Content Analysis of Articles on Reading Culture and Habits: A Case of LIS Journals Indexed in Science Direct And ISC

This study aims to analyze the content of reading culture, reading development strategies, and the application of technology to expand reading habits published in LIS journals indexed in ScienceDirect and ISC. This study is an applied-descriptive study in terms of its objectives. This study is also a part of Scientometrics and employs content analysis. A total of 363 articles from the ScienceDirect database and 82 articles from the ISC database were selected using purposive sampling, in which "word" was taken as the registration unit and "article" as the unit of analysis. The data were collected using a researcher-made checklist whose validity was reviewed and confirmed by experts, and its reliability was measured using the kappa coefficient (κ) with an interrater agreement of 0.7. The findings of this study showed that out of 445 articles reviewed, about 120 articles addressed the reading culture, 273 articles focused on reading development strategies, and 52 articles assessed the application of technology to expand reading skills. The research method most frequently used in the reviewed articles was the descriptive method. Besides, students constituted the most extensive research population. Encouraging students to engage in reading, teaching, and promoting effective reading methods and access to free digital books and publications wherever possible had the highest rankings among the extracted categories related to the reading culture, reading development strategies, and the application of technology to promote reading habits. Besides, the reviewed articles addressed practical methods of promoting reading habits. Our data highlighted the importance of reading and belief in its value in societies. Thus, there is no way to achieve scientific, cultural, and economic growth and prosperity other than expanding the community's constant and goal-directed reading habits. To this end, establishing school libraries and developing reading habits in children and adolescents need to receive more attention. In recent years, due to fundamental changes in social institutions, improving the quality of education has also received special attention

Gendering the New Security Paradigm in Sri Lanka

This article points to the significant military turn that has taken place in Sri Lanka following the armed conflict between the Sri Lanka government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). It is particularly concerned with the impacts on gender relations and how the lines between women's insecurity and militarised masculinity have been redrawn and reinforced. It argues that these gender relations can be seen in sharp relief in the country's Free Trade Zones, where young rural women in the garment industry and young rural men who join the military meet, and where features of transnational labour, violence against women, law and the state combine to reinforce globalisation and militarisation as the twin rationalities upon which national security regimes and the global order rest today. The article discusses resistances to this paradigm, and assesses their successes and failures in the context of how security is currently marketed as a public good and militarism as a path to the ‘good life’. It concludes by pointing to how these constructions have elicited consent on the part of a significant segment of Sri Lankan society to the militarisation of its society as a whole

Citing Journal Articles in Social Sciences Blogs

This article aims to analyze motivations behind social sciences blog posts citing journal articles in order to find out whether blog citations of scholarly journal articles are good indicators for the societal impact of research. A random sample of 300 social sciences blog posts (out of 1,233 blog posts) from ResearchBlogging published between 01/01/2012 to 18/06/2014 were subjected to content analysis. An existing categorization scheme was used and modified inductively. The 300 blog posts had 472 references including 424 journal articles from 269 different journals. Sixty-one (22.68%) of all journals cited were from the category of social sciences and most of the journals with high frequency were highly cited general science journals such as PNAS and Science. Seventy-five percent of all journals were referenced only once. The average age of articles cited was 5.8 years. The most frequent (38, 12.67%) motivation was to ‘neutrally presenting details of a study’. Overall, social science blogs were rather subject-oriented than article oriented. This means a considerable number of blog posts were not driven simply by writing about an article, instead bloggers tend to write about their subject of interest and use references to support their argument. The study shows the potential of blog citations as an altmetric measure and as a proxy for assessing the research impact