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Multiple authorship on research publications is common in many disciplines. Is the order in which authors appear in the byline determined by consistent criteria? This study investigated co-authored papers published in theJournal of Informetricsin 2016, the year in which this representative journal of the area of informetrics started to publish the articles with the author contributions form, as a case study to determine if there is consistency in the author order based on author contributions. For the papers studied, there was greater consistency for the first and last authors, and less consistent rationale for the order of the remaining author positions for the papers studied. A survey sent to the authors of the publications studied revealed that authors believed the first and last author positions played a more distinctive role. The lack of agreement and function of author order in other positions raises the question about the significance of author order and its purpose in determining the credit authors receive for co-authored publications. La autoría múltiple en publicaciones de investigación es común en muchas disciplinas. ¿El orden en el que aparecen los autores en la mención de autoría está determinado por criterios consistentes? Este estudio investiga los artículos en coautoría publicados enJournal of Informetricsen 2016, el año en el que esta revista representativa del área de la informetría comenzó a publicar los artículos junto al formulario de contribuciones de los autores, como un estudio de caso para determinar si hay coherencia en el orden de los autores según sus contribuciones. Para los artículos estudiados, hubo mayor consistencia para el primer y último autor, y una justificación menos consistente para el orden de las posiciones de los autores restantes. Una encuesta enviada a los autores de las publicaciones estudiadas reveló que los autores creían que la posición del primer y último autor desempeñaba un papel más distintivo. La falta de acuerdo y función del orden de los autores en otras posiciones plantea la pregunta sobre la importancia del orden de los autores y su propósito para determinar el crédito que reciben los autores por las publicaciones en coautoría.

This panel brings together experts in bibliometrics and information retrieval to discuss how each of these two important areas of information science can help to inform the research of the other. There is a growing body of literature that capitalizes on the synergies created by combining methodological approaches of each to solve research problems and practical issues related to how information is created, stored, organized, retrieved and used. The session will begin with an overview of the common threads that exist between IR and metrics, followed by a summary of findings from the BIR workshops and examples of research projects that combine aspects of each area to benefit IR or metrics research areas, including search results ranking, semantic indexing and visualization. The panel will conclude with an engaging discussion with the audience to identify future areas of research and collaboration., Comment: 4 pages, accepted at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST 2016) in Copenhagen

Using data sampled from top-level Web pages across five high-level domains and from sample pages within individual websites, the authors investigate the frequency distribution of outlinks in Web pages. The observed distributions were fitted to different theoretical distributions to determine the best-fitting model for representing outlink frequency across Web pages. Theoretical models tested include the modified power law (MPL), Mandelbrot (MDB), generalized Waring (GW), generalized inverse Gaussian-Poisson (GIGP), and generalized negative binomial (GNB) distributions. The GIGP and GNB provided good fits for data sets for top-level pages across the high level domains tested, with the GIGP performing slightly better. The lumpiness and bimodal nature of two of the observed outlink distributions from Web pages within a given website resulted in poor fits of the theoretical models. The GIGP was able to provide better fits to these data sets after the top components were truncated. The ability to effectively model Web page attributes, such as the distribution of the number of outlinks per page, paves the way for simulation models of Web page structural content, and makes it possible to estimate the number of outlinks that may be encountered within Web pages of a specific domain or within individual websites.

This study introduces a new methodology to explore Web information distribution. Subject terms extracted from a key journal in the field of information science were employed to conduct Web searches on Google to identify a corpus of Internet domains and associated Web pages to represent the discipline of information science. A Bradford analysis was then applied to the corpus to determine if the scatter of Web pages conformed to a Bradford distribution. The modeling of the collected data to the power law function in LOTKA program indicates a good fit at even 10% significance level. With a binning procedure and least squares fitting, an R square value of 0.987 was obtained. A division of the data according to top level domain category shows different number of domains and domain productivities in different types of domains. Governmental and commercial domains have higher productivity than the educational and organizational domains. However, the difference between governmental and commercial domains and between educational and organizational domains are not significant

Air pollutants can affect lung function and also the immune system. In a study about lung function of salt miners in relation to the complex exposure in a salt mine, we also analysed selected immunological parameters and inflammation markers in the blood of miners. Effect of salt dust, diesel exhaust, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and smoking on the biomarkers was analysed.Blood was drawn from 286 salt miners, and the soluble intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (s-ICAM), monocyte chemotactic protein (MCP-1) and clara cell protein (CC16) were analysed by an immunoassay, blood profile was done and lymphocyte subpopulations (CD3, CD3/CD4, CD3/CD8, CD19, NK-cells, CD3/HLA-DR) were determined by flow cytometry. Salt dust was measured by two-step gravimetry (personal sampling). Diesel exhaust was measured as elemental carbon concentration by coulometry. NOx were determined by an electrochemical cell method. Differences between non-smokers, former smokers and active smokers were analysed by analysis of variance. Linear regression analysis to describe exposure-response relationships was done with regard to confounding factors [smoking, inflammatory diseases, time of blood drawing, respiratory infection and body-mass index (BMI)].Significant differences between non-smokers and active smokers were found for most of the leukocyte types (e.g. granulocytes P = 0.000, lymphocytes P = 0.002, T-cells P = 0.033) and for some soluble parameters (ICAM P = 0.000, IgM P = 0.007, IgE P = 0.035). Increasing numbers of total lymphocytes, T-cells and HLA-DR positive T-cells in relation to exposure were found by linear regression analysis (e.g. for inhalable dust:total lymphocytes P = 0.011, T-cells P = 0.061, HLA-DR positive T-cells P = 0.007). CONCLUSION. Comparison of immunological markers in non-smokers and active smokers confirms leukocytosis and inflammation following tobacco consumption. The combined exposure of salt dust, diesel exhaust and NOx seems to influence the immune system. Together, the results suggest that the analysis of leukocytes and their subsets can complete other investigations (lung function, questionnaire) to monitor exposure-response relationships in occupational studies investigating the effect of inhaled substances. Longitudinal studies will be necessary to determine the predictive value of the immunological changes.

Soluble intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (s-ICAM-1) was evaluated as biomarker indicating inflammatory processes in the airways of persons exposed to salt dust, ceramic dust and flour dust. ICAM values in the serum of these workers were related to airway symptoms, lung function (FEV1), inhalable dust dose and tobacco consumption. A weak relation was found to airway symptoms (cough and phlegm) and FEV1. Consistent elevated ICAM levels in smokers suggest, that ICAM indicates inflammatory processes following strong irritants such as tobacco smoke. In contrast to lung function analysis, serum ICAM does not support inflammatory changes by salt dust or ceramic dust.

The efficient design and maintenance of information retrieval systems are still important considerations, even with the current availability of faster computer hardware and cheaper secondary storage. Informetrics, the quantitative study of information and its use, could provide the systems designer and analyst with tools with which to aid in decision making for optimising system performance.;This study examines how informetrics can be used to help the systems designer in deciding what types of file structures would provide the best performance for a given type of information system environment. It is hypothesized that for varying index term distributions and system term usage patterns, different file structures provide more timely access and require less space.;A factorial design simulation study was carried out to examine the retrieval performance and space requirements of several types of hypothetical information retrieval systems. Performance estimates were based on simulation runs varying system parameters which included the index term distribution, the term selection relationship and number of index terms. Results under different file structures were compared using multi-way Analysis of Variance.;It was found that different structures were better suited for different retrieval environments. The chained hashing structure, in most cases, provided the best retrieval performance and most economical space requirements where gradually decreasing term distributions were present. However, the proposed modified hashing structure performed better in situations where steep term distributions existed. Two variations of the BIM-tree (Balanced Implicit Multiway tree) also provided good performance where steep term distributions were encountered and where the term selection relationship favoured the retrieval of terms with larger postings lists.

"In this paper we describe a case study where researchers in the social sciences (n=19) assess topical relevance for controlled search terms, journal names and author names which have been compiled by recommender services. We call these services Search Term Recommender (STR), Journal Name Recommender (JNR) and Author Name Recommender (ANR) in this paper. The researchers in our study (practitioners, PhD students and postdocs) were asked to assess the top n preprocessed recommendations from each recommender for specific research topics which have been named by them in an interview before the experiment. Our results show clearly that the presented search term, journal name and author name recommendations are highly relevant to the researchers topic and can easily be integrated for search in Digital Libraries. The average precision for top ranked recommendations is 0.749 for author names, 0.743 for search terms and 0.728 for journal names. The relevance distribution differs largely across topics and researcher types. Practitioners seem to favor author name recommendations while postdocs have rated author name recommendations the lowest. In the experiment the small postdoc group favors journal name recommendations." (author's abstract)