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Background. Many researchers contact colleagues in order to obtain re-prints of their papers. Most people, these days, use electronic aids to do this. Aim. The aim of this study was to compare the success rates for obtaining re-prints using such electronic communication with those obtained previously by post. Method. A hundred requests for e-prints or re-prints were sent electronically to colleagues, and the response rates recorded. Results. Of those approached, 79% responded to the requests, although 12% of these needed a reminder. Those replying electronically without a reminder (41%) took an average of one day to respond (range 0-13 days), whereas those replying by mail without a reminder (26%) took on average nine days (range 2-34 days). Responders needing a reminder (12%) took on average 41 days to respond (range 32-71). There were no significant differences between the response rates of American and British researchers, nor between those of men and women, but there was a significantly higher response rate from colleagues who were sent accompanying materials with the request. Conclusions. These results indicate that rapid replies were received from people responding electronically and that the overall response rate was somewhat higher, and somewhat faster, than that found in most previous postal studies. However, the problem of non- and late-responders still exists. One further advantage for the electronic system is that, unlike the postal method, it facilitates rapid additional communication between the sender and the recipient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study that examined citation practice in a set of scholarly papers. After evaluating 2162 bibliographic references it was found that 48.1% (1041) of all citations used in the papers referred to a Web-located resource. A significant number of references to URLs were found to be missing (45.8%) and an evaluation of these Web-located citations allowed the average half-life (4.8 years) for these missing resources to be determined. The study also examined the composition of the top-level domains associated with resource loss as well as the proportional use of Web-located resources in individual articles. The proportional use of Web-located resources in individual articles and their corresponding evaluation for disappearance has not been previously documented. The paper utilized the pro- portional Web-citation aspect of articles in proposing a Web-resource contribution index and a Web-citation use-loss grid that may aid future authors, editors and, in particular, researchers in investigating this growing aspect of citation behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections. Information architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users can actually find what they are looking for. Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address. The paper argues that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that they provide a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the problem in Web page ranking of effectively combining link and content information with efficiency high enough to be applicable to real-world search engines. Unlike previous surfer models, our approach is based on the viewpoint of a Web page author. Based on this viewpoint, we formulate the concept of contribution score, which indicates the amount to which a term in each page is utilized by other pages. To improve efficiency without loss of effectiveness, we exploit the expectations of both a Web page author and a Web search engine user on retrieval results, and restrict candidate terms that can contribute to other pages to a set of keywords of each page. In this paper, we propose three contribution-based models: C-Rank, PC-Rank and HC-Rank. Experimental results show that C-Rank provides the best precision among the models and is very effective for topic distillation tasks on the .GOV collection in TREC. Most importantly, the proposed models are efficient enough to be applicable to real-world search engines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A digital service, like a web site, may contain a lot of information but we often do not know if it is used, relevant or valuable. Transaction log files generated by digital information services do record the pages (topics or content) viewed by users and this is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the logs. However, analysing these pages poses plenty of problems for researchers, especially when comparing content coverage of various related services. It is quite normal, even for digital services of the same organization, to adopt different page naming conventions for each service. This is even truer about digital services run by different organizations. What all this means is that there is no easy way to compare topic use as revealed by access behaviour. This paper looks at the problems of describing and comparing the content usage of digital information services, covering three digital platforms operating in the health field. This paper discusses problems posed in making health content comparisons based on page names listed in the transaction log files and between very large data sets. It reviews the impact that system architecture might have as well as the time the service has been available online and the impact due to outlet differences. However, the main focus of the article is a comparison of five sources of health information through their log files. It makes use of cluster analysis and applies procedures normally used to define species diversity to research content coverage. In all, two million page views were analysed, covering more than 5000 unique health pages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Factors, such as whether a website is designed to be user-oriented beyond its mere visual design, its effectiveness and efficiency, its usability, and the organisation of the information it offers, have come to the fore once again after the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been evident that the link structure in a website, better known as the website's information architecture, helps the practitioners with identifying factors that affect the usability of a website. In this sense, practitioners must ensure that the information architecture supports the usage intentions of a websites' visitors to better serve and motivate them. However, in many cases, different types of users navigate websites that contain immense amounts of information, so understanding their needs is also important for practitioners. In parallel, this article addresses the problem that different visitors of a large-scale website will need to navigate through dense information to find the information they are looking for, and the information architecture of the website must support different user tasks for the website to be widely adopted. Thus, unlike previous studies, this article combines the principles of information architecture and the technology acceptance model to investigate the effect of information architecture on visitor's usage intentions. The work also guides practitioners in developing architectural strategies to better enable visitors to fulfil their objectives in the least amount of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Search engines have become the most important medium for Internet users to find pages on the web. They help customers to decrease their information overload, and enhance the sales of commercial web sites in different ways. For these reasons, the exploration of and changes in (human) online searching behaviour has become a subject of particular importance. This paper will help search engine and web site administrators and developers to monitor online searching behaviour properly and to derive strategies from the information gained. We define standard parameters against which search engines can be measured and compared. These parameters also reflect the online searching behaviour of search engine users. Therefore, an overview of studies conducted in the last few years is given. Statistics used in different papers are compared to extract standard parameters for online searching behaviour. In the next step, search queries from four different search engines covering periods of between 10 and 13 months are compared using these parameters. Using an automatic process, we retrieved around 99% of all search queries from three different search engine live tickers. For the first time, different data sets over a long period are compared. We observe that some patterns stay stable in a number of different search engines, and shed light on patterns that shorter analyses could not adequately examine. Our observations do not support the assumption that web search has become more business driven. For this reason, we introduce the concept of evergreens in search queries. One implication is that search engines should simplify web search interfaces for users since Boolean operators and special search features are rarely used. We also present the evergreen topics in search queries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context has long been considered very useful to help the user assess the actual relevance of a document. In web searching, context can help assess the relevance of a web page by showing how the page is related to other pages in the same web site, for example. Such information is very difficult to convey and visualize in a user friendly way. In this paper we present the design, implementation and evaluation of a graphical visualization tool aimed at helping users to determine the relevance of a web page by displaying the structure of the web site the page belongs to. The results of an initial evaluation suggest that this visualization technique helps the user navigate large web sites and find useful information in an effective way, without increasing the cognitive load of the user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blogging has become an important activity on the web; the number of web blogs is growing extremely fast, and thus this phenomenon cannot be ignored. This paper monitors a set of blogs for a two-month period in September-October 2003 and characterizes these blogs based on descriptive statistics and content analysis. We have chosen a set of ‘topic-oriented’ blogs, i.e. blogs whose purpose is to convey professional information. Our findings show that most of these blogs are excellent information hubs, i.e. provide short summaries (sometimes with a personal touch) with links to further information on major issues related to the topic of the blog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects, from a moral perspective, on South- North archiving. It is argued that web pages, though trivial and ephemeral in nature, reflect contemporary culture and are as important in this context as printed material. As such, web pages should provide raw data for future scholars and should be archived. The archiving of web pages created in the developing countries (the South) raises some vexing questions such as: Is it legal to archive web sites? Does one need permission from the creator of the web site? To what extent should access to archived web sites be controlled? These questions are addressed in the paper. A moral frame-work based on social justice and human rights is proposed, that can be used to guide web archiving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational cognitive models of web-navigation developed so far have largely been tested only on mock-up websites. In this paper, for the first time, we compare and contrast the performance of two models, CoLiDeS and CoLiDeS+, on two real websites from the domains of technology and health, under two conditions of task difficulty, simple and difficult. We found that CoLiDeS+ predicted more hyperlinks on the correct path and had a higher path completion ratio than CoLiDeS. CoLiDeS+ found the target page more often than CoLiDeS, took more steps to reach the target page and was more ‘disoriented’ than CoLiDeS for difficult tasks. Difficult tasks in general for both models had less task success and lower path completion ratio, predicted less hyperlinks on the correct path, visited pages with lower mean LSA and took more steps to complete compared with simple tasks. Overall, inclusion of context from previously visited pages and implementation of backtracking strategies (which are both part of CoLiDeS+) led to better modelling performance. Suggestions to further improve the performance of these computational cognitive models on real websites are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the types of formats and ease of reuse of transparency-related information available on the websites of 53 national public libraries and 53 provincial historic archives. Further to Spain's Transparency Act, reuse of public sector information is one of the elements comprising the right of access to information. Access and use must consequently be ensured to enable citizens and businesses to reuse all available data. The working methodology deployed here consisted in searching for, identifying and analysing the transparency-related documents carried on library and archive websites and the legal warnings governing their reuse. The findings revealed a wide variety of formats and rules governing reuse and indications of scant interest in these institutions in fostering the transparency and reuse of public information. Even when available, reusable information was normally found to be posted either separately from the data furnished by libraries and archives directly or positioned on pages or sections with complex access paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an analysis of interlinking between 100 major European universities is given. Since websites contain links to webpages for other organizations, they may reveal the strongest relationships established between two organizations. This analysis of web links allowed us to determine the different behaviours among the universities with regard to incoming or outgoing web links; some universities had significantly greater incoming than outgoing activity. In general, there was a low level of interaction between the universities studied. Also, we observed the existence of geographic–linguistic patterns in establishing links. Five primary nuclei or blocks of universities can be identified: the group composed almost exclusively of universities from the UK; the group composed in large part of German universities, along with some from Switzerland and Austria; the cluster of universities from Mediterranean countries, including various French universities; the group of Belgian and Dutch universities, along with some from French-speaking Switzerland; and finally, the group made up of universities from the Nordic countries. Although there are some universities that overlap with several groups or clusters, the overall design is rather clear. On the other hand, the whole picture seems to agree with the results of other studies based on bibliographic co-authorship production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Question answering (Q&A) sites, where communities of volunteers answer questions, may provide faster, cheaper, and better services than traditional institutions. However, like other Web 2.0 platforms, user-created content raises concerns about information quality. At the same time, Q&A sites may provide answers of different quality because they have different communities and technological platforms. This paper compares answer quality on four Q&A sites: Askville, WikiAnswers, Wikipedia Reference Desk, and Yahoo! Answers. Findings indicate that: (1) similar collaborative processes on these sites result in a wide range of outcomes, and significant differences in answer accuracy, completeness, and verifiability were evident; (2) answer multiplication does not always result in better information; it yields more complete and verifiable answers but does not result in higher accuracy levels; and (3) a Q&A site’s popularity does not correlate with its answer quality, on all three measures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the prevalence of research social networks, determining effective methods for recommending scientific articles to online scholars has become a challenging and complex task. Current studies on article recommendation works are focused on digital libraries and reference sharing websites while studies on research social networking websites have seldom been conducted. Existing content-based approaches or collaborative filtering approaches suffer from the problem of data sparsity. The quality information of articles has been largely ignored in previous studies, thus raising the need for a unified recommendation framework. We propose a hybrid approach to combine relevance, connectivity and quality to recommend scientific articles. The effectiveness of the proposed framework and methods is verified using a user study on a real research social network website. The results demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Websites that provide content creation and sharing features have become quite popular recently. These sites allow users to categorize and browse content using 'tags' or free-text keyword topics. Since users contribute and tag social media content across a variety of social web platforms, creating new knowledge from distributed tag data has become a matter of performing various tasks, including publishing, aggregating, integrating, and republishing tag data. However, there are a number of issues in relation to data sharing and interoperability when processing tag data across heterogeneous tagging platforms. In this paper we introduce a semantic tag model that aims to explicitly offer the necessary structure, semantics and relationships between tags. This approach provides an improved opportunity for representing tag data in the form of reusable constructs at a semantic level. We also demonstrate a prototype that consumes and makes use of shared tag metadata across heterogeneous sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the analysis of social annotations. Social annotations allow users to annotate web resources more easily, openly and freely than do taxonomies and ontologies. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for social annotations. It introduces a fuzzy biclustering algorithm to social annotations for identifying subgroups of users and of resources, and discovering the relationships between those users for social annotations. The algorithm employs a combination of pattern search and compromise programming to construct hierarchically structured biclusters. The pattern search method is used to compute a single objective optimal solution, and the compromise programming is used to trade-off between multiple objectives. The algorithm is not subject to the convexity limitations, and does not need to use the derivative information. It can automatically identify user communities and achieve high prediction accuracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative analyses were used to launch a preliminary exploration of the dominant knowledge organization (KO) trends in the pre- and post-web eras. Data for this study was assembled by searching the Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts database for articles that have used the term 'knowledge organization' or 'information organization' in their titles, abstracts, or descriptors. Taken as a whole, these preliminary results suggest that the content of the KO literature has shifted since the advent of the web. Although classic KO principles remain prominent throughout both eras, the presence of new content areas, such as metadata, denotes a shift in KO trends. In the pre-web era, the literature was related in large part to indexing and abstracting. In contrast, cataloging and classification issues dominate the landscape in the postweb era. The findings from this paper will be of particular use to those interested in learning about upcoming trends in the KO literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents early findings of a unique analysis that related questionnaire data to site usage as recorded in the transaction log reports of ScienceDirect, for the same people. Its focus is the differences in the online behaviour of three types of navigational users: those accessing the site via a gateway (either via a reference hyperlink or subject search facility), those using the on site search facility and those employing menus. Towards this end 16,865 sessions were analysed and grouped by navigational entry and compared over three types of online behaviour: the viewing of articles in press (Alp), the number of different journals viewed in a session and the viewing of old material. A strong association was found between form of navigation and behavioural trait. Those using menus were more likely to view AlPs, while those using the search facility were more likely to view a greater number of different journals and were more likely to view older material. This supports a hypothesis proposed by Nicholas et al. (2006) that use of the online searching facility increases the visibility of material irrespective of journal and age and results in a greater use of older material and a more diverse journal use compared to other online and off-line information retrieval methods. Although research has been undertaken on the different strategies that users employ to navigate and find their way around a collection of content (e.g. a digital library), this we believe is the first time the effect of different navigational strategies on outcomes (for example, what is viewed) has been investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SHIL on the Web is the website of the Israeli Citizens' Advice Bureau. It provides information about rights, social benefits, government and public services and civil obligations. Activity on the site approaches 10,000 pages visited per day. It has interfaces in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. Logfile analysis of the SHIL website revealed to our surprise that about 60.7% of the requests reaching SHIL from external sites (excluding requests from robots) are from general search engines (e.g. Google and MSN), and users reach a specific page on the site linked from the search results page. This finding seems to indicate that the site is not known well enough to the public. On the other hand the site is very active, thus it seems to serve Israeli citizens well, even without being a well known brand. In this paper we analyzed the external requests coming from search engines. The analysis is based on the 266,295 queries from search engines that reached SHIL during March-October 2005. Studying queries submitted to search engines is a novel technique for analyzing the access patterns to the site and provides a belier understanding of the user needs and intentions than analyzing the distribution of the visited pages only. We are not aware of any previous study that analyzed the relation between [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored differences in DeCSS posting between EU member nations, the PRC, Hong Kong, and Macau. DeCSS is a software program that circumvents DVD copy and access protection systems. The study investigated the number of websites in each nation that posted DeCSS. The study also examined the degree to which website authors included political speech on their websites referring to changes in copyright law brought about by World Intellectual Property Organization Treaty requirements. It also examined whether or not websites made reference to Free/Open Source software. Results found no DeCSS posting websites in the PRC, Macau, Luxembourg, Spain or Portugal; and results found few DeCSS posting websites in Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy and Greece. Results show more DeCSS posting websites in northern EU nations, especially the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and France. The paper draws on institutional theory and collective action theory to suggest explanations for the observed differences in DeCSS posting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emulation has been proposed as a preservation strategy for longevity of digital objects. An advantage of emulation is the relative platform independency. Emulation with a high degree of platform independency requires a Universal Virtual Computer (UVC), as described by Lone. This paper describes the realization of the enhanced UVC developed for the National Library of the Netherlands. The preservation method of the UVC at preservation time and at retrieval time (in the future) is concisely described, the conceptual model of the UVC is given, and the object design and the logical data viewer of the UVC are presented. The UVC has been realized and proven to work for image types using the JPEG and GIF87a formats, although performance of the present UVC can still can be improved. The UVC demonstration tool is freely available at the Alphaworks web site to let the general public experience this approach on long-term access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the rapid Internet development, an answer to the challenging question of how to automatically convert heterogeneous information into the desired XML format that can be accepted by a designated device is urgently requested. In this paper, we propose an OWL-based extensible transcoding system (OETS) which is based on an extensible transcoding policy infrastructure, with a hierarchical structure of ontologies, and can automatically render an HTML document in mobile devices. In order to create common knowledge of OETS, we develop two top level ontologies: procedural sensor/effector ontology (PSEO) and markup file taxonomy ontology (MFTO). PSEO combines with situated logic to support sensor/effector procedures attached to an ontology class, while MFTO supports the markup file and structural components classification. Developers can exploit the extensible transcoding capability of OETS to satisfy various layout-specific structures of HTML pages by providing dedicated domain ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperlinks between academic web sites, like citations, can potentially be used to map disciplinary structures and identify evidence of connections between disciplines. In this paper we classified a sample of links originating in three different disciplines: maths, physics and sociology. Links within a discipline were found to be different in character to links between pages in different disciplines. There were also disciplinary differences in both types of link. As a consequence, we argue that interpretations of web science maps covering multiple disciplines will need to be sensitive to the contexts of the links mapped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making better business decisions is often the key to gaining competitive advantage. An important factor in effective decision-making is the ability to access, understand, and utilise business information easily. In this paper, we propose a framework that focuses on integrating data analysis tools into the Web and providing hypermedia functionality to them, and supporting the development of hypermedia functionalities with Web usage mining techniques. In this framework, data analysis tools play the role of utilizing historical data to discover useful information and improve the process of business decisions. Augmenting data analysis tools with rich hypermedia functionality would streamline access to and provide rich navigational features around related information, while augmenting hypermedia facilities with Web usage mining would allow them to dynamically restructure the Web site to fit users' browsing needs based on past navigation history. We believe that the proposed framework should result in new ways to view and manage data analysis tools and help users easily browse Web sites. a [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the Web, hyperlinks have been used both to assess the impact of academic Web sites and to trace aspects of online informal scholarly communication. They are also used in Web information retrieval algorithms to identify important pages and to cluster pages by topic, both of which help in ranking search engine results. In this paper we investigate a type of link that is of particular interest for all of these applications: one that crosses subject boundaries. We took a sample of 586 linked pairs of domains in different UK academic sites, and extracted those that represented different subjects, resulting in 52 pairs of domains with different subjects. These were then grouped by the type of relationship between the source and target page. Over a third of the links formed a scholarly connection between similar subjects, but in 8% of cases dissimilar subjects also had a scholarly connection. Additionally, higher education teaching links were seen to form an extensive cross- disciplinary network, accounting for 19% of the links. A significant number of links (12%) also targeted non-subject- specific general resources. The results suggest that mapping disciplinary collaboration on the Web should be feasible but that this process and topic identification in academic Webs would both be helped by the prior removal of key higher education teaching and popular general pages from the data set. These, and computing pages to a lesser extent, play a role more pernicious than `stop words' in traditional information retrieval. The conclusions are of a qualitative rather than quantitative nature because of the small effective sample size, so an initial set of thousands of links would be required to remedy this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors propose improved ways of analysing web server log files. Traditionally web site statistics focus on giving a big (and shallow) picture analysis based on all transaction log entries. The pictures are, however, distorted because of the problems associated with resolving Internet protocol (IP) numbers to a single user and cross-border IP registration. The authors argue that analysing extracted sub-groups and categories presents a more accurate picture of the data and that the analysis of the online behaviour of selected individuals (rather than of very large groups) can add much to our understanding of how people use web sites and, indeed, any digital information source. The analysis is labelled `micro' to distinguish it from traditional macro, big picture transactional log analysis. The methods are illustrated with recourse to the logs of the Surgery Door (www.surgerydoor.co.uk) consumer health web site. It was found that use attributed to academic users gave a better approximation of the sites' geographical distribution of users than an analysis based on all users. This occurs as academic institutions, unlike other user types, register in their host country. Selecting log entries where each user is allocated a unique IP number can be particularly beneficial, especially to analyses of returnees. Finally the paper tracks the online behaviour of a small number of IP numbers, in an example of the application of microanalysis, [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although higher education institutions (HEIs) are expected to be the leaders in knowledge generation and dissemination, it is often not clear whether they are knowledge-aware, that is, have a knowledge focus. In this article, the communication with stakeholders through HEI websites is examined to determine to what extent these institutions communicate about their knowledge initiatives and projects. This is done through an investigative study involving all HEIs and their faculties in Slovakia. Using content analysis, the study examines whether the publicly available resources on HEIs' websites contain knowledge-related keywords, indicating the existence of a knowledge-focus. The results reveal that the websites of some HEIs contain hundreds of these resources, whereas others have none. Statistical evidence confirms that the intensity of communication about knowledge terms increases with the age and size of the HEI and is also dependent on the type of HEI (public, private state, foreign). Other dependencies between the examined factors have also been revealed, for example, HEIs that rank higher in Webometrics indicators are more intensive in their knowledge communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The need to understand authors' motivations for creating links between university web sites is addressed by a survey of a random collection of 414 such links from the ac.uk domain. A classification scheme was created and applied to this collection. Obtaining inter-classifier agreement as to the single main link creation cause was very difficult because of multiple potential motivations and the fluidity of genre on the Web. Nevertheless, it was clear that, whilst the vast majority, over 90%, was created for broadly scholarly reasons, only two were equivalent to journal citations. It is concluded that academic web link metrics will be dominated by a range of informal types of scholarly communication. Since formal communication can be extensively studied through citation analysis, this provides an exciting new window through which to investigate a facet of a previously obscured type of communication activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes a research that was conducted on 'The Times/The Sunday Times' websites, to determine the appropriate method for evaluating use and to establish what form of analysis could best be derived in the evaluation of the use of websites. Commercial online hosts and online public access catalogues; Parsing techniques and the Statistical Package for the Social Science.

The ClueWeb09 dataset and its successor, the ClueWeb12 dataset, are two of the largest collections of Web pages released by Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). The ClueWeb datasets were used in various tracks of TREC ran through 2009 to 2017. For every year, approximately 50 new queries are released and a pool of Web pages are judged against these queries by human assessors as relevant, non-relevant or spam. In this article, a ground truth for binary classification (spam vs non-spam) is constructed from Web pages that are judged as spam or relevant under the assumption that a Web page judged as relevant for any query cannot be spam. Based on this ground truth, we evaluate classification performances of the Waterloo spam rankings (Fusion, Britney, GroupX and UK2006), which have been traditionally used to identify and filter spam pages in retrieval systems. The experimental results in terms of the universal binary classification evaluation measures suggest that the Fusion (with threshold = 11%) is the best for the ClueWeb09 dataset. Analysis of the frequency distributions of relevant/spam documents over spam scores reveals that the GroupX is the most powerful at identifying relevant documents, whereas the Fusion is the most powerful at identifying spam documents. It is also confirmed that the effectiveness of the Fusion spam ranking of the ClueWeb12 dataset is not as good as that of the ClueWeb09. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clickbaits are online articles with deliberately designed misleading titles for luring more and more readers to open the intended web page. Clickbaits are used to tempt visitors to click on a particular link either to monetise the landing page or to spread the false news for sensationalisation. The presence of clickbaits on any news aggregator portal may lead to unpleasant experience to readers. Automatic detection of clickbait headlines from news headlines has been a challenging issue for the machine learning community. A lot of methods have been proposed for preventing clickbait articles in recent past. However, the recent techniques available in detecting clickbaits are not much robust. This article proposes a hybrid categorisation technique for separating clickbait and non-clickbait articles by integrating different features, sentence structure and clustering. During preliminary categorisation, the headlines are separated using 11 features. After that, the headlines are recategorised using sentence formality and syntactic similarity measures. In the last phase, the headlines are again recategorised by applying clustering using word vector similarity based on t -stochastic neighbourhood embedding (t -SNE) approach. After categorisation of these headlines, machine learning models are applied to the dataset to evaluate machine learning algorithms. The obtained experimental results indicate that the proposed hybrid model is more robust, reliable and efficient than any individual categorisation techniques for the dataset we have used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government websites are currently important for providing information and services to citizens. It is a crucial task to evaluate the performance of each government website. The traditional evaluation processes based on experts are criticised as being subjective and cannot work in real time. This article proposes a framework and automatic assessment system for evaluating the performance of government websites in real time. To test the proposed framework and the automatic assessment system, we evaluate and classify 70 websites from Shaanxi Province of China. This article provides guidance for government agencies, managers of government websites and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter is a social networking website that has gained a lot of popularity around the world in the last decade. This popularity made Twitter a common target for spammers and malicious users to spread unwanted advertisements, viruses and phishing attacks. In this article, we review the latest research works to determine the most effective features that were investigated for spam detection in the literature. These features are collected to build a comprehensive data set that can be used to develop more robust and accurate spammer detection models. The new data set is tested using popular classifiers (Naive Bayes, support vector machines, multilayer perceptron neural networks, Decision Trees, Random forests and k-Nearest Neighbour). The prediction performance of these classifiers is evaluated and compared based on different evaluation metrics. Moreover, a further analysis is carried out to identify the features that have higher impact on the accuracy of spam detection. Three different techniques are used and compared for this analysis: change of mean square error (CoM), information gain (IG) and Relief-F method. Top five features identified by each technique are used again to build the detection models. Experimental results show that most of the developed classifiers obtained high evaluation results based on the comprehensive data set constructed in this work. Experiments also reveal the important role of some features like the reputation of the account, average length of the tweet, average mention per tweet, age of the account, and the average time between posts in the process of identifying spammers in the social network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extracting the user reviews in websites such as forums, blogs, newspapers, commerce, trips, etc. is crucial for text processing applications (e.g. sentiment analysis, trend detection/monitoring and recommendation systems) which are needed to deal with structured data. Traditional algorithms have three processes consisting of Document Object Model (DOM) tree creation, extraction of features obtained from this tree and machine learning. However, these algorithms increase time complexity of extraction process. This study proposes a novel algorithm that involves two complementary stages. The first stage determines which HTML tags correspond to review layout for a web domain by using the DOM tree as well as its features and decision tree learning. The second stage extracts review layout for web pages in a web domain using the found tags obtained from the first stage. This stage is more time-efficient, being approximately 21 times faster compared to the first stage. Moreover, it achieves a relatively high accuracy of 96.67% in our experiments of review block extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study was to find out whether discarding XML declarations and changing file extensions (i.e. .xml) improve the indexability and visibility of DCXML, MARCXML and MODS element tag names in Web search engines. Two groups of metadata records were included in an experimental study: an experimental group composed of 300 XML-based records without XML declarations and with file extensions according to the name of related metadata standards, and a control group composed of 300 XML-based records with the normal XML structure. These were analysed through an experimental approach. The two sets of records were published on two separate websites and then the sites were introduced to Google and Yahoo!. Findings showed that Google and Yahoo! indexed and retrieved all the tag names relating to the experimental group. However they did not index the tag names in the control group’s records. Based on the findings, some patterns are suggested to metadata creators and Web search engine developers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the advent of ubiquitous connectivity and a constant flux of user-generated content, people’s online information-seeking behaviours are rapidly changing, one o f which includes seeking information from peers through online questioning. Ways to understand this new behaviour can be broken down into three aspects, also referred to as the three M’s – the modalities (sources and strategies) that people use when asking their questions online, their motivations behind asking these questions and choosing specific services, and the types and quality of the materials (content) generated in such an online Q&A environment. This article will provide a new framework – three M’s – based on the synthesis of relevant literature. It will then identify some of the gaps in our knowledge about online Q&A based on this framework. These gaps will be transformed into six research questions, stemming from the three M’s, and addressed by (a) consolidating and synthesizing findings previously reported in the literature, (b) conducting new analyses of data used in prior work, and (c) administering a new study to answer questions unaddressed by the pre-existing and new analyses of prior work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes to knowledge on how users establish the trustworthiness of digital information. An exploratory two-stage study was conducted with Master’s and undergraduate students in information studies. In the first phase of the study respondents commented on the factors and processes associated with trust formation. Participants commented on authorship and references, quality of writing and editing, and verification via links to external reference sources. Findings from the second phase, based on a checklist, suggested that participants relied on a range of factors when assessing the trustworthiness of articles, including content factors such as authorship, currency and usefulness together with context factors such as references, expert recommendation and triangulation with their own knowledge. These findings are discussed in the light of previous related research and recommendations for further research are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Online healthcare information is used by patients, their carers and families (PCF) experiencing speech and language difficulties (SLD) after a stroke. This information may be of variable quality. Tools have been designed to assess the risk of poor information quality, evaluating both generic and specific concepts, yet none focuses on stroke. The readability of information is also an issue when communication disorders are under consideration. The study investigated the quality and readability of information on 51 web sites pertaining to SLD following a stroke. These were assessed using two generic evaluation tools (DISCERN and the HON Code), readability tests (Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level) and a specifically designed Stroke Tool based on the reported information needs of stroke PCF experiencing SLD. The tools themselves were then evaluated for their feasibility, reliability and validity. In common with previous studies, the information quality of the selected web sites was found to be extremely variable with only 59% achieving a score of 50% or more using HON, only 37% using DISCERN, and 49% using the Stroke Tool. Readability is generally very poor with only 6% of web sites scoring below the recommended grade 7. The tools did not correlate well, suggesting that they measure different domains of quality. The Internet may be a valuable resource for stroke PCF; however, the variable quality of information means that cautious use is recommended. The readability of information is a more serious issue that needs addressing by web site developers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study explores the relationships between cultural and social capital and online social tagging behaviour in Delicious.com, a social bookmarking web site that offers social tagging functionalities. Based on Bourdieu’s conception of cultural and social capital, an online questionnaire was developed to measure Delicious users’ capital possession and its influences on social tagging behavioural tendencies. The study findings showed that the offline/online cultural capital and offline social capital affected information organization-oriented tagging; offline/online social capital affected social oriented-tagging; offline/online cultural capital and offline/online social capital both affected strategic tagging; offline/online social capital affected tagging imitation. Based on the findings, we made inferences on the user roles and the power structure of a social tagging folksonomy community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Search engines are important outlets for information query and retrieval. They have to deal with the continual increase of information available on the web, and provide users with convenient access to such huge amounts of information. Furthermore, with this huge amount of information, a more complex challenge that continuously gets more and more difficult to illuminate is the spam in web pages. For several reasons, web spammers try to intrude in the search results and inject artificially biased results in favour of their websites or pages. Spam pages are added to the internet on a daily basis, thus making it difficult for search engines to keep up with the fast-growing and dynamic nature of the web, especially since spammers tend to add more keywords to their websites to deceive the search engines and increase the rank of their pages. In this research, we have investigated four different classification algorithms (naïve Bayes, decision tree, SVM and K-NN) to detect Arabic web spam pages, based on content. The three groups of datasets used, with 1%, 15% and 50% spam contents, were collected using a crawler that was customized for this study. Spam pages were classified manually. Different tests and comparisons have revealed that the Decision Tree was the best classifier for this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Detecting alert e-mails received daily by millions of subscribers from online news providers is a relatively new area of research which falls within the e-mail filtering field of research. Alert e-mails may address government, political issues, breaking news, and criminal attacks. This article proposes a hybrid approach based on both the Graham statistical filter and rule-based filters to detect and filter Arabic alert e-mails. The approach is basically language-independent. To test the performance of the proposed approach, several experiments have been conducted using a set of 1500 Arabic messages related to criminal activities collected manually from some news websites such as Al-Jazeera Net and BBC Arabic news. The results showed that the proposed approach has achieved a competitive performance in terms of accuracy, precision, and F-measure, where about 87% of the messages tested have been correctly detected and filtered by the proposed filter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the ways in which information consumers evaluate the quality of content in a collaborative-writing environment, in this case Wikipedia. Sixty-four users were asked to assess the quality of five articles from the Hebrew Wikipedia, to indicate the highest- and lowest-quality article of the five and explain their choices. Participants viewed both the article page, and the article’s history page, so that their decision was based both on the article’s current content and on its development. The analysis shows that the attributes that most frequently assisted the users in deciding about the quality of the items were not unique to Wikipedia: attributes such as amount of information, satisfaction with content and external links were mentioned frequently, as with other information quality studies on the web. The findings also support the claim that quality is a subjective concept which depends on the user’s unique point of view. Attributes such as number of edits and number of unique editors received two contradictory meanings – both few edits/editors and many edits/editors were mentioned as attributes of high-quality articles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social tagging, as a recent approach for creating metadata, has caught the attention of library and information science researchers. Many researchers recommend incorporating social tagging into the library environment and combining folksonomies with formal classification. However, some researchers are concerned with the quality issues of social annotation because of its uncontrolled nature. In this study, we compare social tags created by users from the LibraryThing website with the subject terms assigned by experts according to the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). The purpose of this study is to examine the difference and connections between social tags and expert-assigned subject terms and further explore the feasibility and obstacles of implementing social tagging in library systems. The results of our study show that it is possible to use social tags to improve the accessibility of library collections. However, the existence of non-subject-related tags may impede the application of social tagging in traditional library cataloguing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The top 100 university websites in mainland China have been selected as samples to explore the link relationship between their websites using principal component, multidimensional scale and social network analysis methods, such as co-link, betweenness, and k-core. These relationships reflect the characteristics of comprehensive strength, influential power and the subject types of the universities. Macroscopically, websites are typically linked for their influence, while subject/regional relations are discovered through sub-network analysis at the micro-level. The micro-level link analysis shows that subject relation, as well as geographical relation, are significant motivators for collaboration between universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the overall purpose of improving the information literacy skills of librarianship and information science students, an academic portal specifically centred on abstracts and abstracting resources is proposed. We take the existing literature, together with our knowledge and experience of abstract/abstracting topics and web-based technologies to conceive the research design. The research mainly consists of the selection, assessment and web-display of the most relevant abstracts on knowledge management, information representation, natural language processing, abstract/abstracting, modelling the scientific document, information retrieval and information evaluation. The resulting Cyber abstracts portal presents its products consistently and includes reference, abstract, keywords, assessment and access to the full document. Improvement opportunities for this unique subject-based gateway, representing much more than a mere subject catalogue, are uncovered as the starting point on a planned route towards excellence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is a longitudinal study of the evolution and the state of 738 web sites at two different points in time (1997 and 2004). It tries to establish the rate of growth and decay of the web and all the web elements. To this end, the structure and the contents of these web sites are extracted through a crawler and compared at the two different moments in time. The main results confirm a growth of web content and elements in the web, although there is also a high degree of web content decay. The results suggest that in the seven-year period covered by this study the web is characterized by both strong dynamism and instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]