Looking for love in all the wrong places: Accessing sexual and reproductive health information via the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature

The Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature has been described as a cultural barometer. It supports scholars of history and culture by providing access to ideas circulated via the mass media in earlier times, but its own coverage and indexing practices also reveal attitudes and values toward issues of the time. The Progressive Era (1900–1924) coincides with the founding and growth of the Readers' Guide. Examining how the Readers' Guide directed readers' attention to matters of sexual and reproductive health in its first quarter century demonstrates changes in social attitudes and has implications for scholarly work. The array of index terms required to locate information on this topic indicates both barriers to information access for contemporary readers as well as challenges for present-day scholars concerned with recovering information of the era.     

Scholarly reviewing and the role of choice in the postpublication review process

Publishers of books for the library and scholarly markets use prepublication reviews to reduce the risk of publishing a book that does not meet scholarly standards or is not economically justifiable. Book purchasers use postpublication reviews to reduce the risk of spending their budgets unwisely. Despite problems associated with both sorts of review, they are integral to the processes of scholarly communication and academic career advancement. The role and policies ofChoice, a book review journal directed toward scholars and librarians of undergraduate-level collections, are discussed in detail.     

Exploring the scholarly communication styles of Arab social science and humanities scholars

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study of scholarly communication behaviour among Arab scholars. The main objective of this study is to determine how Egyptian and Saudi Arabian social sciences and humanities scholars engage in scholarly communication practices. The study used a mixed‐methods approach. A questionnaire was answered by a sample of 104 participants, followed by interviews with 36 participants to gain insight into the scholarly communication behaviour of the Arab scholars. The analysis demonstrated that participants use different styles of scholarly communication approaches. Most of the participants do use informal (social media) channels to communicate their research findings (particularly ResearchGate and Facebook), although priority is given to formal over informal publication in peer reviewed journals. Responses showed that the promotional systems of both countries dictate publication choices of scholars, reducing the amount of collaboration by ranking co‐publications lower than sole publications and favouring printed journals over online‐only journals.     

DigitalHub: A Repository Focused on the Future

The DigitalHub scholarly repository was developed and launched at the Galter Health Sciences Library for the Feinberg School of Medicine and the greater Northwestern Medicine community. The repository was designed to allow scholars the ability to create, share, and preserve a range of citable digital outputs. This article traces the evolution of DigitalHub’s development and engagement activities, highlighting project challenges, innovations, success stories, and the team-based approach that was employed to successfully achieve project goals.     

TrendMD: Helping scholarly content providers reach larger and more targeted audiences

• With over 6,000 new peer‐reviewed articles published daily, scholarly content providers face growing challenges of reaching their target audience.
• There are few evidenced‐based strategies for disseminating online scholarly content to a targeted audience.
• TrendMD increased weekly page views by 49% relative to baseline traffic for a group of articles published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
• Future studies are needed to determine how article page views correlate with other article‐level metrics such as Altmetric scores and citations.

     

Being in the archive: affect and scholarly distance

Working in the archives of living writers provides exciting possibilities for extended interpersonal research as well as ethical challenges. This article explores the author’s experience of working in Helen Garner’s restricted archives and negotiating the demands of scholarly objectivity with an increasingly felt empathic engagement. The author traces a chronological path through the archives relating to Garner’s three substantial works of non-fiction: The First Stone (1995), Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014). She draws attention to some of the ways in which distance and objectivity can be influenced not only by contact with a living writer but also by the space in which the archive is encountered. With a deliberate focus on the lived experience of researching, rather than a scholarly examination of archival theory, the author offers a case study of how the interaction of archives and living subject can shape research and publication.     

Scholarly Journals Should Be Treated as a Public Good

SUMMARY

The thesis that scholarly journals should be treated as public goods is based on five arguments. First, scholarly journal articles have many public good characteristics, and many of their private good characteristics are created by choice. Second, our current system undersupplies students with scholarly journals. Third, the supply chain for journals from publisher to user is burdened by many deadweight losses. Fourth, online publishing might reduce those deadweight losses enough to fund a system freely available to scholars. Finally, treating scholarly journals as public goods can meet the needs of all stakeholders. Explanations of the economic concepts of public good, deadweight loss, and Pareto optima are given to support the arguments.     

Priorities for publishing research: A multidisciplinary agenda

Publishing research, to be effective and useful, requires the participation of scholars and practitioners in many disciplines: literature, history, sociology, psychology, technology, economics, and education. Examples are drawn from trade and scholarly publishing. The results of such research can benefit all segments of the industry. Beth Luey is director, Scholarly Publishing Program at Arizona State University and have been editor of Publishing Research Quarterly since 1988. She is the author of several books, includingHandbook for Academic Authors.     

The State Secrets Privilege and the War on Terror: An Annotated Bibliography

This selective annotated bibliography is a guide to scholarly articles about use of the State Secrets Privilege during the War on Terror. Use of the privilege became controversial during the presidential administration of George W. Bush, resulting in a scholarly debate over the privilege and the propriety of its use in litigation concerning measures taken by the United States government in the years following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. This bibliography is intended to provide an overview of the scholarly literature to lawyers, scholars, and students.     

Where Arab social science and humanities scholars choose to publish: Falling in the predatory journals trap

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study of publishing behaviour among a group of Arab scholars in social science and humanities disciplines. The paper also investigated the number of Arab scholars who are publishing in predatory journals and the reasons that drive them to select these journals to share their scholarly findings. The study adopted a mixed methods approach. Eighteen journals that were categorized as predatory journals were scanned to find the number of Arab scholars who published in them. Then, a questionnaire was sent to Egyptian and Saudi scholars as they were found to be the top Arab contributors in these journals. The questionnaire was followed by semi‐structured interviews to gain an in‐depth understanding of the publishing behaviour. The data showed that many Arab scholars prefer publishing in predatory journals as these journals are easier and faster. The results also indicate that there is a need to raise the awareness of the harm that predatory journals can cause to the scholars and how they can avoid these journals. This study was conducted with social science and humanities scholars in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The publishing behaviour may differ in other scholarly disciplines and other Arabic countries.     

网络环境下学术传播的变迁研究

论文分析了网络环境下学术信息媒介的演变引发的学术传播的一系列变化：学者查找信息行为的变化、出现新的学术传播方式、学者之间合作的加强、无形学院的扩大、出现新的学术出版联合体等。     

论顾颉刚《清代著述考》对清代学术统系的构建

[目的/意义]《清代著述考》是顾颉刚编纂的一部有关清代学术的目录学著作。书中所体现顾颉刚的治学路径、思想和方法至今仍值得借鉴和吸收。[方法/过程]通过对《清代著述考》成书、体例及创新点的分析，结合顾颉刚早年有关目录学与清代学术的相关文献论著，探索其早年治学观念，揭示其构建清代学术统系的路径、内容和影响。[结果/结论]经过《清代著述考》的编撰，顾颉刚深化了对清人治学成果的吸收，对他形成"由经入史"的治学路径，在古史研究领域做出开创性贡献，打下重要基础。     

Authorship,Gender, and Institutional Affiliation in Library History:

Library historians can learn a great deal from studying the gender of authorship and institutional affiliation of a scholarly journal. The focus of this study is to examine these two aspects of journal production in library history to see who is producing published research in this field. Twenty-three years of Libraries & Culture were chosen as the target volumes. The study reveals that more men than women published in library history as well as locating which institutions were represented. This type of information is usedful to the library historian engaged in the analysis of published scholarship, and more generally to scholars with an interest in patterns of literature production in fields closely related to the social and behavioral sciences.     

Affordances,Technical Agency,and the Politics of Technologies of Cultural Production

Culture Digitally is a collective of scholars, gathered by Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University) and Hector Postigo (Temple University). With the generous funding of the National Science Foundation, the group supports scholarly inquiry into new media and cultural production through numerous projects, collaborations, a scholarly blog, and annual workshops. For more information on projects and researchers affiliated with Culture Digitally, visit culturedigitally.org or follow @CultureDig).     

中外图书馆出版服务研究主题比较分析

[目的/意义]图书馆出版服务受到广泛的关注且不断地发展,国内外学者纷纷开始研究其对旧图书出版服务和单一的图书馆场所服务模式的挑战及影响。通过对国内外学者研究方向和主题进行归纳总结,对比分析中外学者的关注热点,旨在引进思路并为我国图书馆出版服务提供借鉴。[方法/过程]采用LDA文档主题提取方法,并在提取出来的数据中绘制主题分布热点图。[结果/结论]通过对比国内外研究热点,发现由于国外图书馆较早开展出版服务,很多高校会根据自己的情况来制定出版服务的模式,因此国外学者的研究更多集中在分析图书馆的角色定位、线上服务、数字化趋势和战略性创新等方面;而国内学者主要是通过借鉴国外案例,并结合国内的实际情况,如经费问题、体制问题等,指出我国当前图书馆出版服务中所面临的挑战和新机遇,同时提出符合国内发展状况的模式和内外结合的创新性思路。     

Universality of scholarly impact metrics

Given the growing use of impact metrics in the evaluation of scholars, journals, academic institutions, and even countries, there is a critical need for means to compare scientific impact across disciplinary boundaries. Unfortunately, citation-based metrics are strongly biased by diverse field sizes and publication and citation practices. As a result, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of newly proposed metrics that claim to be “universal.” However, there is currently no way to objectively assess whether a normalized metric can actually compensate for disciplinary bias. We introduce a new method to assess the universality of any scholarly impact metric, and apply it to evaluate a number of established metrics. We also define a very simple new metric h_s, which proves to be universal, thus allowing to compare the impact of scholars across scientific disciplines. These results move us closer to a formal methodology in the measure of scholarly impact.     

Data,disciplines, and scholarly publishing

Data are becoming an essential product of scholarship, complementing the roles of journal articles, papers, and books. Research data can be reused to ask new questions, to replicate studies, and to verify research findings. Data become even more valuable when linked to publications and other related resources to form a value chain. Types and uses of data vary widely between disciplines, as do the online availability of publications and the incentives of scholars to publish their data. Publishers, scholars, and librarians each have roles to play in constructing a new scholarly information infrastructure for e‐research. Technical, policy, and institutional components are maturing; the next steps are to integrate them into a coherent whole. Achieving a critical mass of datasets in public repositories, with links to and from publisher databases, is the most promising solution to maintaining and sustaining the scholarly record in digital form.     

Open access megajournals: The publisher perspective (Part 2: Operational realities)

This paper is the second of two Learned Publishing articles in which we report the results of a series of interviews, with senior publishers and editors exploring open access megajournals (OAMJs). Megajournals (of which PLoS One is the best known example) represent a relatively new approach to scholarly communication and can be characterized as large, broad‐scope, open access journals, which take an innovative approach to peer review, basing acceptance decisions solely on the technical or scientific soundness of the article. Based on interviews with 31 publishers and editors, this paper reports the perceived cultural, operational, and technical challenges associated with launching, growing, and maintaining a megajournal. We find that overcoming these challenges while delivering the societal benefits associated with OAMJs is seen to require significant investment in people and systems, as well as an ongoing commitment to the model.     

Identifying prize-winning scientists by a competition-aware ranking

Evaluating scholars’ achievements is an important problem in the science of science with applications in the evaluation of grant proposals and promotion applications. Since the number of scholars and the number of scholarly outputs grow exponentially with time, well-designed ranking metrics that have the potential to assist in these tasks are of prime importance. To rank scholars, it is important to put their achievements in perspective by comparing them with the achievements of other scholars active in the same period. We propose here a particular way of doing so: by computing the evaluated scholar's share on each year's citations which quantifies how the scholar fares in competition with the others. We assess the resulting ranking method using the American Physical Society citation data and four prestigious physics awards. Our results show that the new method significantly outperforms other ranking methods in identifying the prize laureates.     

Libraries and Faculty Collaboration: Four Digital Scholarship Examples

ABSTRACT

About twenty years ago, the Internet began to change the way people create, access, publish, and share information. The impact of this information revolution has been felt in every industry. For instance, the Internet has enabled new models in the publishing sector, which has subsequently impacted education and changed the landscape of teaching and learning. About a decade ago, the introduction of new buzzwords such as open access, electronic publishing, digital humanities, and digital scholarship continued to challenge the scholarly production and dissemination of knowledge. Undoubtedly, these changes also created new opportunities for collaboration among multidisciplinary groups including researchers, scholars, students, technologists, librarians, and others. In this article, the author discusses four successful faculty-driven digital scholarship projects that his library system has supported in the last two years. His team's work serves as an example of how academic libraries and centers for digital scholarship at undergraduate institutions can support digital humanities and digital scholarship initiatives. Additionally, the case examples can contribute to the ongoing discussion of new roles for librarians and technologists in working with scholars and students to gain the skills necessary to implement digital scholarship projects.