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Can you imagine a pile of 150 million tons of waste paper? That is approximately the quantity the OECD countries generated in 1990, the largest amount ever. Compressed into bales, [...]

A network is constructed by nodes and links, thus the node degree and the link strength appear as underlying quantities in network analysis. While the power-law distribution of node degrees is verified as a basic feature of numerous real networks, we investigate whether the link strengths follow the power-law distribution in weighted networks. After testing 12 different paper cocitation networks with 2 methods, fitting in double-log scales and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test ( K- S test), we observe that, in most cases, the link strengths also follow the approximate power-law distribution. The results suggest that the power-law type distribution could emerge not only in nodes and informational entities, but also in links and informational connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: RICHARD MONASTERSKY If publications are the gold standard of scholarship, then American science does not shine as brightly as it once did. That is the simple but perhaps too [...]

While the world's attention was fixated on Iraq, a more urgent crisis was brewing in Northeast Asia. In the midst of the protracted confrontation and war with Iraq, the deeply [...]

The consistent finding that internationally coauthored papers are more heavily cited has led to a tacit agreement among politicians and scientists that international collaboration in scientific research should be particularly promoted. However, existing studies of research collaboration suffer from a major weakness in that the Thomson Reuters Web of Science until recently did not link author names with affiliation addresses. The general approach has been to hierarchically code papers into international paper, national paper, or local paper based on the address information. This hierarchical coding scheme severely understates the level and contribution of local or national collaboration on an internationally coauthored paper. In this research, I code collaboration variables by hand checking each paper in the sample, use two measures of a paper's impact, and try several regression models. I find that both international collaboration and local collaboration are positively and significantly associated with a paper's impact, but international collaboration does not have more epistemic authority than local collaboration. This result suggests that previous findings based on hierarchical coding might be misleading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the parable about the blind men and the elephant, each man, concentrating on the single feature of the animal he touched first, confidently maintains his opinion on the nature [...]

The U.S. Department of Treasury has ruled that scientific journals based in the United States cannot edit papers submitted by authors from Iran unless they have the government's permission. The [...]

Thomson papers covered the election more than a comparable group of other newspapers, and editorialized on the election while others did not., Critics and scholars have long worried about the power that media owners have to shape the content and ideas that reach the public. In the past four decades, as concentration [...]

Developed countries have an even distribution of published papers on the seventeen model organisms. Developing countries have biased preferences for a few model organisms which are associated with endemic human diseases. A variant of the Hirsch-index, that we call the mean moh-index (“model organism h-index”), shows an exponential relationship with the amount of papers published in each country on the selected model organisms. Developing countries cluster together with low mean moh-indexes, even those with high number of publications. The growth curves of publications on the recent model Caenorhabditis elegans in developed countries shows different formats. We also analyzed the growth curves of indexed publications originating from developing countries. Brazil and South Korea were selected for this comparison. The most prevalent model organisms in those countries show different growth curves when compared to a global analysis, reflecting the size and composition of their research communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than 40 years, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now part of Thomson Reuters) produced the only available bibliographic databases from which bibliometricians could compile large-scale bibliometric indicators. ISI's citation indexes, now regrouped under the Web of Science (WoS), were the major sources of bibliometric data until 2004, when Scopus was launched by the publisher Reed Elsevier. For those who perform bibliometric analyses and comparisons of countries or institutions, the existence of these two major databases raises the important question of the comparability and stability of statistics obtained from different data sources. This paper uses macrolevel bibliometric indicators to compare results obtained from the WoS and Scopus. It shows that the correlations between the measures obtained with both databases for the number of papers and the number of citations received by countries, as well as for their ranks, are extremely high (R2 ≈ .99). There is also a very high correlation when countries' papers are broken down by field. The paper thus provides evidence that indicators of scientific production and citations at the country level are stable and largely independent of the database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A highlight of the 2012 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, the pre-conference session on the History of ASIS&T and Information Science and Technology Worldwide drew presenters and attendees from around the globe. The day featured papers on four historical themes, starting with the institutional roots of ASIS&T and recognizing decades of research presented in the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. The evolution of the field was apparent through a review of information revolutions prompted by the printing press, the post-World War II information crisis and the Internet, as well as through presentations on digital curation,ongoing work on relevance, sense-making theory and developments from Croatia to France.Discussion of the historical contexts of technology innovations and impacts consideredphotographic documentary techniques, binary computing and networking standards. The development of foundational ideas was explored through presentations on pioneering document indexing methods, the semantic challenge of term-oriented retrieval, early European perceptions of classification systems and the French view of communication and information science. Efforts to deepen the historical understanding of information science and technology will continue through oral history interviews, funded research and awards for outstanding papers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international standard ISO 214:1976 defines an abstract as “an abbreviated, accurate representation of the contents of a document” (p. 1) that should “enable readers to identify the basic content of a document quickly and accurately to determine relevance” (p. 1). It also should be useful in computerized searching. The ISO standard suggests including the following elements: purpose, methods, results, and conclusions. Researchers have often challenged this structure and found that different disciplines and cultures prefer different information content. These claims are partially supported by the findings of our research into the structure of pharmacology, sociology, and Slovenian language and literature abstracts of papers published in international and Slovenian scientific periodicals. The three disciplines have different information content. Slovenian pharmacology abstracts differ in content from those in international periodicals while the differences between international and Slovenian abstracts are small in sociology. In the field of Slovenian language and literature, only domestic abstracts were studied. The identified differences can in part be attributed to the disciplines, but also to the different role of journals and papers in the professional society and to differences in perception of the role of abstracts. The findings raise questions about the structure of abstracts required by some publishers of international journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]