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This cross-national study explores the relative contributions of academic and corporate research to subsequent industrial R&D activities within one industry. Japanese university research emerged as less influential than Japanese corporate research. The difference between the relevance of U.S. university and U.S. corporate research was only marginally significant. In both countries, university research appeared to contribute most to domestic firms. These findings accentuate the role that national institutional structures play in influencing a country's university research activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents research on online journalism and mass media. A survey was conducted in September, 2008 during the U.S. presidential campaign asking respondents to state their knowledge of the positions on the issues of candidates Barack Obama and John McCain and to determine their primary sources of political information. The survey found that respondents who cited the Web sites of mass media journalism operations such as newspapers or television news broadcasting and online political blogs had a more accurate understanding of the candidates' positions than did those who cited print newspapers or television news broadcasting as their main sources of information.

Objectives: The study sought to determine if two major resources for primary care questions have significant differences in information content and whether the number of documents found differs by disease category, patient age, or patient gender. Methods: Seven hundred fifty-two questions were randomly selected from the Clinical Questions Collection of the National Library of Medicine. UpToDate and the National Guidelines Clearinghouse (NGC) were searched utilizing keywords from the questions. The number of documents retrieved for each question in the resources was recorded. Chi-squared analysis was used to compare differences in retrieval between the resources. Logistic regression was used to evaluate the effect of patient age, patient gender, or disease category on the ability to find content. Results: UpToDate returned 1 or more documents for 580 questions, while NGC returned at least 1 document for 493 questions (77.1% versus 65.5% of question sampled, P = 0.001). In combination, the 2 resources returned content for 91% of searches (n - 685). NGC retrieved a mean of 16.3 documents per question versus 8.7 documents from UpToDate. Disease category was the only variable having a significant impact on the presence of online resource content. Conclusions: UpToDate had greater breadth of content than NGC, while neither resource provided complete coverage. Current practice guidelines, as reflected by those in the NGC, addressed at most two-thirds of the selected clinical questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the results of an investigation conducted by Ithaka Strategic Services for the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) concerning the aspect of online resources valued by scholars in 2008. A field team of librarians at ARL institutions in Canada and in the U.S. was assembled to interview faculty members on their campuses about the usability of scholarly resources. The report identifies several principal types of digital scholarly resources, which include electronic-only journals, reviews, blogs, and discussion forums. Further, the report indicates several ways that university librarians can play a central role in sharing information about digital resources with the campus community.