Information-seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers

Purpose – The study examines two aspects of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers including methods applied for keeping up-to-date and methods used for finding articles. The relationship between academic status and research field of users with their information seeking behaviour was investigated. Methodology/approach – Data were gathered using a questionnaire survey of PhD students and staff of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London; 114 people (47.1 per cent response rate) participated in the survey. Findings – The study reveals differences among subfields of physics and astronomy in terms of information-seeking behaviour, highlights the need for and the value of looking at narrower subject communities within disciplines for a deeper understanding of the information behaviour of scientists. Originality/value – The study is the first study to deeply investigate intradisciplinary dissimilarities of information-seeking behaviour of scientists in a discipline. It is also an up-to-date account of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers

Use of research by librarians and information professionals

The study’s aim is twofold: first to determine the extent to which Australian library and information professionals produce research literature (specifically journal articles); and second to explore the status of the use of research literature by library and information science (LIS) practitioners as evidence for their practice. All articles published in the field of LIS in 2015 by Australian authors were analysed and seven interviews were conducted with Australian librarians. Out of 152 articles published in 2015 by Australian authors, 37 articles (20.3%) were authored by at least one practitioner, 29 articles (15.9%) were fully authored by practitioners, and eight articles were joint work by faculty members and practitioners. Australian LIS journals played an important role in providing a venue for the publication of articles authored by practitioners. Interviews showed that the use of research literature as evidence is not yet an institutionalised practice in the profession. Practitioners’ expectations of research literature generated by academic researchers is not high for they believe academic research lacks relevance, applicability, and coverage, and is sometimes aspirational. They find commissioned research, practice-led research and professional research more valuable than academic research. Mailing lists play an important role in the dissemination and identification of research that is useful for practitioners. Research collaboration between practitioners and researchers should be facilitated and encouraged

Information-seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers

Purpose – The study examines two aspects of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers including methods applied for keeping up-to-date and methods used for finding articles. The relationship between academic status and research field of users with their information seeking behaviour was investigated. Methodology/approach – Data were gathered using a questionnaire survey of PhD students and staff of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London; 114 people (47.1 per cent response rate) participated in the survey. Findings – The study reveals differences among subfields of physics and astronomy in terms of information-seeking behaviour, highlights the need for and the value of looking at narrower subject communities within disciplines for a deeper understanding of the information behaviour of scientists. Originality/value – The study is the first study to deeply investigate intradisciplinary dissimilarities of information-seeking behaviour of scientists in a discipline. It is also an up-to-date account of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers

Representation and construction of self in writing discourses

The "discoursal self", according to Ivanic, is "the impression... they [the students] consciously or unconsciously convey... in a particular written text. ... [I]t is constructed through the discourse characteristics of a text, which relate to values, beliefs, and power relations in the social context in which they were written" (25). The "autobiographical self", Ivanic explains, "is the identity which people bring with them to any act of writing" (24). The goal for this paper is an overview investigating whether or not students are aware of a discoursal self-being constructed for them as a result of being students in another academic environment. The author begins by exploring the theoretical concepts of the socially constructed "self", language and how language is used by society to influence the individual. Further, he narrows the focus and reviews the field of literature by Rhetoric and Composition scholars who have explored the issues and impacts of teaching academic discourse to students. If we attempt to understand what the students think and how they perceive the writing, we may be able to better tailor our assignments, methods and approaches to better fit the needs of the students. The findings and results of my thesis may be of benefit to educators and other professionals across the world. The text will also provide a safe, anonymous, respectable outlet for students to voice their opinions and thoughts

Collaboration network of applied linguistics research articles with different methodological orientations

The current study draws on synthetic techniques and bibliometric analysis to explore the patterns of scientific collaboration in light of methodological orientations. We examined 3,992 applied linguistics (AL) articles published in 18 top-tier journals from 2009 to 2018 and analyzed their methodological orientations and scientific collaboration. Considering that the number of co-authored papers outweighs single-authored counterparts, our results revealed that the overall degree of collaboration for AL journals was moderate-to-high (57.7%). In particular, quantitative studies contained the highest degree of collaboration (66.8%). This was followed by systematic reviews (60.9%), and mixed-methods approach (55.7%). Country-wise, our overall findings further indicated that the United States and the United Kingdom were the two main hubs of collaborative activities for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research. While the USA was the top country in systematic reviews like all other research approaches, the UK was the fifth country in systematic reviews. As for collaborating authors, our findings demonstrated that the most influential quantitative researchers had collaborated on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data mining. While the mixed-methods researchers had a tendency to collaborate on conceptual issues subscribing to the language testing and assessment strand, the most productive qualitative researchers had collaborated on L2 writing issues. Implications for applied linguistics research are further discussed

ProductAE: Toward Deep Learning Driven Error-Correction Codes of Large Dimensions

While decades of theoretical research have led to the invention of several classes of error-correction codes, the design of such codes is an extremely challenging task, mostly driven by human ingenuity. Recent studies demonstrate that such designs can be effectively automated and accelerated via tools from machine learning (ML), thus enabling ML-driven classes of error-correction codes with promising performance gains compared to classical designs. A fundamental challenge, however, is that it is prohibitively complex, if not impossible, to design and train fully ML-driven encoder and decoder pairs for large code dimensions. In this paper, we propose Product Autoencoder (ProductAE) -- a computationally-efficient family of deep learning driven (encoder, decoder) pairs -- aimed at enabling the training of relatively large codes (both encoder and decoder) with a manageable training complexity. We build upon ideas from classical product codes and propose constructing large neural codes using smaller code components. ProductAE boils down the complex problem of training the encoder and decoder for a large code dimension $k$ and blocklength $n$ to less-complex sub-problems of training encoders and decoders for smaller dimensions and blocklengths. Our training results show successful training of ProductAEs of dimensions as large as $k = 300$ bits with meaningful performance gains compared to state-of-the-art classical and neural designs. Moreover, we demonstrate excellent robustness and adaptivity of ProductAEs to channel models different than the ones used for training.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2110.0446

Common Problems of Library and Information Science Education in Asian Developing Countries: A Review Article

Education of Library and Information Science (LIS) has several problems that are caused by the changing nature of the discipline and the social, economic and cultural contexts in which LIS departments function. The aim of this article is to enumerate and discuss some of the common problems of LIS education in developing countries of Asia and suggest solutions. We show that as Asian developing countries share some of the social, economic and cultural elements, they have similar problems in LIS education. Therefore, the same solutions could be recommended such as setting up limited number of independent LIS schools, establishing or empowering accreditation agencies, flexibility in educational systems, more emphasis on research, developing in-service training, relocating the departments in new faculties, equipping the departments with new facilities, employing new and skillful staff, encouraging collaboration among faculty members and departments, diversifying courses and degrees, updating syllabi in an ongoing manner, taking advantage of IT, and creating and publishing LIS literature in native language