Seats at the table: the network of the editorial boards in information and library science

The structural properties of the network generated by the editorial activities of the members of the boards of "Information Science & Library Science" journals are explored through network analysis techniques. The crossed presence of scholars on editorial boards, the phenomenon called interlocking editorship, is considered a proxy of the similarity of editorial policies. The evidences support the idea that this group of journals is better described as a set of only relatively connected subfields. In particular two main subfield are identified, consisting of research oriented journals devoted respectively to LIS and MIS. The links between these two subsets are weak. Around these two subsets there are a lot of (relatively) isolated professional journals or journals characterized more by their subject-matter content than by their focus on information flows. It is possible to suggest that this configuration of the network may be the consequence of the youthfulness of Information Science & Library Science, which has not permitted yet to reach a general consensus through scholars on research aims, methods and instruments.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables Accepted for publication. Journal of Informetric

Toward a Discourse Community for Telemedicine: A Domain Analytic View of Published Scholarship

In the past 20 years, the use of telemedicine has increased, with telemedicine programs increasingly being conducted through the Internet and ISDN technologies. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the discourse community of telemedicine. This study examined the published literature on telemedicine as it pertains to quality of care, defined as correct diagnosis and treatment (Bynum and Irwin 2011). Content analysis and bibliometrics were conducted on the scholarly discourse, and the most prominent authors and journals were documented to paint and depict the epistemological map of the discourse community of telemedicine. A taxonomy based on grounded research of scholarly literature was developed and validated against other existing taxonomies. Telemedicine has been found to increase the quality and access of health care and decrease health care costs (Heinzelmann, Williams, Lugn and Kvedar 2005 and Wootton and Craig 1999). Patients in rural areas where there is no specialist or patients who find it difficult to get to a doctor’s office benefit from telemedicine. Little research thus far has examined scholarly journals in order to aggregate and analyze the prevalent issues in the discourse community of telemedicine. The purpose of this dissertation is to empiricallydocument the prominent topics and issues in telemedicine by examining the related published scholarly discourse of telemedicine during a snapshot in time. This study contributes to the field of telemedicine by offering a comprehensive taxonomy of the leading authors and journals in telemedicine, and informs clinicians, librarians and other stakeholders, including those who may want to implement telemedicine in their institution, about issues telemedicine

Diffusion of Meta-Analysis, Systematic Review, and Related Research Synthesis Methods: Patterns, Contexts, and Impact

Like collaboration and interdisciplinary scholarship, research synthesis methods are used to integrate science knowledge. Unlike collaboration and interdisciplinary scholarship, research synthesis is a scientific method researchers apply to systematically and explicitly integrate knowledge from primary research studies to estimate the best answer to a specific question based on accumulated research findings. This study investigates the diffusion and impact of research synthesis methods at the macro- and meso-levels. At the macro-level, diffusion from 1972-2011 is described using bibliometric methods. Relatively modest engagement with the methods in the 1970s and 1980s was followed by increased engagement across a greater diversity of fields in the 1990s. Engagement with the methods continued to increase and spread across fields through the first decade of the 2000s. Engagement with research synthesis methods was strongly correlated with engagement with evidence-based practice (ρ=0.893, p < 0.001) and the number of years a field engaged with the methods (ρ = 0.706, p < 0.001), moderately correlated with engagement with past research (ρ = 0.403, p < 0.001); and modestly correlated with Biglan class (ρ = 0.279, p = 0.011). Five fields, Evolutionary Biology, Conservation Biology, Social Work, Women’s Studies, and Information and Library Science were selected for investigation at the meso-level. Content analysis, topic modeling, and qualitative summaries of literature at the intersections of these fields and research synthesis contextualize the diffusion process and reveal differences and similarities across field contexts. Bibliometric evaluation indicates that adoption of research synthesis contributes to changes in collaboration patterns: a greater number of authors contribute to research syntheses than research reviews in fields where collaboration on research reviews is low. This study provides some evidence that use of the methods has refined rather than replaced roles of traditional research reviews in Social Work; and illustrates interactions between innovations and use contexts. Innovations and their contexts are modified through adaptations influenced by historical contexts, values, and goals that intersect with the innovation use context.Doctor of Philosoph