the chosen topic; (iii) public debate with Italian and British scientists; and (iv) a final report to be drawn up by the students.

The visualization of scientific field structures is a classic of scientometric studies. This paper presents a domain analysis of the library and information science discipline based on author co-citation analysis (ACA) and journal cocitation analysis (JCA). The techniques used for map construction are the self-organizing map (SOM) neural algorithm, Ward's clustering method and multidimensional scaling (MDS). The results of this study are compared with similar research developed by Howard White and Katherine McCain [1]. The methodologies used allow us to confirm that the subject domains identified in this paper are, as well, present in our study for the corresponding period. The appearance of studies pertaining to library science reveals the relationship of this realm with information science. Especially significant is the presence of the management on the journal maps. From a methodological standpoint, meanwhile, we would agree with those authors who consider MDS, the SOM and clustering as complementary methods that provide representations of the same reality from different analytical points of view. Even so, the MDS representation is the one offering greater possibilities for the structural representation of the clusters in a set of variables.

The amount of material published on the worldwide web continues to grow. This is also true of South Africa. Much of this material is banal and ephemeral, but it nevertheless forms part of South Africa's documentary heritage. It will have value for future historians and social scientists just as previous centuries’ printed broadsheets, newspapers and ‘penny horribles’ are used today as raw material for research. The proliferation of websites worldwide poses enormous challenges to heritage institutions such as national, research and repository libraries. In the developed countries the capturing, organization and preservation of websites have become an important theme in the professional literature of information science. Many difficulties have to be overcome before we can be sure that an adequate proportion of this material is preserved for future use. The difficulties are not only of a technical nature, but also organizational, economic, political, legal and ethical. This paper draws on experience gained in two current projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The first is the Political Communications Web Archiving Project, undertaken in the United States under the aegis of the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, which has attempted to develop a model for the preservation of websites for use by area studies researchers at US universities. The second is a South African project on the legal deposit of electronic publications, managed by the Foundation for Library and Information Service Development (FLISD) on behalf of the National Library of South Africa. The paper outlines the major issues that have to be addressed when a national system for the preservation of websites is set up, with special emphasis on ‘soft’ issues (political, legal and moral) rather than technical issues.

Various ideas of data have emerged, expressed in practice through distinct vocabularies of data-related terms. This article develops a six-category taxonomy of these vocabularies, and illustrates how their terms are utilized in texts which relate to geographic information systems (GIS) in general, and to the HYDRA5 water catchment modeling system developed for the Sydney Water Corporation in particular. Revealed is complex cross-referencing between inter-related vocabularies. Terms from different vocabularies are juxtaposed in such a way as to produce a cascade of meaningful reference which invites the reader to accept the transitions from understanding ‘data’ in one way to understanding it in another. Several implications are drawn out briefly: problems with viewing data as ‘object’; the need to explore further how the complexity of data is negotiated in practice; and the defining role that ideas of data have in relation to communities of practice, professional education and technical training.

This study explores the extent to which the information seeking behaviour of researchers active in the field of English Literature in the universities of the UK and the wider world has changed as a result of the developing electronic information revolution. It deals with the researchers’ attitudes towards the Internet and examines their position with regard to utilizing the Internet as a publication outlet. The different types of electronic information sources for English literature are identified and the experiences of researchers using them explored. Finally, the study examines researcher attitudes towards electronic publication and to plans for a `virtual library’. The article concludes with recommendations for further study of the use of electronic resources in relation to information literacy and browsing and other facilities for subject access on the Internet.

The article investigates factors that may make the Nigeria Virtual Library Project a myth or reality. Questionnaires were used for data collection, using 22 University Librarians in federal universities as respondents, and 14 (64%) University Librarians completed the questionnaires. Three indicators were used to determine the myth or reality of evolving virtual libraries in Nigeria: availability of information infrastructures, human capacity building programmes in ICT, and level of funding of university libraries. Nine (64%) of the libraries have relevant information infrastructures, 12 (86%) are involved in human capacity building programmes, 11 (79%) affirm that the level of funding for university libraries is low. The article concludes that evolution of virtual libraries is feasible and real in Nigeria.

This Brief Communication examines the extent of publications written by a single author in different disciplines in Israeli universities. In the natural sciences the share of single-authored articles in the total amount of publications varies slightly between the different fields of science. A significant difference was found while comparing natural sciences as a whole with mathematics and a major one when compared with the social sciences and humanities. The conclusion is that the more theoretical is the research and the greater the share of the initial idea in the finished article, the higher the probability that a single person will publish it.

As part of research on journal submissions to the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), data was compiled for a longitudinal analysis for Unit of Assessment (UoA) 43, Business and Management Studies (BMS). Data on the 1996 RAE submissions for this UoA was considered. For the 2001 RAE, academic Departments in the UK wishing to submit to the RAE were asked to nominate up to four items of published output per member of staff being submitted that represented the best work those individuals had published in the period. There was no obligation to just use journal articles, as all types of publication were acceptable, but in practice the majority of items returned (69.7% in 2001) were journal articles. The remainder comprised reports, conference proceedings and similar outputs. Journal submission data obtained from the publicly available database (http://www.hero.ac.uk) following the 2001 exercise was checked, tabulated and analysed. This showed that for 2001, 7941 journal articles were submitted to 1489 journal titles . This sample of journal titles could be said to represent the best UK BMS research for the period 1996-2001 (the period under consideration in the 2001 RAE). . The question arises whether journals in which articles for the RAE are submitted represent the “core” journals for that subject. One way of approaching this question is to subject the data to a Bradford-Zipf analysis. If the material shows a classic Bradford-Zipf distribution, it could be argued perhaps that the core journals in the field can indeed be identified using this method. In order to address this issue and as part of the on-going research, the group of 1489 titles was used to test for a Bradford-Zipf distribution.

The use of peer review within both the scholarly communication system and the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise is reviewed. The common denominator is that of peer-reviewed academic journals, since peer review is used by referees to aid publication decisions and by RAE panel members to evaluate a department’s research performance. We propose that since academic research is now subject to peer review at all stages of evaluation, it is becoming an accepted method of rewarding (by funding) research. The growth of electronic publications (both toll-access and open access) provides possibilities for changes to some of the process of peer review and RAE, but the fundamental model of peer review to reduce the number of poor quality publications will remain. The paper concludes that because of the many criticisms of peer review, it is unwise to base funding decisions on second level peer review of articles that have already undergone peer review.

Objective: To conduct a content analysis of library and information studies (LIS) literature published in 2001 and test the domains developed by Crumley and Koufogiannakis. Methods: A comprehensive list of refereed library and information studies journals was compiled and reviewed independently by two researchers to derive a list of included journals. Articles published in 2001 from included journals were independently assessed for relevancy by two researchers. Researchers separately extracted and checked data from included articles. Results: 217 LIS journals were reviewed and 107 were included; 91 journals provided data. 2664 journal articles were examined, with 807 (30.3%) classified as research. The Top 10 journals for research published in 2001 were: 1) JASIST, 2) Scientometrics, 3) Info Proc & Man; 4) Coll & Res Lib, 5) Tie: J Lib Adm/Bull Med Lib Assn, 7) Libs & Culture, 8) J Doc, 9) Tie: J Info Sci/J Acad Libr. For the period studied, descriptive research (329 out of 807 articles) was published far more frequently than any other type. The domain Information Access & Retrieval had the highest number of research articles (314/807), followed by Collections (193/807), Management (135/807), Education (95/807) and Reference (77/807). Two new possible domains were identified: Library History and Professional Issues. Conclusions: Because 36 articles fell into the domain of Professional Issues, a case can be made to add this domain to Crumley and Koufogiannakis’ taxonomy. Library History was not added as a domain because historical research is not used for evidence-based decision-making. There was no evidence to support keeping the Marketing & Promotion domain. LISA provides the best coverage of the top 10 LIS research journals identified in this study.

This study explores the international collaboration efforts of archivists and records managers starting with the hypothesis that Internet technologies have had a significant impact on both national and international communication for this previously conservative group. The use and importance of mailing lists for this purpose is studied in detail. A quantitative analysis looks globally at the numbers of lists in these fields and the numbers of subscribers. A qualitative analysis of list content is also described. The study finds that archivists and records managers have now created more than 140 mailing lists related to their profession and have been contributing to these lists actively. It also ‘estimates’ that about half of the profession follows a list relating to their work and that archivists seem to like lists more than records managers do. The study concludes that mailing lists can be seen as a virtual college binding these groups together to develop the field.

This paper reviews the work of the Chemoinformatics Research Group in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, focusing particularly on the work carried out in the period 1985-2002. Four major research areas are discussed, these involving the development of methods for: substructure searching in databases of three-dimensional structures, including both rigid and flexible molecules; the representation and searching of the Markush structures that occur in chemical patents; similarity searching in databases of both two-dimensional and three-dimensional structures; and compound selection and the design of combinatorial libraries. An analysis of citations to 321 publications from the Group shows that it attracted a total of 3725 residual citations during the period 1980-2002. These citations appeared in 411 different journals, and involved 910 different citing organizations from 54 different countries, thus demonstrating the widespread impact of the Group's work.

This study aimed to test the usefulness of bibliometric methods for the evaluation of subject portals at the Nordic research libraries, and to generate ideas for the creative use of portal resources in the new learning environment of the universities. The subject portals for social sciences were chosen as objects for the study. Sam Webb at Gothenburg University Library in Sweden was selected as the main portal for this study. Bisigate at the Aarhus Business School Library, Denmark, was the other partner included in the analysis. In order to capture the local users' views and requirements of the portals, the analyses targeted two selected institutions in both countries with visibility in the international research arena: Gothenburg University, Department of Political Sciences and Aarhus School of Business, Department of Organization and Management. Through bibliometric analysis a list of `candidate journals' was compiled for the institution(s) and matched with the available portal resources. The methodology was used to see how well the portals are supporting the current, local research activities at the institution(s), and if the new, emerging research areas are covered by the resources pooled at the subject portals. The article provides a set of examples which illustrate the type of information and visualization material which could be used to explore the resources of the portals (and the library), and to facilitate the individual searching and navigation among students and researchers in the electronic information landscape.

This study assesses the impact of information technology (IT) on scholarly publications and the problems associated with accessing these publications by scientists at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. The study discovered that ICT (Information and Communication Technology) facilities like the Internet and e-mail have taken root in the academic environment through providing access to scholarly publications. However, the implementation of IT application is still a problem to Nigerian academics because of many factors, ranging from the lack of funds to fluctuations in the supply of electricity. This has indirectly affected the level of usage of ICT in Nigeria by the lecturers and it has hindered access to scholarly publications useful for research. Despite many constraints, the use of information technology is growing among lecturers in Nigerian universities.

The Internet culture is creating a new scientific communication system with new facilities that are competing with, and might replace, the present printed information sources. The use and non-use of these facilities by Nigerian academic scientists were investigated, using data collected from a survey of academic staff of selected disciplines in 10 universities. It was found that the scientists are still heavily dependent on printed information sources, especially journals, indexes and abstracts. The study reveals that 64.4% of them have a computer at their disposal, while 50.4% have access to, and are using, the Internet. Besides e-mail, very little use is made of other Internet facilities. Non-use of the Internet is attributable to problems of accessibility, ease of use and cost. Most of the non-users are aware of the information and communication potential of the Internet in their disciplines, and believe that the Internet will become indispensable in their research in the future.

Following a description of the changing roles of library and information professionals, this paper will cover the issues of the What? and How? of education and training courses for such professionals, and the developments of distance learning programmes and virtual learning environments. Finally, case studies based on the author’s experiences in education and training programmes in Wales, Slovakia and in the Asia-Pacific region will be described. Such courses are examples of attempts to ensure that today’s library and information professionals are well prepared to meet the challenges of the future.