Journal Self-Citation XXI: Bibliography as Artifact – How Citations Are Data

Citation rates are important criteria for judging an author’s impact in the research community or discipline. They form one of the many indicators of research quality that help people less familiar with a field understand the effectiveness of a research paper or individual. The contents of a bibliography or set of references are also markers that help orient the reader to the framework of a piece of writing. Lately, journal publishers have paid increased attention to citation rates as more and more journals vie to be included in abstracting and indexing services. These lists act as a filter for libraries and bulk subscription brokers, so they can affect circulation and hence, revenue. Because of this, some journals have required authors to cite prior papers from the same journal when submitting research, even going so far as to specify how many citations are needed for a paper to be considered. This paper argues that commercial considerations must not outweigh the primary academic purpose of a citation list. Not only are there a host of conventions associated with citations that arise from author integrity and community relationships, but the bibliography is itself research data for another discipline. Compelling and precise portraits of researchers can be derived from such data. A case from library science on the late Rob Kling’s sources illustrates the value of preserving the integrity of citations for the purpose of building and understanding a discipline, not a revenue stream

PRISM: a consumer information processing model for housewife decision-making

This thesis describes a test of the applicability of a model developed from a qualitative study of a market for consumer nondurables to two other markets for consumer non-durables. The model was developed to explain the effect of public relations information on housewives 1 buying decisions. The results of two questionnaire surveys of fifty housewives each were analysed. Results from the first market study were to be confirmed by the second study before acceptance. The relationships specified in the model were not identified in the tests. It is suggested that the relationship between perceived risk and openness to information was not supported because of the low risk in the present studies and that relationships concerning usage strategies were not identified because it was not possible to group individual strategies. In the light of the results the problems of developing a generalisable model from a qualitative study of one situation and ways of tackling these problems are discussed. The advantages and disadvantages to the project of using a market research firm for the survey and of having commercial sponsors are identified. This thesis provides several criteria for distinguishing between the diverse conceptualisations of perceived risk reviewed. It points out why the uncertainty component and not the probability component is consistent with perceived risk theory. It shows that there is little conclusive evidence of a relationship between consumer perceived risk and information handling due to a lack of quality programmatic research, although that relationship is often held to be true. The above point highlights a general problem in consumer behaviour research exemplified by a lack of programmatic research, by exploratory studies which are not followed up and by many measures of concepts none of which are validated

Panel 20 The Merits of Three Qualitative Research Methods

There has been growing interest in qualitative research methods and their application to information systems in recent years. Since 1990 panels and/or workshops on qualitative research methods have become a regular feature of ICIS. Prominent among the variety of research strategies which have been suggested in the research literature are case studies, grounded theory, ethnography (Harvey and Myers 1995; Wynn 1991), phenomenology, semiotics (Klein and Truex 1995), hermeneutics, critical hermeneutics (Myers 1994) and critical theory approaches

Understanding Virtuality in a Global Organization: Toward a Virtuality Index

“We are getting more virtual all the time!” was a phrase frequently uttered during recent planning sessions for remote collaboration support at Intel Corporation; some form of this statement is no doubt made in other global firms as well. But what virtual comprises is not well understood. The construct of virtuality cannot be directly measured, so how virtual and how fast the stated change is occurring is mostly an enigma. Certain high level metrics of corporate information infrastructure can give indications, but much of virtuality is not obvious. The lack of definition makes it hard to understand the impact of virtual work on performance, or to evaluate the infrastructure and collaborative toolset needed to support distributed knowledge workers. Building on the concept of discontinuities, or factors contributing to a decrease in cohesion, we propose a virtuality index to assess the degree to which virtual work occurs and the pace at which this phenomenon progresses. The index was derived from data gathered in a study with sound psychometrics of over 1,200 employees at Intel Corporation. Preliminary analyses suggest that work predictability and general sociability (on or off teams), along with a range of media for expressivity and visualization can mitigate the consequences of working in discontinuous environments, while discontinuity of practices (e.g., more cultural and work process diversity) and worker mobility negatively impact the perception of team performance. Being distributed in and of itself was found to have no impact on team performance. These findings, along with others yet to be analyzed, promise to give us a handle on how the discontinuities of working virtually can be most effectively supported with collaboration tools

Browsing for information on the web and in the file system

Browsing is one of the methods used for finding and refinding information on the web or in the file local system and there are opportunities to avoid this, particularly if that information is revisited frequently. We present empirical results from a field study contrasting patterns of browsing to local and web information and we qualify the cost that this navigation method incurs. In addition, we provide an improved method for defining revisit behavior and report on the level of revisits during our study. Our findings have implications for solution development that reduce user effort for finding and refinding information.Keywords: navigation, finding, Information Search and Retrieval, Information Storage and Retrieval, Information interfaces and presentation, refinding, files, web pages, Browsin