Multilingual Information Retrieval & Use: Perceptions and Practices Amongst Bi/Multilingual Academic Users

In recent years, technological advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) such as machine translation have made it possible for users to access information in multiple languages, even those in which they may not be proficient. The current study investigated the information searching behavior of bi/multilingual academic users, and examined their practices and perceptions regarding searching for information on the Internet and on electronic databases. Bi/multilingual students were recruited from a Canadian university and a community college both located in London, Ontario. A total of 250 (N = 250) students completed a web survey through a link that was embedded in an invitation e-mail. Results showed that though advancements in NLP technology have alleviated some of the linguistic related challenges that some bi/multilingual academic users face while searching for information online, language barriers do still exist for some especially at the query formulation stage. The study found that an increase in Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) tools on electronic databases coupled with appropriate information literacy instruction could be helpful in further alleviating language barriers. © 201

The citer-success-index: a citer-based indicator to select a subset of elite papers

The goal of this paper is introducing the citer-success-index (cs-index), i.e. an indicator that uses the number of different citers as a proxy for the impact of a generic set of papers. For each of the articles of interest, it is defined a comparison term—which represents the number of citers that, on average, an article published in a certain period and scientific field is expected to ‘‘infect''—to be compared with the actual number of citers of the article. Similarly to the recently proposed success-index (Franceschini et al. Scientometrics 92(3):621-6415, 2011), the cs-index allows to select a subset of ‘‘elite'' papers. The cs-index is analyzed from a conceptual and empirical perspective. Special attention is devoted to the study of the link between the number of citers and cited authors relating to articles from different fields, and the possible correlation between the cs- and the successindex. Some advantages of the cs-index are that (i) it can be applied to multidisciplinary groups of papers, thanks to the field-normalization that it achieves at the level of individual paper and (ii) it is not significantly affected by self citers and recurrent citers. The main drawback is its computational complexit

A new author's productivity index: p-index

In this paper a new author's productivity index is introduced, namely the golden productivity index. The proposed index measures the productivity of an individual researcher evaluating the number of papers as well as the rank of co-authorship. It provides an efficient method to measure the author's contribution in articles writing, compared to other ordinary methods. It gives emphasis to the first authors contributions due to the fact that traditionally the rank of each author shows the magnitude of his contribution in the article