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Using data for a sample of 2,132 individuals, we examine the characteristics of the sociology faculty and departments that ranked highest on any of four measures of publishing productivity over the...

Many academic libraries evaluate their journal holdings with an emphasis on deselection rather than selection. Likewise, many consider each journal package or full-text database as a whole, through indicators such as cost per download, without explicitly accounting for the quality of the journals included in each package. Better results can be achieved through a two-stage process that first identifies the ‘wanted journals’ most important to the university’s teaching and research programs, then objectively determines the most cost-effective means of acquiring those journals. Our procedure combines an emphasis on the quality of individual journals with an iterative database/subscription selection method that minimizes costs and avoids any bias toward the journals initially held by the library. Although the process involves considerable effort, it can be used to increase the library’s holdings of wanted journals without increasing total expenditure, or to maintain the number of wanted journals while reducing total expenditure. Our results also demonstrate that title-by-title selection of journals is not inconsistent with acquisition through full-text databases.

This study examines the 2013–2017 publishing productivity of sociology faculty at six types of colleges and universities (e.g., research universities, master’s institutions, and top liberal arts colleges) based on publication counts for articles, articles in high-impact journals, books, and books from high-impact publishers. We compare the productivity of groups based on institution type, gender, academic rank, years of experience, and reputation of PhD-granting institution. Our age-cohort data suggest that differentials in productivity among institution types have diminished in recent decades. The top universities are losing ground, in relative terms, while faculty at other types of institutions are more productive now than in the past. Our results for gender are unlike those reported in previous research, revealing (1) higher productivity for women than for men across most institution types and (2) the absence of any gender differential for all institution types combined. Our data also show that book and article counts are virtually unrelated, that faculty at the top liberal arts colleges have the highest average book counts, and that there is great variation in productivity within every institution type. In general, associate professors, faculty with fewer than 17 years of experience, and faculty with doctorates from top universities are especially productive.

We examine the relationships between four citation metrics (impact factor, the numerator of the impact factor, article influence score, and eigenfactor) and the library journal selection decisions made by Manhattan College faculty as part of a large-scale serials review. Our results show that journal selection status (selected or not) is only weakly or moderately related to citation impact. Faculty choosing journals for their universities do consider the citation data provided to them, although they place less emphasis on citation impact than do faculty responding to journal ranking surveys. While previous research suggests that subjective journal ratings are more closely related to size-independent metrics (those that represent the average impact of an article rather than the impact of the journal as a whole) and weighted metrics (those that give more credit for citations in high-impact journals), our current results provide no support for the first assertion and only limited support for the second.

This paper identifies two contrasting approaches to the quantitative measurement of scholarly output, emphasizing the distinction between contribution studies and productivity studies. Contribution studies are those in which the investigator starts with a well-defined list of publication outlets, recording all contributions to that literature by all authors, whomever they might be. In contrast, productivity studies are those in which the investigator starts with a well-defined list of contributors, recording all their scholarly output, wherever it might have appeared. We apply this conceptual model to sociology by examining the key characteristics of 25 relevant studies published since 1970. Nine are contribution studies, twelve are productivity studies, and four are too limited in scope to fall into either category. We conclude by discussing the implications of the contribution/productivity distinction for sociology and other disciplines—in particular, the problems that may arise when contribution studies are used to evaluate scholarly productivity.

This study uses citation data and survey data for 55 library and information science journals to identify three factors underlying a set of 11 journal ranking metrics (six citation metrics and five stated preference metrics). The three factors—three composite rankings—represent (1) the citation impact of a typical article, (2) subjective reputation, and (3) the citation impact of the journal as a whole (all articles combined). Together, they account for 77% of the common variance within the set of 11 metrics. Older journals (those founded before 1953) and nonprofit journals tend to have high reputation scores relative to their citation impact. Unlike previous research, this investigation shows no clear evidence of a distinction between the journals of greatest importance to scholars and those of greatest importance to practitioners. Neither group's subjective journal rankings are closely related to citation impact.

This study uses journal ratings in criminology and criminal justice, library and information science, public administration, and social work to investigate two research questions: (1) Are stated preference (subjective) journal ratings more closely related to size-dependent citation metrics (eigenfactor and total citations, which represent the impact of the journal as a whole) or to size-independent citation metrics (article influence and CiteScore, which represent the impact of a typical article)? (2) Are stated preference ratings more closely related to unweighted citation metrics (five-year impact factor and source normalized impact per publication, which do not account for the impact of each citing journal) or to weighted citation metrics (article influence and SCImago journal rank, which do)? Within the disciplines evaluated here, respondents’ subjective ratings of journals are more closely related to size-independent metrics and weighted metrics. The relative strength of the relationship between subjective ratings and size-independent metrics is moderated by subject area and other factors, while the relative strength of the relationship between subjective ratings and weighted metrics is consistent across all four disciplines. These results are discussed with regard to popularity and prestige, which are sometimes associated with unweighted and weighted citation metrics, respectively.

This paper presents five key questions that should be considered by researchers and librarians who develop or use survey-based (stated preference) journal rankings. Many of the distinctions among the various rankings—their attributes, strengths, and weaknesses—are captured in the responses to these five questions: What construct is being measured? How are differences in the construct expressed and recorded? Who are the respondents? Which journals are included in the rankings? How is respondents' familiarity with the journals taken into account? The paper also summarizes the problems that may require attention when survey-based rankings are used.

Papers submitted to the journals of academic librarianship sometimes include errors in research design or statistical methods that limit the extent to which the results can be generalized beyond the sample of study participants. This guide discusses how to avoid common problems associated with survey design, sampling, and significance testing (hypothesis testing). The first section, on surveys, covers generalization, random error, investigator bias, response bias, survey design, and alternative methods of gathering data. The second section, on sampling, covers the need for sampling, the importance of defining the population and the cases, sampling strategies, sampling bias (selection bias, volunteer bias, survivorship bias, and nonresponse bias), the need to compare sample and population characteristics, and sample size. The third section, on significance testing, covers the need for significance tests, their inability to account for bias, levels of measurement, types of tests (independent-samples, paired-samples, and one-sample tests), t-tests and nonparametric alternatives, p values and alpha levels, hypothesis testing, and the importance of magnitude or effect size. The paper concludes with guidance on non-statistical methods of generalizing from limited data.

Although use statistics are often used in the assessment of library collections and services, they are of limited value in evaluating the library’s effectiveness as an information system. This essay highlights three concepts from the information retrieval literature—recall, precision, and relevance—and describes a standard of relevance that accounts for the learning goals of the academic community as well as the performance goals of students. It also demonstrates how the academic mission of the university can be incorporated into the assessment and management of the library as an information retrieval system. The discussion concludes with guidelines for the assessment of recall and precision as well as suggestions for the integration of these concepts into library collection development, cataloging/access, reference, and instruction.

This guide presents several fundamental principles for the evaluation and selection of online resources in academic libraries. It first describes the universe of scholarly documents: the narrow scope of most academic library collections; the distinctions between information, documents, titles, information resources, and products; and the striking variations in impact and importance that can be seen among both articles and journals. Second, the article discusses the ways in which libraries can help meet academic needs by selecting only high-quality resources that strengthen the links between course requirements and broader educational goals. Specifically, it addresses the distinction between students’ wants and needs, the primacy of content, the importance of comparative assessments, the advantages of title-by-title selection, and the need for resource coherence by subject or function. Third, the article presents seven guidelines for assessing and promoting cost-effectiveness—guidelines that focus ...

This guide describes several information sources that can be used to assist faculty interested in quantitative and qualitative assessments of journal reputation and scholarly impact: Journal Citation Reports, Eigenfactor, Google Scholar Metrics, Elsevier Journal Metrics, Excellence in Research for Australia, Cabell’s International, Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Beall’s List. It also introduces the indicators most often used to represent citation impact: impact factor, article influence score, eigenfactor, h5-index, source normalized impact per paper, impact per publication, and SCImago journal rank. Methods of assessing the influence of individual articles are also presented, along with strategies for the identification of predatory or low-quality journals.

This study examines the influence of four predictor variables—university-wide research activity, faculty status (eligibility for sabbaticals), university control (public versus private), and enrollment—on the scholarly productivity of librarians at research universities in the United States. University-wide research activity is directly related to librarians’ scholarly productivity, although the relationship weakens at institutions with more than 30 librarians. In contrast, faculty status has a direct influence that is strong and consistent across all university sizes. These results suggest that the faculty subculture, by setting university-wide expectations for research, influences librarians’ scholarly productivity only when there is no strong librarian subculture with its own research norms—in other words, only when the institution employs relatively few librarians. Librarians’ faculty status (or nonfaculty status) appears to have both formal aspects (such as promotion requirements), which are consistent across all university sizes, and informal aspects (such as scholarly norms and expectations), which moderate the influence of the faculty subculture at those institutions where the librarian subculture is strong.

Research experience is widely regarded as an important qualification for editorial board members. Not all board members are active scholars, however. This study evaluates the research contributions of individuals who served on the boards of thirty library and information science journals based on their publications in those same thirty journals from 2007 to 2012. Data for all authors—board members and others—allow for comparative analysis. Overall, 52 per cent of the 1,079 board members authored or co-authored at least one article in the thirty journals during the study period. The percentage varies considerably among journals, however, and it is substantially lower (35 per cent) among the ten practice-oriented journals. Moreover, the board members of the practice-oriented journals tend to write fewer articles than the authors who typically contribute to those journals. Among the thirty journals, citation impact is strongly correlated with board members' research productivity.

This study examines the book selections of 22 Manhattan College librarians, faculty, and students who were asked to make yes or no decisions for 287 books reviewed in CHOICE. It focuses on four research questions. First, What characteristics are associated with selected and nonselected books? Although there is only modest agreement among selectors, yes decisions are associated with favorable reviews, appropriateness for lower-division undergraduates, reasonable price, publication by a university press, and the absence of caveats in the review. The results suggest that selectors are willing to relax certain selection criteria if others are exceeded, that selectors’ generally favorable attitudes toward multidisciplinary works do not extend to all such books, and that titles in areas unfamiliar to the selector are less likely to be chosen. Second, What are the key differences among the book selections of librarians, faculty, and undergraduates? Although there are minor differences among all three groups, the main finding is that students’ selections are relatively unpredictable and less closely linked to particular book and review characteristics. Third, What are the key differences among the book selections of specialists (faculty and librarians) in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities? Although the three subject groups are similar in their yes / no decisions and in the characteristics of the books they choose, most selectors demonstrate a strong tendency to favor books in their own subject areas. Finally, What individual characteristics are associated with effectiveness as a book selector? Librarians and faculty are equally effective, overall. Faculty have an advantage among selectors without book selection experience, but the positive impact of experience is greater for librarians than for faculty. In contrast, students are relatively ineffective selectors, and their choices are not closely related to those of other students, faculty, or librarians.

This article investigates whether the board members of thirty well-known library and information science journals are especially likely to publish in the journals for which they serve as board members. It compares board member authors with all the authors who published in each journal from 2007 through 2012. Overall, only 36 per cent of board member authors published more articles in their own journals than might be expected based on the publication patterns of all the authors who published in each journal. That is, 64 per cent published fewer articles than expected. This may reflect lower submission rates from board members (perhaps to avoid conflicts of interest), differences in the quality of submissions, or systematic bias in the review process.

We investigate the contributions of particular disciplines, countries, and academic departments to the literature of library and information science LIS using data for the articles published in 31 journals from 2007 to 2012. In particular, we examine the contributions of authors outside the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada; faculty in departments other than LIS; and practicing librarians. Worldwide, faculty in LIS departments account for 31% of the journal literature; librarians, 23%; computer science faculty, 10%; and management faculty, 10%. The top contributing nations are the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, China, Canada, and Taiwan. Within the United States and the United Kingdom, the current productivity of LIS departments is correlated with past productivity and with other measures of reputation and performance. More generally, the distribution of contributions is highly skewed. In the United States, five departments account for 27% of the articles contributed by LIS faculty; in the United Kingdom, four departments account for nearly two-thirds of the articles. This skewed distribution reinforces the possibility that high-status departments may gain a permanent advantage in the competition for students, faculty, journal space, and research funding. At the same time, concentrations of research-active faculty in particular departments may generate beneficial spillover effects.

This study identifies the top individual contributors to 31 LIS journals from 2007 to 2012, both worldwide (all disciplines) and among four groups: LIS faculty in the US and Canada, LIS faculty in the UK, LIS faculty in other countries, and librarians worldwide. The distribution of authorship is highly skewed. Although more than 9,800 authors (86.4 %) each contributed no more than a single article over the six-year period, the top 50 authors (0.4 %) each contributed eight or more articles, with an average of 13.0. Together, the top 50 authors account for nearly 8 % of the LIS literature. Moreover, the most productive LIS faculty are concentrated in relatively few universities. Faculty in the natural sciences and LIS are more likely to be found among the top 50 authors than their overall contributions would suggest, while librarians, computer scientists and non-academic authors are underrepresented. Top authors are especially likely to publish in the Journal of Informetrics and Scientometrics. Among American LIS faculty, the list of the most prolific authors has changed substantially over time. Only three of the top 21 authors of the 1999---2004 period can be found on the current top-20 list.

Unlike Impact Factors (IF), Article Influence (AI) scores assign greater weight to citations that appear in highly cited journals. The natural sciences tend to have higher citation rates than the social sciences. We might therefore expect that relative to IF, AI overestimates the citation impact of social science journals in subfields that are related to (and presumably cited in) higher-impact natural science disciplines. This study evaluates that assertion through a set of simple and multiple regressions covering seven social science disciplines: anthropology, communication, economics, education, library and information science, psychology, and sociology. Contrary to expectations, AI underestimates 5IF (five-year Impact Factor) for journals in science-related subfields such as scientific communication, science education, scientometrics, biopsychology, and medical sociology. Journals in these subfields have low AI scores relative to their 5IF values. Moreover, the effect of science-related status is considerable—typically 0.60 5IF units or 0.50 SD. This effect is independent of the more general finding that AI scores underestimate 5IF for higher-impact journals. It is also independent of the very modest curvilinearity in the relationship between AI and 5IF.

This study investigates the methods by which faculty obtain scholarly articles, books, and chapters. It focuses on full-text retrieval rather than discovery, drawing on a survey of 529 full-time faculty at U.S. colleges and universities in the Carnegie master's—large and master's—medium categories. When seeking articles, faculty rely mainly on their home-institution library collections, freely accessible online resources, and interlibrary loan. The situation is different for books, however; faculty most often purchase the books they need. Despite the continuing importance of formal access mechanisms (home-institution library collections and interlibrary loan), faculty rely on other sources of full text—informal access mechanisms—for 50% of the articles and 66% of the books they use. Nearly 25% get more articles from the open web than from any other source, and substantial minorities report heavy reliance on other sources. In particular, faculty sometimes use other libraries, often relying on current or past affiliations (e.g., part-time teaching) or on the user accounts of family, friends, and colleagues. Many are critical of their university library collections, but most are satisfied with freely accessible online resources and interlibrary loan.

This paper reviews the recent literature on e-book sharing and use in post-secondary libraries, exploring current restrictions on viewing, printing, downloading, circulation, and interlibrary loan. It also discusses the ways in which these restrictions influence the library lending of e-book readers and other mobile devices. The most fundamental problems include restrictive license provisions, proprietary software and file formats, digital rights management (DRM), and the single-user business model adopted by many e-book vendors.

This bibliographic essay examines the difficulties associated with the selection, licensing, acquisition, and management of e-books in academic libraries. The potential advantages of e-book technology are likely to be realized only to the extent that they advance the economic goals of e-book suppliers and are consistent with the legal framework that has been negotiated by publishers, vendors, libraries, and readers. Many difficulties can be traced to a lack of uniformity in license terms, access restrictions, and librarians' expectations. Likewise, sustainable access to e-books is hindered by impermanent physical media, proprietary file formats and software, and restrictive license provisions. Although the goals of e-book providers are sometimes inconsistent with those of universities, librarians are well-positioned to guide vendors in the development of e-book licenses and platforms.

We continue to uncover a wealth of information connecting microbes in important ways to human and environmental ecology. As our scientific knowledge and technical abilities improve, the tools used for microbiome surveys can be modified to improve the accuracy of our techniques, ensuring that we can continue to identify groundbreaking connections between microbes and the ecosystems they populate, from ice caps to the human body. It is important to confirm that modifications to these tools do not cause new, detrimental biases that would inhibit the field rather than continue to move it forward. We therefore demonstrated that two recently modified primer pairs that target taxonomically discriminatory regions of bacterial and fungal genomic DNA do not introduce new biases when used on a variety of sample types, from soil to human skin. This confirms the utility of these primers for maintaining currently recommended microbiome research techniques as the state of the art., Designing primers for PCR-based taxonomic surveys that amplify a broad range of phylotypes in varied community samples is a difficult challenge, and the comparability of data sets amplified with varied primers requires attention. Here, we examined the performance of modified 16S rRNA gene and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) primers for archaea/bacteria and fungi, respectively, with nonaquatic samples. We moved primer bar codes to the 5′ end, allowing for a range of different 3′ primer pairings, such as the 515f/926r primer pair, which amplifies variable regions 4 and 5 of the 16S rRNA gene. We additionally demonstrated that modifications to the 515f/806r (variable region 4) 16S primer pair, which improves detection of Thaumarchaeota and clade SAR11 in marine samples, do not degrade performance on taxa already amplified effectively by the original primer set. Alterations to the fungal ITS primers did result in differential but overall improved performance compared to the original primers. In both cases, the improved primers should be widely adopted for amplicon studies. IMPORTANCE We continue to uncover a wealth of information connecting microbes in important ways to human and environmental ecology. As our scientific knowledge and technical abilities improve, the tools used for microbiome surveys can be modified to improve the accuracy of our techniques, ensuring that we can continue to identify groundbreaking connections between microbes and the ecosystems they populate, from ice caps to the human body. It is important to confirm that modifications to these tools do not cause new, detrimental biases that would inhibit the field rather than continue to move it forward. We therefore demonstrated that two recently modified primer pairs that target taxonomically discriminatory regions of bacterial and fungal genomic DNA do not introduce new biases when used on a variety of sample types, from soil to human skin. This confirms the utility of these primers for maintaining currently recommended microbiome research techniques as the state of the art.

Patron-driven acquisition (PDA), also known as demand-driven acquisition, patron-initiated purchasing, or books on demand, allows patrons to select and purchase books for the library collection without staff mediation or oversight. This essay presents the argument that PDA programs are unlikely to improve the quality of academic library collections. In particular, they risk failing to distinguish between students’ immediate desires and their long-term educational needs, making poor use of librarians’ knowledge and expertise, failing to represent the full range of library stakeholders, and producing collections that are biased or poorly balanced. Although PDA can lead to efficiencies in information delivery, those efficiencies do not necessarily support the broader educational goals of the academic library.

We examine the characteristics of 663 Open Access (OA) journals in biology, computer science, economics, history, medicine, and psychology, then compare the OA journals with impact factors to comparable subscription journals. There is great variation in the size of OA journals; the largest publishes more than 2,700 articles per year, but half publish 25 or fewer. While just 29 percent of OA journals charge publication fees, those journals represent 50 percent of the articles in our study. OA journals in the fields of biology and medicine are larger than the others, more likely to charge fees, and more likely to have a high citation impact. Overall, the OA journal landscape is greatly influenced by a few key publishers and journals.

We investigate the extent to which open-access (OA) journals and articles in biology, computer science, economics, history, medicine, and psychology are indexed in each of 11 bibliographic databases. We also look for variations in index coverage by journal subject, journal size, publisher type, publisher size, date of first OA issue, region of publication, language of publication, publication fee, and citation impact factor. Two databases, Biological Abstracts and PubMed, provide very good coverage of the OA journal literature, indexing 60 to 63% of all OA articles in their disciplines. Five databases provide moderately good coverage (22–41%), and four provide relatively poor coverage (0–12%). OA articles in biology journals, English-only journals, high-impact journals, and journals that charge publication fees of $1,000 or more are especially likely to be indexed. Conversely, articles from OA publishers in Africa, Asia, or Central/South America are especially unlikely to be indexed. Four of the 11 databases index commercially published articles at a substantially higher rate than articles published by universities, scholarly societies, nonprofit publishers, or governments. Finally, three databases—EBSCO Academic Search Complete, ProQuest Research Library, and Wilson OmniFile—provide less comprehensive coverage of OA articles than of articles in comparable subscription journals. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of simple and expert searches in Google Scholar (GS), EconLit, GEOBASE, PAIS, POPLINE, PubMed, Social Sciences Citation Index, Social Sciences Full Text, and Sociological Abstracts. It assesses the recall and precision of 32 searches in the field of later-life migration: nine simple keyword searches and 23 expert searches constructed by demography librarians at three top universities. For simple searches, Google Scholar’s recall and precision are well above average. For expert searches, the relative effectiveness of GS depends on the number of results users are willing to examine. Although Google Scholar’s expert-search performance is just average within the first fifty search results, GS is one of the few databases that retrieves relevant results with reasonably high precision after the fiftieth hit. The results also show that simple searches in GS, GEOBASE, PubMed, and Sociological Abstracts have consistently higher recall and precision than expert searches. This can be attributed not to differences in expert-search effectiveness, but to the unusually strong performance of simple searches in those four databases.

Students and scholars can take full advantage of Open Access journals only if libraries make them available through mechanisms that are familiar to patrons. This study examines the extent to which American liberal arts colleges have provided access to Open Access journals through their journal title lists (Serials Solutions, Ex Libris, etc.) and their online public access catalogs (OPACs). While 57 percent of the colleges provide access to at least 90 percent of the journals in our sample, 20 percent of the colleges provide access to fewer than 20 percent of the journals. Large and high-impact journals are especially likely to appear in libraries' catalogs and journal lists. There is no systematic trend by publication fee status or country of publication, however. The study concludes with a discussion of the strategies libraries can use to select Open Access journals and add them to their collections.

Although GIS is well established at most research universities, it has only recently been integrated into the instructional programs of many undergraduate colleges. This article explores three organizational models for implementing GIS in the undergraduate environment: the departmental model (GIS based in a single academic department), the non-departmental model (GIS based in another agency, such as the library or the computer centre), and the “no centre” model (in which there is no identifiable centre for GIS despite its use in teaching and research). Survey results from 55 liberal arts colleges in the United States reveal that institutions with GIS centres (departmental or otherwise) tend to have enhanced instructional capabilities, better institutional support, and greater capacity to handle large-scale demand for GIS. Non-departmental GIS centres are associated with several additional advantages: the availability of GIS courses in a wide range of academic disciplines, increased support for faculty just beginning to learn GIS, and higher potential demand for GIS resources and services. These findings may indicate that non-departmental GIS centres encourage the diffusion of GIS across multiple departments, or that non-departmental centres are most likely to emerge at colleges where GIS is already well established across a range of disciplines.

Library collections are economically sustainable only if the rate of increase in costs is no greater than the rate of increase in the library acquisitions budget. Because book prices increase at a much lower rate than journal prices, undergraduate libraries can achieve economic sustainability through a renewed emphasis on books rather than journals. Book-centered collections are consistent with the goals of many undergraduate colleges, and books rather than journals may provide the best teaching resources even in those fields that rely heavily on journals for the communication of original research results.

This paper presents a comparative evaluation of Google Scholar and 11 other bibliographic databases (Academic Search Elite, AgeLine, ArticleFirst, EconLit, GEOBASE, MEDLINE, PAIS International, POPLINE, Social Sciences Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, and SocINDEX), focusing on search performance within the multidisciplinary field of later-life migration. The results of simple keyword searches are evaluated with reference to a set of 155 relevant articles identified in advance. In terms of both recall and precision, Google Scholar performs better than most of the subscription databases. This finding, based on a rigorous evaluation procedure, is contrary to the impressions of many early reviewers. The paper concludes with a discussion of a new approach to document relevance in educational settings—an approach that accounts for the instructors' goals as well as the students' assessments of relevance.

While nearly half of all academic libraries use formulas to allocate firm order funds on behalf of particular departments or subject areas, few have adopted systematic methods of selecting or weighting the variables. This paper reviews the literature on library fund allocation, then presents a statistically informed method of weighting and combining the variables in a fund allocation formula. The regression-based method of fund allocation uses current, historical, or hypothetical allocations to generate a formula that excludes the influence of non-relevant variables as well as the influence of arbitrary or non-systematic variations in funding. The resulting fund allocations are based on the principle of equity—the idea that departments with the same characteristics should receive the same allocations.

Open-access journals are growing in number and importance. Because they rely on revenue from publication fees rather than subscriptions, these journals have important economic implications for the institutions that sponsor, produce, and use research in the life sciences. This article shows how the wholesale adoption of open-access pricing would influence institutional journal costs in the field of cell biology. Estimating prices under two open-access models, we find that a switch to open access would result in substantial cost reductions for most institutions. At the same time, the top universities would pay up to 10 times as much as they currently do. Institutions with fewer than 4.29 million library volumes would be likely to save money under either open-access model. The long-term viability of open-access publishing in the biosciences may depend on the establishment of an environment in which the top research institutions are willing and able to pay a greater share of the total systemwide cost.

This paper evaluates the content of Google Scholar and seven other databases (Academic Search Elite, AgeLine, ArticleFirst, GEOBASE, POPLINE, Social Sciences Abstracts, and Social Sciences Citation Index) within the multidisciplinary subject area of later-life migration. Each database is evaluated with reference to a set of 155 core articles selected in advance-the most important studies of later-life migration published from 1990 to 2000. Of the eight databases, Google Scholar indexes the greatest number of core articles (93%) and provides the most uniform publisher and date coverage. It covers 27% more core articles than the second-ranked database (SSCI) and 2.4 times as many as the lowest-ranked database (GEOBASE). At the same time, a substantial proportion of the citations provided by Google Scholar are incomplete (32%) or presented without abstracts (33%).

This study investigates the impact of climate on [U.S.] metropolitan elderly migration rates. Factor analysis is used to identify six factors within a set of forty climatic variables. These six factors along with eleven nonclimatic variables are used to predict elderly in- and outmigration rates. Metropolitan areas with mild winters and low average incomes are attractive to elderly inmigrants while those with high rents and clear dry summers are likely to lose older residents through outmigration. These findings are consistent with the life course model of mobility and with the distinction between conservative and innovating migrants. (EXCERPT)

The assessment of library service quality requires both expertise and objectivity. Undergraduate students are neither expert nor objective, and assessment methods that rely heavily on students’ perceptions are likely to be inadequate in several respects. Students’ needs are not necessarily consistent with their preferences, for example, and the limited experiences of most undergraduates give them only a partial understanding of library collections and services. Although user surveys provide valuable information about patrons’ perceptions, that information is no substitute for objective standards based on professional knowledge.

This article presents an introduction to the acquisition of video media (DVD and VHS) in academic libraries, with emphasis on the policies and procedures most appropriate for undergraduate colleges. The article discusses several issues—collection development, copyright, identification and evaluation of video titles, acquisitions procedures, budgets and expenditures, and vendor selection and performance—drawing on data and examples from the video media acquisitions program of St. Lawrence University. Although the goal of developing a permanent video collection is not always compatible with the day-to-day operation of an instructional audiovisual service, even small colleges can build collections of lasting value by developing and applying systematic guidelines for the selection and acquisition of video titles.

This study examines the literature of a multidisciplinary field, later-life migration, and evaluates the effectiveness of 12 bibliographic databases in indexing that literature. Five journals--three in social gerontology, one in rural sociology, and one in regional science--account for 40% of the papers published in this area. The disciplines that publish the most work on later-life migration are not necessarily those that provide the best index coverage, however. Moreover, four multidisciplinary databases each provide better index coverage than any single-subject index. The relatively low degree of overlap among the 12 databases suggests that scholars working on topics such as later-life migration must continue to rely on a wide range of bibliographic tools, both disciplinary and multidisciplinary.