Academicians＇ self-efficacy in the application of TEC learning curriculum instructional design in Malaysian public tertiary education

This research is attempted to examine universities＇ academic staffs＇ curriculum instructional design in the teaching and learning process in applying the technology enhanced classroom （TEC） learning. The universities have embarked on a costly project to create an innovative and creative learning and teaching environment to promote and establish a state-of-the-art, smart, efficient, effective and high quality education. The teaching and learning culture of universities have great influence on determining the level of students＇ achievement. Seven dimensions of public universities in Malaysia were examined to determine the percentage of academic staffs＇ self-efficacy in the application of TEC learning. There is a significant difference among factors concerning the academic staffs＇ self-efficacy in their teaching and learning processes in the classroom management. Their self-preparedness in using the provided technology is closely related to the experiences and practicality of the teaching materials. This study represents an addition to the extant literature on universities＇ academic staffs＇ self-efficacy in the application of TEC learning. Academic staffs＇ self-efficacy in using TEC learning instructional design is of the utmost important to disseminate knowledge to students, which will also fully help utilize the government＇s effort in providing technology to the additional instructional design, so as to achieve high quality education and technological enhance education to pave the way to achieve a techno-education environment for all public universities in Malaysia. This study provides furtber groundwork to assist existing tertiary educational managers to improve smart teaching and learning environment and to retain high quality academic staffs in the day-to-day classroom curriculum.     

On the tips of their tongues: authors and their views on scholarly publishing

The paper presents the results of an international questionnaire survey of the attitudes of senior authors towards scholarly publishing. It was commissioned by the Publishers Association (PA) and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). A total of 5,513 authors participated. The questionnaire included 22 closed questions and one open‐ended question that 1,943 authors used to freely express their views. Using QSR N6 textual analysis software, their comments were processed and themes extracted. The main concerns of the authors were the peer‐review process, faster publishing, better access to journals, journal prices, and issues related to electronic publishing.     

A global questionnaire survey of the scholarly communication attitudes and behaviours of early career researchers

This article describes an international study informed by a 3‐year‐long qualitative longitudinal project, which sought to discover the scholarly communication attitudes and behaviour of early career researchers (ECRs). Using a combination of small‐scale interviews and a larger‐scale survey, ECRs were questioned on their searching and reading behaviour, publishing practices, open data, and their use of social media. Questionnaire invitations were sent out via publisher lists, social media networks, university research networks, and specialist ECR membership organizations. One‐thousand and six‐hundred responses were received, with many coming from China, Russia, and Poland. Results showed that ECRs are adopting millennial‐facing tools/platforms, with Google, Google Scholar, social media, and smartphones becoming embedded in their scholarly activities. Open data sharing obtains widespread support but somewhat less practice. There are some differences in attitudes and behaviour according to age and subject specialism.     

Interdisciplinarity and the information-seeking behavior of scientists

Adopting an intradisciplinary perspective, this article evaluates the information-seeking behavior of academics from different subfields of physics and astronomy. It investigates the effect of interdisciplinarity (reliance on the literature of other subjects) and the scatter of literature on two aspects of the information-seeking behavior: methods used for keeping up-to-date and for identifying articles. To this end a survey of 114 PhD students and staff at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University College London was carried out. The findings showed that the subfields that are more interdisciplinary or have a more scattered literature are more likely to use general search facilities for finding information. The study also showed that cross-disciplinary use of the literature is not necessarily an indicator of scattered literature. The study reveals intradisciplinary differences among physicists and astronomers in terms of their information-seeking behavior and highlights the risk of overlooking the characteristics of information-seeking behavior of specialized subject communities by focusing on very broad subject categories.     

Patterns of Iranian co-authorship networks in social sciences: A comparative study

Collaboration in science is a process in which two or more authors share their ideas, resources and data to create a joint work. This research compares coauthorship networks of Iranian articles in library and information science (LIS), psychology (PSY), management (MNG), and economics (ECO) in the ISI Web of Knowledge database during 2000–2009, and uses network analysis for the visualization of coauthorship networks. Data include all articles with at least one Iranian author and indexed in ISI's Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for the fields of LIS, PSY, MNG, and ECO. Indicators such as the Collaborative Index (CI), Degree of Collaboration (DC) and Collaboration Coefficient (CC) were calculated for each discipline. Results show that two or three authors were the most common number of authors per paper, and authors of PSY tended to have more multi-authored articles, compared to the other disciplines. LIS had the lowest rank regarding CC. MNG had the densest coauthorship network, and PSY had the sparsest. Iranian authors in the field of PSY mostly collaborated with those in the U.S., while LIS and MNG authors tended to collaborate with U.K. authors, and ECO authors tended to collaborate with Canadians.     

The impact of the pandemic on early career researchers' work-life and scholarly communications: A quantitative aerial analysis

After two-years of repeat interviewing early career sciences/social sciences researchers from around the world about their work life and scholarly communications in pandemic-times, the Harbingers-2 project is in a position to release quantitative data on the pandemic's overall impact. The data comes from around 50 questions asked in the third and final round of interviews with 147 early career researchers (ECRs), which had a codifiable element to them (such as yes, no, do not know). The 19 scholarly topics covered include: pandemic-related research; research funding; changes to the workplace/working from home; pandemic-incurred stress and anxiety; teaching; employment security; career progression; mentoring; assessment (including metrics); collaboration; searching/finding information; ethics; networking; informal communication; publishing; sharing; pre-prints; outreach; and scholarly transformations. The main findings are that in six broad aspects of ECRs' work-life and scholarly behaviour, more than 50% of ECRs were impacted by the pandemic, with remote teaching having the greatest impact. By way of comparison, in another six aspects there was little change, least of all when it came to sharing activities. Among the countries studied, Malaysia stood out as being the most impacted, and of the disciplines it was the medical sciences and the soft social sciences most impacted.     

Representations of swine flu: perspectives from a Malaysian pig farm

Novel influenza viruses are seen, internationally, as posing considerable health challenges, but public responses to such viruses are often rooted in cultural representations of disease and risk. However, little research has been conducted in locations associated with the origin of a pandemic. We examined representations and risk perceptions associated with swine flu amongst 120 Malaysian pig farmers. Thirty-seven per cent of respondents felt at particular risk of infection, two-thirds were somewhat or very concerned about being infected. Those respondents who were the most anxious believed particular societal "out-groups" (homosexuals, the homeless and prostitutes) to be at higher infection risk. Although few (4%) reported direct discrimination, 46% claimed friends had avoided them since the swine flu outbreak. Findings are discussed in the context of evolutionary, social representations and terror management theories of response to pandemic threat.