Programmer's choice: Eight factors in program decision‐making

In the introduction to Charles Woodliff's “Catch Me if You Can” in the Fall, 1965 issue of the Journal it was, prophesied that it would be not “the last that will be published on the question of the proper curriculum for training professional broadcasters.” In this issue, on the preceding pages, is an article by Professor John Pennybacker answering Professor Woodliff's article disagreeing with the one that started it all, Pennybacker's “Working with Universities.” The following comment by Woodliff is intended only as a brief comment upon Pennybacker's “Leadership and the Educator: The Middle Way” and does not, of course, attempt to make full reply in this brief form. Professor Woodliff (Assistant Professor in the Department of Radio‐Television‐Film at the University of Denver) hopes that the dialogue between him and Dr. Pennybacker represents their respective points of view fairly—and that other positions will be heard from in the future. The airing of these points of view is not just another rehash of the old “liberal arts vs. professionalism” debate. Recent surveys have shown that broadcasting education has not yet made its mark on the industry—if it is to do so in the future, teachers of broadcasting must constantly reassess their goals and the means to achieve these goals.     

How important is choice of the scaling factor in standardizing citations?

Because of the variations in citation behavior across research fields, appropriate standardization must be applied as part of any bibliometric analysis of the productivity of individual scientists and research organizations. Such standardization involves scaling by some factor that characterizes the distribution of the citations of articles from the same year and subject category. In this work we conduct an analysis of the sensitivity of researchers’ productivity rankings to the scaling factor chosen to standardize their citations. To do this we first prepare the productivity rankings for all researchers (more than 30,000) operating in the hard sciences in Italy, over the period 2004–2008. We then measure the shifts in rankings caused by adopting scaling factors other than the particular factor that seems more effective for comparing the impact of publications in different fields: the citation average of the distribution of cited-only publications.     

Peer choice – does reviewer self‐selection work?

The British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) uses a novel system for obtaining referees by e‐mailing the abstracts of submissions to a panel of over 250 referees and allowing these individuals to choose which papers they would like to review. An analysis of 13 experienced referees showed that, of 473 reviews assessed, these referees were slightly more lenient than the editor and that electronic records provide useful data that can be mined in interesting ways.     

Post-graduate students and learning environments: Users’ perceptions regarding the choice of information sources

The purpose of this paper is to investigate, through empirical analysis, whether or not post-graduate students choose information technology or other information sources such as home institution libraries for the purposes of learning, expanding their knowledge and/or completing their studies. A survey was conducted to gather primary source data for the paper. Questionnaires were administered to 211 education post-graduate students. Results showed that Greek post-graduate students from different fields of study chose the Internet as their primary information source for a number of reasons but mainly: for the provision of creditable and up-to-date information, for easy access to information at home, for the time of day they can access the material and for fast information retrieval. Although the Greek post-graduate students believed the Greek information network to be satisfactory up to a degree, this paper identifies that greater access to Internet resources, training programs providing students with tools to effectively use the network's resources and more online databases, combined with a historical and statistical database of libraries’ online catalogs are key issues in improving both information source performance and the link between strategy and implementation.