Search

The amount of scientific papers is growing together with the development of science itself; but, although there is an unprecedented availability of large citation indexes, some daily activities of researchers remain time‐consuming and poorly supported. In this paper, we present Visual Bibliographies (VisualBib), a real‐time visual platform, designed using a zz‐structure‐based model for linking metadata and a narrative, visual approach for showing bibliographies. VisualBib represents a usable, advanced, and visual tool, which simplifies the management of bibliographies, supports a core set of bibliographic tasks, and helps researchers during complex analyses on scientific bibliographies. We present the variety of metadata formats and visualization methods, proposing two use case scenarios. The maturity of the system implementation allowed us two studies, for evaluating both the effectiveness of VisualBib in providing answers to specific data analysis tasks and to support experienced users during real‐life uses. The results of the evaluation are positive and describe an effective and usable platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detailed and accurate documentation of the reagents, tools and methods used in a study is key for reproducible science. However, the information provided in the Materials and Methods section is not always sufficiently detailed to allow for the adoption of methodologies across laboratories. Substantial time and effort, as well as extensive correspondence with the authors of a published paper, is often required in order to obtain all the relevant information related to a particular technique. Even after following a trail of references that frequently lead to a paper published decades ago, it is sometimes impossible to find a sufficiently detailed description of a technique “performed as described before”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The indexing of a document is among the most crucial steps in preparing that document for retrieval. The adequacy of the indexing determines the ability of the system to respond to patron requests. This paper discusses this process, and document retrieval in general, on the basis of formal decision theory. The basic theoretical approach taken is illustrated by means of a model of word occurrences in documents in the context of a model information system; both models are fully defined in this paper. Though the main purpose of this paper is to provide insights into a very complex process, formulae are developed that may prove to be of value for an automated operating system. The paper concludes with an interpretation of recall and precision curves as seen from the point of view of decision theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article a set of requirements for the design of a personal document management system is presented, based on the results of three research studies (Bondarenko, 2006; Bondarenko & Janssen, 2005; Bondarenko & Janssen, 2009). We propose a framework, based on layers of task decomposition, that helps to understand the needs of information workers with regard to personal document and task management. Relevant user processes are described and requirements for a document-management system are derived for each layer. The derived requirements are compared to related studies, and implications for system design are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amount of knowledge accumulated in published scientific papers has increased due to the continuing progress being made in scientific research. Since numerous papers have only reported fragments of scientific facts, there are possibilities for discovering new knowledge by connecting these facts. We therefore developed a system called BioTermNet to draft a conceptual network with hybrid methods of information extraction and information retrieval. Two concepts are regarded as related in this system if (a) their relationship is clearly described in MEDLINE abstracts or (b) they have distinctively co-occurred in abstracts. PRIME data, including protein interactions and functions extracted by NLP techniques, are used in the former, and the Singhal-measure for information retrieval is used in the latter. Relationships that are not clearly or directly described in an abstract can be extracted by connecting multiple concepts. To evaluate how well this system performs, Swanson's association between Raynaud's disease and fish oil and that between migraine and magnesium were tested with abstracts that had been published before the discovery of these associations. The result was that when start and end concepts were given, plausible and understandable intermediate concepts connecting them could be detected. When only the start concept was given, not only the focused concept (magnesium and fish oil) but also other probable concepts could be detected as related concept candidates. Finally, this system was applied to find diseases related to the BRCA1 gene. Some other new potentially related diseases were detected along with diseases whose relations to BRCA1 were already known. The BioTermNet is available at http://btn.ontology.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in information systems (IS) indicates an absence of clear-cut models to assess IS effectiveness. While the costs are easily identifiable it is the benefits which are most difficult to assess due to the scope of impact of information systems. In order to provide structure to the problem this paper presents a hierarchical approach to develop an IS effectiveness model using structured modelling techniques. This study uses the prior research work and a survey to identify and relate factors of IS effectiveness. The results of the model show that ‘improving systems integration’ has the highest influence on information systems effectiveness, followed by ‘facilitating information retrieval’. We were able to validate our results by showing that they are consistent with the widely accepted ‘stages model’ of IS development. Of particular interest is the finding that significantly high levels of IS effectiveness are experienced by organizations in the penultimate or final stage of IS development. The most significant contribution of this study is the development of a comprehensive IS effectiveness evaluation framework that resolves many subjective dilemmas of traditional user-centred evaluation approaches. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of this paper is to examine the concept of about as it is used in its information retrieval sense when, for example, an indexer judges that a document is (or is not) about some given subject. The problem with about is that it is a very complex notion and we are unable to say precisely what it is we do when we make judgment of aboutness. Since about is at the heart of indexing, how are we to formulate any proper theory of indexing if we cannot explicate precisely the key concept of about? In this paper we look at this concept of about and offer a solution to the problem mentioned; it consists of an operational definition of about which interprets about in terms of search behavior. A second objective of this paper is to show that about is, in fact, not the central concept in a theory of document retrieval. A document retrieval system ought to provide a ranked output (in response to a search query) not according to the degree that they are about the topic sought by the inquiring patron, but rather according to the probability that they will satisfy that person's information need. This paper shows how aboutness is related to probability of satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Airway management is a cornerstone of emergency care. Development of a robust evidence base to support the practice of pre‐hospital emergency anaesthesia is key to the safety and evolution of this common but high‐risk procedure. This paper discusses the benefits, risks, insights, learning and limitations of the use of an airway registry in pre‐hospital and retrieval medicine, for both research and quality improvement purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Document keyphrases provide a concise summary of a document's content, offering semantic metadata summarizing a document. They can be used in many applications related to knowledge management and text mining, such as automatic text summarization, development of search engines, document clustering, document classification, thesaurus construction, and browsing interfaces. Because only a small portion of documents have keyphrases assigned by authors, and it is time-consuming and costly to manually assign keyphrases to documents, it is necessary to develop an algorithm to automatically generate keyphrases for documents. This paper describes a Keyphrase Identification Program (KIP), which extracts document keyphrases by using prior positive samples of human identified phrases to assign weights to the candidate keyphrases. The logic of our algorithm is: The more keywords a candidate keyphrase contains and the more significant these keywords are, the more likely this candidate phrase is a keyphrase. KIP's learning function can enrich the glossary database by automatically adding new identified keyphrases to the database. KIP's personalization feature will let the user build a glossary database specifically suitable for the area of his/her interest. The evaluation results show that KIP's performance is better than the systems we compared to and that the learning function is effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new document representation model is presented in this paper. This model is based on the idea of representing a document by two or more pictures of the document taken from different perspectives. It is shown that by applying the stereo representation model, enhanced textual retrieval performance is achieved because the new model improves the capability of capturing individual features of the document. Experiments have been conducted on two standard corpora, TIME and ADI, using the standard term vector method and the latent semantic indexing (LSI) method based upon both the stereo representation model and the traditional representation model. Statistical t-tests on the experimental results have convincingly illustrated that these methods achieve significant improvements in retrieval performances with the stereo representation model over those with the traditional representation model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As electronic text files increase in number and diversity, the problem of devising a more effective information retrieval interface grows more important. Future designs may draw upon cognitive theories of categorization and metaphor to understand how users interact with text-both paper and electronic. Relevant literature in cognitive psychology and information science suggests the importance of the users physical environment in thinking about abstract entities, such as categories of documents. Empirical studies have established a basis for understanding how we think about, file, remember, and locate text. Results from a study of 20 historians-an exemplary group in terms of their close studies of texts and the broad scope of their inquiries-imply the importance of metaphors for storage and retrieval of documents. The study found that metaphors and subjective categories were frequently applied to documents collected and created by these scholars. Two physical factors-spatial configuration and document form-were often considered before topic in determining document storage locations in the office. Developers of information systems should consider qualitative aspects of cognition in their designs. System developers might also consider segmenting the audience for computer interfaces, as well as designing generic tools that apply to all users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this paper reports a comparative study of the document classifications produced by the use of the single linkage, complete linkage, group average, and Ward clustering methods. Studies of cluster membership and of the effectiveness of cluster searches support previous findings that suggest that the single linkage classifications are rather different from those produced by the other three methods. These latter methods all produce large numbers of small clusters containing just pairs of documents. This finding motivates the work reported in the second part of the paper, which considers the use of clusters consisting of a document together with that document with which it is most similar. A comparison of the use of such clusters with conventional best match searches using seven document test collections suggests that the two types of search are of comparable effectiveness, but they retrieve noticeably different sets of relevant documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relative effectiveness of indexing using full-text or less than full-text was tested using a non-Boolean, chaining type of file structure and searching method. Indexing was done using titles, abstracts, full-text, references, and various combinations of these surrogates and then Goffman's indirect method of information retrieval was used to structure and search the tile. The database consisted of 733 documents and 38 queries were searched. The hypothesis of the study was that by using a particular non-Boolean method as a file structuring and searching technique, full-text indexing is not essential to optimum information retrieval effectiveness. The outcome of the study was positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the optimal storage of books by size in libraries. A network model is developed to determine the optimum number of shelf heights to use which will minimize the shelving cost for a given collection of books. The model is analyzed and solved by a well known operations research technique of finding the shortest path in a directed network. Results of an experimental study to apply this model to a sample collection of books from the Purdue University Library are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for full-fledged information retrieval services via the World Wide Web has grown as the Internet has evolved. However, existing information retrieval systems for the World Wide Web have various limitations in the search functions, and in structure and scale of databases. The information retrieval system described in this paper has been operating for a real information retrieval service, providing high-level search functions via a command line and a Web interface for large-scale scholarly databases in text form with complex structures. In this paper, the authors first describe an outline of and the design of the information retrieval functions, in particular the characteristic functions including set operations, thesaurus searches, hierarchical structure searches, and unified searches of multiple databases. Next, they describe the implementation technologies of the system focusing on the features of the search engine, the session control method, the handling of large-scale databases, and the structure of servers and processes. Then, the authors evaluate the current system based on the real operation, and finally discuss the future issues and the related researches. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 34(6): 44–58, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10015 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To effectively use news videos that are valuable as references, we need a system that stores a copious amount of news material and allows on-demand retrieval and display of news contents. This paper proposes a news on-demand system that integrates retrieval and editing functions. The authors show that more advanced revision of news digests is possible by integrating guided navigation and time-adjusting browsing. Guided navigation facilitates retrieval of news contents from a large amount of material by automatically presenting guide information. Time-adjusting browsing satisfies a user's editing requests by sharing editing templates for news contents. This paper also proposes high-speed editing using a scenario-tree management function that helps achieve integration of guided navigation and time-adjusting browsing. © 1998 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 29(10): 1–14, 1998 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vannevar Bush's famous article, "As We May Think" (1945), described an imaginary information retrieval machine, the Memex. The Memex is usually viewed, un-historically, in relation to subsequent developments using digital computers. This study reconstructs the little-known background of information retrieval in and before 1939 when "As We May Think" was originally written. The Memex was based on Bush's work during 1938-1940 in developing an improved photoelectric microfilm selector, an electronic retrieval technology pioneered by Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon, Dresden, in the 1920s. Visionary statements by Paul Otiet (1934) and Walter Schürmeyer (1935) and the development of electronic document retrieval technology before Bush are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cleverdon's "inverse relationship between recall and precision " and other relationships between the measures of performance of retrieval systems, arise from variations in other (independent) system variables. This paper explores the properties of these independent variables, and defines a class of basic variables named M-factors. The "inverse relationship" is generated by variations in a single M-factor, but does not always obtain if more than one M-factor is allowed to vary. A number of examples are discussed in the light of this analysis. The possibility is suggested that all variables affecting the performance of retrieval systems can be decomposed into M-factors. The implications of these ideas for laboratory tests on retrieval systems are discussed. A mathematical treatment of the ideas is also given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Internationally, the adoption of technology into residential aged care settings has been slow and fraught with multiple challenges for residents, staff and service providers. The aim of this study was to evaluate the acceptability, efficiency, and quality of health information system implementation into aged care. Methods: Three‐stage, mixed‐methods participatory action research, concurrent with the natural experiment of a co‐designed health information system implementation into a 169‐bed aged care home in Australia. Data were collected pre‐, during, and post implementation between 2019 and 2021. Qualitative data included focus groups, interviews, and observations. Quantitative data included work observations, pedometers, record audits, incident reports and staff and resident surveys. There were 162 participants composed of 65 aged care residents, 90 staff, and 7 managers/consultants. Results: Improved work efficiency included reduced staff time searching for information (6%); reduced nurse time on documentation (20.4% to 6.4%), and 25% less steps. Documentation improvement included resident assessments (68% to 96%); resident‐focused goals (56% to 88%) and evaluations (31% to 88%). The staff reported being better equipped to manage the 'delicacies of dignity'. Conclusion: Implementation of a health information system into a residential aged care facility was associated with improved resident‐focused care and staff efficiency. Clinical relevance: Technology can support nurses and care staff to spend more time with residents in residential aged care homes, improve the quality of resident care, and assist meeting regulatory reporting requirements. Flexible and tailored co‐design strategies can enhance both effectiveness and success of technology implementation into residential aged care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an editorial statement concerning the voluntary data availability policy of the "Canadian Journal of Economics." The author points out that in line with the employment of the policy, authors are expected to cooperate with requests to provide data to researchers who wish to replicate their work. In addition to archiving the data, a key innovation of the new policy was the requirement that the associated programs and associated documentation be included, thus facilitating use of the data by interested researchers. The key features of the new policy are discussed.

This article presents information related to the next special topic for the issue of the "Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology," (JASIST) that is scheduled to come out in early 2007. The topic is "Mining Web Resources for Enhancing Information Retrieval." The guest editors for this special issue will be Wai Lam and Christopher C. Yang. The amount of information on the Web has been expanding at an enormous pace. There are a variety of Web documents in different genres such as news, reports, reviews and so on. Traditionally, the information displayed on Web sites has been static. Recently, there are many Web sites offering content that is dynamically generated and frequently updated. It is also common for Web sites to contain information in different languages since many countries adopt more than one language. Moreover, content may exist in multimedia formats including text, images, video and audio. Although the Web contains a rich amount of valuable resources, raw Web pages are mainly designed for supporting information browsing. Intelligent text mining techniques have recently been applied to the Web environment to harvest or generate novel patterns or knowledge that can be useful in different information seeking situations.

Traditional text-based document classifiers tend to perform poorly on the Web. Text in Web documents is usually noisy and often does not contain enough information to determine their topic. However, the Web provides a different source that can be useful to document classification: its hyperlink structure. In this work, the authors evaluate how the link structure of the Web can be used to determine a measure of similarity appropriate for document classification. They experiment with five different similarity measures and determine their adequacy for predicting the topic of a Web page. Tests performed on a Web directory show that link information alone allows classifying documents with an average precision of 86%. Further, when combined with a traditional text-based classifier, precision increases to values of up to 90%, representing gains that range from 63 to 132% over the use of text-based classification alone. Because the measures proposed in this article are straightforward to compute, they provide a practical and effective solution for Web classification and related information retrieval tasks. Further, the authors provide an important set of guidelines on how link structure can be used effectively to classify Web documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This last decade has seen the publication of an extensive literature describing, cataloguing and analyzing the ‘emergence’ of complexity. This seems very strange. The creation of a complex assembly is comparatively easy—the difficult job is to generate simplicity from it. So much is this the case, that the only context within which it takes place is that of life itself. Although we naturally imagine life as a dynamic process rather than as a static structure, both of these are critical to its survival. Continuously expanding multi-element assemblies finally lose their cohesion, and split up into separate parts, or restructure themselves to redress their stability by generating a simplified umbrella level of operation. In large organisms this process may repeat itself, thus creating a multilevel self-correlating operational hierarchy. It is not obvious how the associated generation of simplicity is initiated, but it appears that such a self-correlating hierarchy is itself alive. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Makerspaces are places for construction and creative expression using tools such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and sewing machines. In this study, we investigate how makers obtain information for their makerspace projects. The study focuses on four sources of information: people, documents, experimentation, and prior knowledge. On the basis of interviews with 13 makers, we analyze their use of these information sources in relation to different knowledge areas, creative‐process stages, and relevance criteria. Our main findings are that (a) experimentation is a prime source of information, (b) ease and pleasure are the dominant relevance criteria, (c) process and situation receive little attention, and (d) information sources vary across process stages. Specifically, experimentation is the dominant information source during the construction stage. In addition, the relevance criteria show that the makers turn to people because it is pleasurable, to documents because it is easy, and to experimentation because it results in quality products. These results emphasize the importance of experimentation and suggest that it warrants closer attention in studies of the information behavior of makers and, more broadly, creative professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a highlight detection method and an indexing method for broadcast sports video using the collaborative processing of text, audio, and image. In the proposed method, the appearance pattern of words in the closed caption text stream is analyzed, and candidate intervals for highlights are detected. Next, these intervals are checked based on their audio levels, and those which seem to be erroneous are rejected. Finally, the resulting highlight intervals are segmented into shots, and the shots are indexed by identifying the highlight shots based on audio levels and dominant color information. In the results of using this method on a real football broadcast, highlight intervals were effectively detected with a recall rate of 77% and a precision rate of 84%. Moreover, for the intervals in which highlights were correctly detected, shot indexing was performed accurately 75% for only the first candidate, and 97% for up to the second candidate. We verified experimentally that efficient processing can be achieved by stepwise analysis of the text, audio, and image. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 34(12): 22–31, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10493 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Japanese, the border between words is not explicitly indicated. Consequently, n-gram (a tuple of n characters) indexing is usually applied to document retrieval. Retrieval based on the n-gram indexing is performed for long retrieval words as follows. After dividing the long retrieval word into n-grams, two-stage processing is applied, consisting of determination of the retrieval candidate document containing the divided n-gram, and noise elimination in the candidate document by matching the position of the n-gram. This paper proposes two methods to speed up the above retrieval processing. One selects the combination that minimizes the processing cost for noise elimination from the n-gram extracted from the long retrieval word. The other applies additionally an n-gram other than the one minimizing the cost, extracted from the retrieval word, to the determination of the candidate document, which improves efficiency in narrowing the range of the candidate documents. An evaluation experiment was performed, using 4 years of newspaper articles, and the effectiveness of the proposed methods was demonstrated. © 2002 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 33(2): 54–63, 2002 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a rare insight into the migration of municipality record‐keeping databases. The migration of a database for preservation purposes poses several challenges. In particular, our findings show that relevant issues are file‐format heterogeneity, collection volume, time and database structure evolution, and deviation from the governing standard. This article presents and discusses how such issues interfere with an organization's ability to undertake a migration, for preservation purposes, of records from a relational database. The case study at hand concerns six Norwegian municipality record‐keeping databases covering a period from 1999 to 2012. The findings are presented with a discussion on how these issues manifest themselves as a problem for long‐term preservation. The results discussed here may help an organization and Information Systems (IS) manager to establish a best practice when undertaking a migration project and enable them to avoid some of the pitfalls that were discovered during this project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fuzzy set concept has been used to improve the performance of the document retrieval scheme. Doyle has applied the fuzzy set in conjunction with the keyword connection matrix (KCM) for document retrieval. The size of the KCM is proportional to the square of the number of keywords. This not only increases the storage and processing requirements, but also makes the updating of database for new documents more difficult. This paper proposes a new method based on hierarchical organization of keywords and broader concepts. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through simulation and experiment. The evaluation of experimental results indicates that the hierarchical method requires a smaller memory space and shorter processing time than the conventional KCM method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measures of cluster-based retrieval effectiveness are computed for five composite representations in the cystic fibrosis (CF) Document Collection. The composite representations are constructed from combinations of two subject representations, based on Medical Subject Headings and subheadings, and two citation representations, consisting of the complete list of cited references and a comprehensive list of citations for each document. Experimental retrieval results are presented as a function of the exhaustivity and similarity of the composite representations and reveal consistent patterns from which optimal performance levels can be identified. The optimal performance values provide an assessment of the absolute capacity of each composite representation to associate documents relevant to the same query and discriminate between documents relevant to different queries in single-link hierarchies. The optimal performance values for all composite representations are completely comparable and are superior to the optimal performance of constituent representations. Optimal performance consistently occurs at tow levels of exhaustivity. Exhaustive composite representations that include subject descriptions produce the lowest levels of performance; retrieval results derived from random structures are comparable to the observed results. The effectiveness of the exhaustive representation composed of references and citations is materially superior to the effectiveness of exhaustive composite representations that include subject descriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of clustering structure in the cystic fibrosis (CF) Document Collection is evaluated as a function of the exhaustivity of five composite representations. The composite representations are constructed from two subject descriptions, based on Medical Subject Headings and subheadings, and two citation indexes, based on the complete set of references in and a comprehensive set of citations to each document. Experimental results reveal observable evidence for clustering structure at all exhaustivity levels of all composite representations but also show that the evidence for clustering structure diminishes as the exhaustivity of each representation is decreased. The representation composed of references and citations shows less evidence of clustering structure at the exhaustive level but more uniform evidence of clustering structure over a wide range of exhaustivity levels than composite representations that include subject descriptions. The structures imposed on the CF Document Collection by all composite representations satisfy the necessary condition for a meaningful clustering outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a failure analysis for the SDI system. The study examined some of the assumptions which underlie the design of SDI systems: the context of use, the activities supported by SDI-based information, and characteristics which made documents useful. It was found that the design assumptions underlying the system were not appropriate for the user community. This finding may help explain why SDI has been adopted by such a small percentage of the users it was designed to serve. However, this information tool is well suited for a broader population than that intended two decades ago. While SDI remains a valuable system, attaining a higher level of usage is likely to require changes in outreach and related activities of the service providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An account is given of the process by which the lriternational Classification System for Physics was developed and finally adopted by four major services that abstract and index the world's physics literature. Details are given of the relevant historical background and of the collaborative procedures followed in achieving consensus in this international project, unique in its scale. This effort was pursued under the aegis of the International Council of Scientific Unions and involved four services and other physics organizations. Some technical points are discussed that bear on the problems of constructing classification systems that fulfill a variety of needs and express a compromise between similar preexisting structures. Aspects of the experience of collaboration, which may be of the to similar enterprises, and some implications for the future of processing of scientific information on an international scale, are briefly reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method of selecting index terms directly from a word frequency list is described. The original idea was suggested by Goffman who reasoned that the most content-bearing words of a given text would occur at the transition region at which Zipf's First Law of words of high frequency of occurrences begins to take on properties of words of low frequency of occurrences. Word frequencies of two articles were analyzed. Results seem to indicate that the automated selection of index terms from a frequency list holds some promise for automatic indexing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Printed bibliographic descriptions of journal articles cited by BioSciences Information Service of Biological Abstracts (BIOSIS), Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), and Engineering Index (Ei) were compared to identify similarities and differences in form, format and data content. Collectively, the three services use 15 different bibliographic data elements, five to provide a description of the journal issue and ten to describe the article. All three services used eight of the 15 data elements. Of the remaining seven data elements, four were used by two of the three services and three were used by only one of the services. The differences in the content of the three services' printed bibliographic descriptions do not adversely affect the user's ability to identify the cited publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The journal citations in A Bibliography on Information Science and Technology [13) provide the data for this Bradford graphical analysis. The mixture of scholarly and nonscholarly work which constitutes the periodical literature of information science is discussed, primarily in terms of the ten journals isolated as the core. The analysis is also directed toward as assessment of the completeness of the bibliography. It is inferred that the bibliography is 72 percent complete in terms of journals and 83 percent complete in terms of articles. Two further uses that have been proposed for the Bradford distribution are ranking subjects in order of breadth and determining policy for collections development. The limited results available in these two areas are considered and problems for future research suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article expounds on the importance of the impact factor (IF) award to the "Health Information and Libraries Journal (HILJ)." To achieve IF, the journal has to go through a vetting procedure that involves a number of parameters. These parameters include regularity of publication, profile of the editorial team, and the relevance and topicality of the contents. The main benefit for having an IF is that it provides an affirmation of a periodical's quality. And for its particular benefit on HILJ, IF can enhance the status and profile of library and information professionals working within the health sector.

The article offers information about the standard of practice in clinical trials for pharmacy services. It mentions that National Competency Standards Framework for Pharmacists in Australia complements the underpinnings of the Charter across several domains of competency for the pharmacy profession.

Crime linkage has been the subject of increasing attention in academic research. Research has found support for the principles of behavioural consistency and distinctiveness, which underpin crime linkage, but this does not provide direct evidence as to whether crime linkage is useful in practice. This literature review draws together documentation that refers to the practice of crime linkage, from assessing analysts' efficacy, to discussing the usage of computerised tools to assist with the linkage process, to providing a comprehensive outline of the process itself. The implications of the amount and type of information currently available are discussed, including the variations in practice and terminology that were explored. Avenues for future investigation and the manner in which future research could be conducted are set out in a research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the derivation of indexing information algorithmically. Advantages of the indexing procedure; Factors to consider in initiating the procedure; Criticism received by Citation Indexes.

Many tasks in library and information science (e.g., indexing, abstracting, classification, and text analysis techniques such as discourse and content analysis) require text meaning interpretation, and, therefore, any individual differences in interpretation are relevant and should be considered, especially for applications in which these tasks are done automatically. This article investigates individual differences in the interpretation of one aspect of text meaning that is commonly used in such automatic applications: lexical cohesion and lexical semantic relations. Experiments with 26 participants indicate an approximately 40% difference in interpretation. In total, 79, 83, and 89 lexical chains (groups of semantically related words) were analyzed in 3 texts, respectively. A major implication of this result is the possibility of modeling individual differences for individual users. Further research is suggested for different types of texts and readers than those used here, as well as similar research for different aspects of text meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In both the social sciences and the humanities, books and monographs play significant roles in research communication. The absence of citations from most books and monographs from the Thomson Reuters/Institute for Scientific Information databases (ISI) has been criticized, but attempts to include citations from or to books in the research evaluation of the social sciences and humanities have not led to widespread adoption. This article assesses whether Google Book Search (GBS) can partially fill this gap by comparing citations from books with citations from journal articles to journal articles in 10 science, social science, and humanities disciplines. Book citations were 31% to 212% of ISI citations and, hence, numerous enough to supplement ISI citations in the social sciences and humanities covered, but not in the sciences (3%–5%), except for computing (46%), due to numerous published conference proceedings. A case study was also made of all 1,923 articles in the 51 information science and library science ISI-indexed journals published in 2003. Within this set, highly book-cited articles tended to receive many ISI citations, indicating a significant relationship between the two types of citation data, but with important exceptions that point to the additional information provided by book citations. In summary, GBS is clearly a valuable new source of citation data for the social sciences and humanities. One practical implication is that book-oriented scholars should consult it for additional citations to their work when applying for promotion and tenure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant fraction of queries in PubMed™ are multiterm queries without parsing instructions. Generally, search engines interpret such queries as collections of terms, and handle them as a Boolean conjunction of these terms. However, analysis of queries in PubMed™ indicates that many such queries are meaningful phrases, rather than simple collections of terms. In this study, we examine whether or not it makes a difference, in terms of retrieval quality, if such queries are interpreted as a phrase or as a conjunction of query terms. And, if it does, what is the optimal way of searching with such queries. To address the question, we developed an automated retrieval evaluation method, based on machine learning techniques, that enables us to evaluate and compare various retrieval outcomes. We show that the class of records that contain all the search terms, but not the phrase, qualitatively differs from the class of records containing the phrase. We also show that the difference is systematic, depending on the proximity of query terms to each other within the record. Based on these results, one can establish the best retrieval order for the records. Our findings are consistent with studies in proximity searching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion on assessment and evaluation in the online environment includes the use of different forms of rubrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter looks at the development and nature of learning objects, meta-tagging standards and taxonomies, learning object repositories, learning object repository characteristics, and types of learning object repositories, with type examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current document-retrieval tools succeed in locating large numbers of documents relevant to a given query. While search results may be relevant according to the topic of the documents, it is more difficult to identify which of the relevant documents are most suitable for a particular user. Automatic genre analysis (i.e., the ability to distinguish documents according to style) would be a useful tool for identifying documents that are most suitable for a particular user. We investigate the use of machine learning for automatic genre classification. We introduce the idea of domain transfer—genre classifiers should be reusable across multiple topics—which does not arise in standard text classification. We investigate different features for building genre classifiers and their ability to transfer across multiple-topic domains. We also show how different feature-sets can be used in conjunction with each other to improve performance and reduce the number of documents that need to be labeled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To design optimal search strategies for locating sound therapy studies and review articles in CINAHL in the year 2000. Design and Methods: An analytic survey was conducted, comparing hand searches of 75 journals with retrievals from CINAHL for 5,020 candidate search terms and 17,900 combinations for therapy and 5,977 combinations for review articles. All articles were rated with purpose and quality indicators. Candidate search strategies were used in CINAHL, and the retrievals were compared with results of the hand searches. The proposed search strategies were treated as “diagnostic tests” for sound studies and the manual review of the literature was treated as the “gold standard.” Operating characteristics of the search strategies were calculated. Findings: Of the 1,383 articles about treatment, 506 (36.6%) met basic criteria for scientific merit and 127 (17.9%) of the 711 articles classified as a review met the criteria for systematic reviews. For locating sound treatment studies, a three-term strategy maximized sensitivity at 99.4% but with compromised specificity at 58.3%, and a two-term strategy maximized specificity at 98.5% but with compromised sensitivity at 52.0%. For detecting systematic reviews, a three-term strategy maximized sensitivity at 91.3% while keeping specificity high at 95.4%, and a single-term strategy maximized specificity at 99.6% but with compromised sensitivity at 42.5%. Three-term search strategies optimizing sensitivity and specificity achieved these values over 91% for detecting sound treatment studies and over 76% for detecting systematic reviews. Conclusions: Search strategies combining indexing terms and text words can achieve high sensitivity and specificity for retrieving sound treatment studies and review articles in CINAHL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]