‘Finding’ and ‘discovering’: How understanding researchers’ search and discovery behaviour informed the building of Cambridge Core

Key points

• Researchers most often visit publisher platforms to ‘find’ a specific article or chapter after ‘discovering’ available resources elsewhere.
• Keywords in the title and author names are the two most important criteria for identifying relevant material.
• Students consider access to be an important criterion for item selection.
• For both humanities and social sciences (HSS) and science, technology, and medicine (STM), user behaviour when identifying relevant content is remarkably similar.
• Students and researchers tend to gather content for later use rather than read it in detail as soon as they find it.

     

‘Reading’ in the digital environment

For ten years CIBER has been studying the logs of scholarly publishers, and what was clear from the very beginning was that scholars conducted very brief visits to websites and spent very little time reading when there, yet publishers envisaged they would dwell; and if not dwell, then at least deep read the PDF later. Yet CIBER's research points to the fact that ‘lite’ reading is in fact endemic: younger people prefer it anyway and older people are getting used to it for the speed and convenience it brings. PDFs are largely a means of archiving and collecting and are not the gold standard reading metric people think. User satisfaction comes not from a PDF but from the ability to deep dive into a site and snatch what you are interested as quickly as possible. Publishers are still not comfortable with that and this article helps explain why they have to be.     

‘Evidence’ within local authority decision making

Michael Cook looks at the role of an embedded Public Health Information Specialist highlighting the ways the core evidence, information and knowledge skills are used to progress Public Health activity in local government settings. Acknowledging the current pandemic, he explores how COVID‐19 has dominated all aspects of health and social care, and outlines how evidence services have work within these complex Public Health systems to lead the local response and recovery efforts.     

Older people’s health information needs

This paper, originally given at the Health Libraries Group conference ‘First aid for the front line’ in September 1998, argues that older people’s health information needs are in many respects little different to anyone else’s. It looks at different formats of information that may be helpful for older people, and at the needs of two specific groups, carers and elders from ethnic groups. Direct user involvement in the development of information is seen as important. It is emphasized that there is a particular need for primary care workers to know how other services, such as those within social care and the voluntary sector, operate. The paper ends by looking at the information professional’s role in providing resources and training to such workers, and suggests a broader remit for the profession as a whole, to help to ensure social inclusion for older people.     

Time to stop talking about ‘predatory journals’

Key points

• The term ‘predatory journal’ hides a wide range of scholarly publishing misconduct.
• The term ‘predatory journal’ unhelpfully bundles misconduct with poor quality.
• The term ‘predatory journal’ blinds us to important possibilities, needs, and questions arising in the developing scholarly landscape.
• The current scholarly publishing environment cannot rely on such a simplified classification of journals into predatory or not.

     

Iranians’ contribution to world literature on neuroscience

Objective: The purpose of this study is to analyse Iranian scientific publications in the neuroscience subfields by librarians and neuroscientists, using Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) via Web of Science data over the period, 2002–2008. Methods: Data were retrieved from the SCIE. Data were collected from the ‘subject area’ of the database and classified by neuroscience experts into 14 subfields. To identify the citation patterns, we applied the ‘impact factor’ and the ‘number of publication’. Data were also analysed using HISTCITE, Excel 2007 and SPSS. Results: Seven hundred and thirty‐four papers have been published by Iranian between 2002 and 2008. Findings showed a growing trend of neuroscience papers in the last 3 years with most papers (264) classified in the neuropharmacology subfield. There were fewer papers in neurohistory, psychopharmacology and artificial intelligence. International contributions of authors were mostly in the neurology subfield, and ‘Collaboration Coefficient’ for the neuroscience subfields in Iran was 0.686 which is acceptable. Most international collaboration between Iranians and developed countries was from USA. Eighty‐seven percent of the published papers were in journals with the impact factor between 0 and 4; 25% of papers were published by the researchers affiliated to Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Conclusion: Progress of neuroscience in Iran is mostly seen in the neuropharmacology and the neurology subfields. Other subfields should also be considered as a research priority by health policymakers. As this study was carried out by the collaboration of librarians and neuroscientists, it has been proved valuable for both librarians and policymakers. This study may be encouraging for librarians from other developing countries.