Cite Unseen: How Neutral Citation And America\u27s Law Schools Can Cure Our Strange Devotion To Bibliographical Orthodoxy And The Constriction Of Open And Equal Access To The Law

This article looks at the phenomenon of legal citation and its unintended consequences. After considering the reasons for the American legal system\u27s devotion to precisely accurate and detailed citations and the history of American legal citation, the article looks at the effect the bibliographical orthodoxy promoted by the two leading citation manuals – The Bluebook and the ALWD Manual – has on open access to the law. In particular, the article looks at how the required common law citation format prescribed by both of these manuals helps to consolidate the market position of West and LexisNexis, the duopoly of legal publishing in this country. After considering the inadequacy of some present-day open access legal information sites, and exploring why it is that market pressures make it unlikely that a viable commercial competitor to the West/Lexis duopoly will emerge, the article concludes that the best approach to ensuring that the law remain free and open to all is through the use of a neutral citation format to describe case law and the formation of a consortium of American law schools to publish the law on the internet

Cite Unseen: How Neutral Citation And America\u27s Law Schools Can Cure Our Strange Devotion To Bibliographical Orthodoxy And The Constriction Of Open And Equal Access To The Law

This article looks at the phenomenon of legal citation and its unintended consequences. After considering the reasons for the American legal system\u27s devotion to precisely accurate and detailed citations and the history of American legal citation, the article looks at the effect the bibliographical orthodoxy promoted by the two leading citation manuals – The Bluebook and the ALWD Manual – has on open access to the law. In particular, the article looks at how the required common law citation format prescribed by both of these manuals helps to consolidate the market position of West and LexisNexis, the duopoly of legal publishing in this country. After considering the inadequacy of some present-day open access legal information sites, and exploring why it is that market pressures make it unlikely that a viable commercial competitor to the West/Lexis duopoly will emerge, the article concludes that the best approach to ensuring that the law remain free and open to all is through the use of a neutral citation format to describe case law and the formation of a consortium of American law schools to publish the law on the internet

Cross-border implementation of Institutional Repository: A case of Aga Khan University

Institutions globally have increasingly embraced Institutional Repositories (IRs) to collect, showcase, archive, and preserve their intellectual and scholarly output. Many benefits are gained from implementation of the platform including: the institution’s visibility, status and reputation is increased; authors get wider public access and visibility thus more citations for their work; long-term preservation of research; and the library benefits from its new role in information creation and distribution thus the opportunity to re-assert its importance in the face of declining user dependence on libraries for simple access to information (Sharif 2013). Despite the high uptake of IRs to manage institutions’ digital resources more effectively, little has been written on the experience of cross-border implementation. This paper seeks to fill this gap by presenting unique lessons learnt from the implementation of Digital Commons (DC), a proprietary hosted institutional repository platform by Bepress. The platform is implemented across AKU’s 7 campuses in 5 countries (United Kingdom, Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania). The varying technological, economical, and cultural contexts of these countries have had effect on the implementation of the platform and have presented some unique and interesting lessons. Cross-border implementation faces many distinctive challenges. From AKU experience, these include lack of a national body for co-ordinating IRs in majority of the countries where AKU is operating; and inequalities in technical expertise, internet access, extent of use, and social support. On the other hand, institutions receive immense benefits from cross-border implementation. Key benefits include: IR helps address the unevenness in availability of researchers’ output where Africa for instance accounts for only 2% of the world’s research output (Christian 2008); and implementation team benefits from networking with colleagues. Being part of the implementation team and working collaboratively with the entire implementation team, the authors share the challenges and best practices learnt first-hand

Multi-disciplinary palliative care is effective in people with symptomatic heart failure: A systematic review and narrative synthesis

Background: Despite recommendations, people with heart failure have poor access to palliative care. Aim: To identify the evidence in relation to palliative care for people with symptomatic heart failure. Design: Systematic review and narrative synthesis. (PROSPERO CRD42016029911) Data sources: Databases (Medline, Cochrane database, CINAHL, PsycINFO, HMIC, CareSearch Grey Literature), reference lists and citations were searched and experts contacted. Two independent reviewers screened titles and abstracts and retrieved papers against inclusion criteria. Data were extracted from included papers and studies were critically assessed using a risk of bias tool according to design. Results: Thirteen interventional and 10 observational studies were included. Studies were heterogeneous in terms of population, intervention, comparator, outcomes and design rendering combination inappropriate. The evaluation phase studies, with lower risk of bias, using a multi-disciplinary specialist palliative care intervention showed statistically significant benefit for patient-reported outcomes (symptom burden, depression, functional status, quality of life), resource use and costs of care. Benefit was not seen in studies with a single component/discipline intervention or with higher risk of bias. Possible contamination in some studies may have caused under-estimation of effect and missing data may have introduced bias. There was no apparent effect on survival. Conclusion: Overall, the results support the use of multi-disciplinary palliative care in people with advanced heart failure but trials do not identify who would benefit most from specialist palliative referral. There are no sufficiently robust multi-centre evaluation phase trials to provide generalisable findings. Use of common population, intervention and outcomes in future research would allow meta-analysis

A review of the characteristics of 108 author-level bibliometric indicators

An increasing demand for bibliometric assessment of individuals has led to a growth of new bibliometric indicators as well as new variants or combinations of established ones. The aim of this review is to contribute with objective facts about the usefulness of bibliometric indicators of the effects of publication activity at the individual level. This paper reviews 108 indicators that can potentially be used to measure performance on the individual author level, and examines the complexity of their calculations in relation to what they are supposed to reflect and ease of end-user application.Comment: to be published in Scientometrics, 201

Visibility and Citation Impact

The number of publications is the first criteria for assessing a researcher output. However, the main measurement for author productivity is the number of citations, and citations are typically related to the paper's visibility. In this paper, the relationship between article visibility and the number of citations is investigated. A case study of two researchers who are using publication marketing tools confirmed that the article visibility will greatly improve the citation impact. Some strategies to make the publications available to a larger audience have been presented at the end of this paper