Search

A survey of iSchool and Library and Information Science American Library Association accredited school heads explored their use and opinions about academic social media platforms. Results show that ResearchGate is the venue of choice, although respondents do not believe maintaining a profile on academic social media platforms influences academic careers. Respondents do see the value of academic social media sites to enhance visibility and reputation. These data are complemented with an analysis of the visibility on academic/professional social media platforms of this group. The altmetric indicators derived from the data were compared to traditional bibliometric indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Axiomatic characterisation of a bibliometric index provides insight into the properties that the index satisfies and facilitates the comparison of different indices. A geometric generalisation of the h-index, called the χ -index, has recently been proposed to address some of the problems with the h-index, in particular, the fact that it is not scale invariant, i.e., multiplying the number of citations of each publication by a positive constant may change the relative ranking of two researchers. While the square of the h-index is the area of the largest square under the citation curve of a researcher, the square of the χ -index, which we call the rec-index (or rectangle-index), is the area of the largest rectangle under the citation curve. Our main contribution here is to provide a characterisation of the rec-index via three properties: monotonicity, uniform citation and uniform equivalence. Monotonicity is a natural property that we would expect any bibliometric index to satisfy, while the other two properties constrain the value of the rec-index to be the area of the largest rectangle under the citation curve. The rec-index also allows us to distinguish between influential researchers who have relatively few, but highly-cited, publications and prolific researchers who have many, but less-cited, publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The e-book reader revolution is already here. The questions we asked ourselves were: What are the reading preferences of Information Science students at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century? How do different variables, such as relative advantage, comprehension, and learning strategies affect students’ reading preferences? The research was conducted in Israel during the first semester of the 2015 academic year and encompassed 177 Library and Information Science students in an Information Science Department in Israel. Three questionnaires were used: personal details, relative advantage, and learning strategies, and two further questions that focused on reading habits. The study showed students’ preferences for printed materials. In addition, it emphasizes the importance of two personal variables that may affect students’ will to read electronic materials: relative advantage and comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the results of an extensive search for information on Eugene Garfield on the World Wide Web. The searches took place in August 2001, using the search terms: “Eugene Garfield”, “Garfield Eugene”, “Gene Garfield”, “E. Garfield” and “Garfield E”. The five major search engines at that time were queried. 9711 different URLs were identified, out of which 4120 were related to Eugene Garfield, the information scientist. About 25% of these pages were characterized using the method of content analysis. The pages were classified into multiple facets: theme, substantiality, page type, publisher, creator, language, domain and site. The findings show that the most frequently mentioned themes (not surprisingly) were the use and theory of citation analysis, the Citation Indexes as products, the Impact Factor and the use of JCR data. Over 50% of the pages were scientific in nature and more than a third of the pages formally cited Garfield’s work. The findings based on the 2001 dataset were not published before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to get insights on library users’ information retrieval behavior, as reflected in log files, reports, and publishers’ counts. From the data it appears that the library’s discovery tool is not the major source for accessing full text items and the patrons often prefer other sources such as Google Scholar. Google Scholar cannot replace the library, but it can link users to resources that the patrons can access, through library subscriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the first systematic study of the influence of time on user judgements for rankings and relevance grades of web search engine results. The goal of this study is to evaluate the change in user assessment of search results and explore how users' judgements change. To this end, we conducted a large-scale user study with 86 participants who evaluated 2 different queries and 4 diverse result sets twice with an interval of 2 months. To analyze the results we investigate whether 2 types of patterns of user behavior from the theory of categorical thinking hold for the case of evaluation of search results: (a) coarseness and (b) locality. To quantify these patterns we devised 2 new measures of change in user judgements and distinguish between local (when users swap between close ranks and relevance values) and nonlocal changes. Two types of judgements were considered in this study: (a) relevance on a 4-point scale, and (b) ranking on a 10-point scale without ties. We found that users tend to change their judgements of the results over time in about 50% of cases for relevance and in 85% of cases for ranking. However, the majority of these changes were local. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]