Weighted citation: An indicator of an article's prestige

We propose using the technique of weighted citation to measure an article's prestige. The technique allocates a different weight to each reference by taking into account the impact of citing journals and citation time intervals. Weighted citation captures prestige, whereas citation counts capture popularity. We compare the value variances for popularity and prestige for articles published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from 1998 to 2007, and find that the majority have comparable status.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure

An experiment with ontology mapping using concept similarity

This paper describes a system for automatically mapping between concepts in different ontologies. The motivation for the research stems from the Diogene project, in which the project's own ontology covering the ICT domain is mapped to external ontologies, in order that their associated content can automatically be included in the Diogene system. An approach involving measuring the similarity of concepts is introduced, in which standard Information Retrieval indexing techniques are applied to concept descriptions. A matrix representing the similarity of concepts in two ontologies is generated, and a mapping is performed based on two parameters: the domain coverage of the ontologies, and their levels of granularity. Finally, some initial experimentation is presented which suggests that our approach meets the project's unique set of requirements

Are Library and Information Science Journals Becoming More Internationalized? A Longitudinal Study of Authors' Geographical Affiliations in 20 LIS Journals from 1981 to 2003

This paper examines journal publications in the field of library and information science (LIS) to assess the level of internationalization in their publications authorship pattern. The international production and communication of scholarly knowledge is crucial to the growth of a discipline. Recent advancement in communication technology and the rise of globalization have led to the hope of a more balanced flow of scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, scholars also cautioned the possibility of a global digital divide and a widening knowledge gap. This study analyzed the geographical affiliations of authors in 20 international LIS journals to track the longitudinal changes in LIS authorship pattern. Findings suggest an increase in the internationalization of LIS authorships over the years. However, the LIS authorship distribution was still highly uneven in 2003 (Gini coefficient = 0.95). Economic power is still found to be a moderate predictor of publication performance. The findings of this study suggest that, at the moment of the writing, there is still room for the LIS field to be more internationalized. Further research is needed to identify the barriers in international scholarly communication and to explore the implications of such a communication pattern on scientific development and global equality

Using the quantum probability ranking principle to rank interdependent documents

A known limitation of the Probability Ranking Principle (PRP) is that it does not cater for dependence between documents. Recently, the Quantum Probability Ranking Principle (QPRP) has been proposed, which implicitly captures dependencies between documents through “quantum interference”. This paper explores whether this new ranking principle leads to improved performance for subtopic retrieval, where novelty and diversity is required. In a thorough empirical investigation, models based on the PRP, as well as other recently proposed ranking strategies for subtopic retrieval (i.e. Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) and Portfolio Theory(PT)), are compared against the QPRP. On the given task, it is shown that the QPRP outperforms these other ranking strategies. And unlike MMR and PT, one of the main advantages of the QPRP is that no parameter estimation/tuning is required; making the QPRP both simple and effective. This research demonstrates that the application of quantum theory to problems within information retrieval can lead to significant improvements

Acknowledgement Patterns in Research Articles: a Bibliometric Study based on Journal of Natural Rubber Research 1986-1997

Analyses the acknowledgements included in the research articles and short communications published in Journal of Natural Rubber Research (1986-1997) in respect of types, frequency of occurrence, individuals acknowledged, etc. Results indicate that 74% items contain acknowledgements; an average acknowledgement per item is 2.2; the most common type of acknowledgments relates to technical support. Peer interactive communication accounts for 44% of the total acknowledgements. The result of the study substantiates the earlier findings that a small number of individuals are highly acknowledged and the rest are acknowledged infrequently

A Study of Legal Information Seeking Behaviour to Inform the Design of Electronic Legal Research Tools

Our work is motivated by the desire to support digital library users in ?getting to grips? with electronic resources. More specifically we are motivated by the desire to support users in understanding how to use, and in which situations it is appropriate to use, particular digital library or electronic resources. This work focuses on lawyers as a specific category of user; Callister [5] highlights that lawyers been traditionally regarded as having poor research skills. Electronic research skills are no exception: Howland and Lewis [8] surveyed U.S. law firm librarians to examine the quality and extent of the electronic legal research skills of summer clerks and first-year associates. They found that these graduates were unable to efficiently or effectively research issues that appear routinely in actual legal cases and concluded that they were not efficient or cost-effective users of LexisNexis and Westlaw (the two biggest digital law libraries in terms of case, legislation and journal coverage). This was despite all of the students having received some training on how to use the libraries while in law school. Digital libraries have traditionally been regarded as difficult to use [4] and based on our contextual observations with academic lawyers, digital law libraries such as LexisNexis Professional and Westlaw are no exception. We believe that this difficulty of use contributes to the problems that lawyers face with electronic legal research. Furthermore, we argue that developing better research skills goes hand-inhand with developing an understanding of the electronic environments in which these skills must be practiced. Our current work is focused on gaining a better understanding of legal academics? and professionals? information seeking behaviour when using existing electronic resources. This understanding will then be used to inform the design of user-centred support tools for digital law libraries (and potentially the design of the libraries themselves)

Studying Academic Lawyers' Information-Seeking to Inform the Design of Digital Law Libraries

We report findings from the initial phase of our study on legal information seeking, which comprised a series of semi-structured interviews and naturalistic observations of academic law students and staff looking for electronic legal information. This study has the long-term aim of informing the design of digital law libraries. Participants found it difficult to use digital law libraries, arising from poor knowledge of the digital library system rather than from poor general electronic research skills. Hazy and faulty system-related knowledge were rife, suggesting the need for academic lawyers to understand more about the digital library systems that they use (within-systems knowledge). These lawyers chose to rely primarily on one major digital law library for legal information seeking. Their preference was often based upon vague or flawed rationale and suggests the need for academic lawyers to appreciate the situations in which different electronic resources might be useful (between-systems knowledge)

On Birthing Dancing Stars: The Need for Bounded Chaos in Information Interaction

While computers causing chaos is acommon social trope, nearly the entirety of the history of computing is dedicated to generating order. Typical interactive information retrieval tasks ask computers to support the traversal and exploration of large, complex information spaces. The implicit assumption is that they are to support users in simplifying the complexity (i.e. in creating order from chaos). But for some types of task, particularly those that involve the creative application or synthesis of knowledge or the creation of new knowledge, this assumption may be incorrect. It is increasingly evident that perfect order—and the systems we create with it—support highly-structured information tasks well, but provide poor support for less-structured tasks.We need digital information environments that help create a little more chaos from order to spark creative thinking and knowledge creation. This paper argues for the need for information systems that offerwhat we term ‘bounded chaos’, and offers research directions that may support the creation of such interface

Evaluation of a prototype interface for structured document retrieval

Document collections often display either internal structure, in the form of the logical arrangement of document components, or external structure, in the form of links between documents. Structured document retrieval systems aim to exploit this structural information to provide users with more effective access to structured documents. To do this, the associated interface must both represent this information explicitly and support users in their browsing behaviour. This paper describes the implementation and user-centred evaluation of a prototype interface, the RelevanceLinkBar interface. The results of the evaluation show that the RelevanceLinkBar interface supported users in their browsing behaviour, allowing them to find more relevant documents, and was strongly preferred over a standard results interface