Chinese academic journals: quality,issues and solutions

Twelve Chinese academic journals, indexed by SCI and financed by the National Natural Science Foundation (NNSF), were analysed using the 2000–2003 Total Citations and Impact Factor data from JCR. It is concluded that the quality of Chinese journals is generally low and has remained so despite recent government measures aimed at improvement. Several factors are influential – particularly the Chinese government's policy of encouraging submission to foreign journals. Finance, management, and the academic degree policy are also obstacles. It is suggested that the Chinese government should reconsider its current policies so as to encourage higher quality in domestic periodicals and thus a greater recognition of Chinese journals by the international academic community.     

Communicating Prevention: The Effects of the keepin' it REAL Classroom Videotapes and Televised PSAs on Middle-School Students' Substance Use

This study sought to determine if exposure to two communication-oriented activities, videotapes and public service announcements, accounts for changes in substance use among adolescents participating in the Drug Resistance Strategies Project's keepin' it REAL adolescent substance use prevention curriculum. Middle-school students (4,734, 72% Latino) responded to questionnaires related to these analyses. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) model was fit separately to six substance use outcomes. The results suggested that intervention students who saw four or five videos engaged in less substance use in the past month than did students who saw fewer videos. Having seen the PSAs one or more times did not predict the reported change in substance use.     

Hierarchical clustering of a Finnish newspaper article collection with graded relevance assessments

Search facilitated with agglomerative hierarchical clustering methods was studied in a collection of Finnish newspaper articles (N = 53,893). To allow quick experiments, clustering was applied to a sample (N = 5,000) that was reduced with principal components analysis. The dendrograms were heuristically cut to find an optimal partition, whose clusters were compared with each of the 30 queries to retrieve the best-matching cluster. The four-level relevance assessment was collapsed into a binary one by (A) considering all the relevant and (B) only the highly relevant documents relevant, respectively. Single linkage (SL) was the worst method. It created many tiny clusters, and, consequently, searches enabled with it had high precision and low recall. The complete linkage (CL), average linkage (AL), and Ward's methods (WM) returned reasonably-sized clusters typically of 18–32 documents. Their recall (A: 27–52%, B: 50–82%) and precision (A: 83–90%, B: 18–21%) was higher than and comparable to those of the SL clusters, respectively. The AL and WM clustering had 1–8% better effectiveness than nearest neighbor searching (NN), and SL and CL were 1–9% less efficient that NN. However, the differences were statistically insignificant. When evaluated with the liberal assessment A, the results suggest that the AL and WM clustering offer better retrieval ability than NN. Assessment B renders the AL and WM clustering better than NN, when recall is considered more important than precision. The results imply that collections in the highly inflectional and agglutinative languages, such as Finnish, may be clustered as the collections in English, provided that documents are appropriately preprocessed.     

Creating Access to Invisible Special Collections: Using Participatory Management to Reduce a Backlog

The University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries used participatory management to reduce a special collections backlog. Without an increase in budget or staffing, technical and public services departments designed a pilot project to redeploy internal human resources in a collaborative manner. The process of backlog management is discussed.     

三个IT厂商酿成的惨痛教训

ｋｅｙｓｔｏｎｅ公司长期停滞的ＥＲＰ项目终于宣告成功，　系统将 １３０ 个厂房，全美国２０００ 多员工连接在一起。回首ｋｅｙｓｔｏｎｅ 信息化历程，其经验教训值得我们深思。     

Seeking Nettle Textiles – Utilizing a Combination of Microscopic Methods for Fibre Identification

Bast fibres have been commonly used as a textile material in Northern Europe since Neolithic times. However, the process of identifying the different species has been problematic, and many important questions related to their cultural history are still unanswered. For example, a modified Herzog test and the presence of calcium oxalate crystals have both been used in identification. In order to generate more reliable results, further research and advancement in multi-methodological methods is required. This paper introduces a combination of methods which can be used to identify and distinguish flax (Linum usitatissimum), hemp (Cannabis sativa), and stinging nettle (Urtica dioica). The research material consisted of reference fibres and 25 fibre samples obtained from 12 textiles assumed to be made of nettle. The textiles were from the Finno-Ugric and Historical Collections of The National Museum of Finland. The fibre samples were studied by observing the surface characteristics and cross sections with transmitted light microscopy, and by using a modified Herzog test with polarized light, in order to identify the distinguishable features in their morphological structures. The study showed that five out of 25 samples were cotton, 16 nettle, one flax, and one hemp. Findings from two samples were inconsistent. The results show that it is possible to distinguish common north European bast fibres from each other by using a combination of microscopic methods. Furthermore, by utilizing these combined methods, new and more reliable information could be obtained from historical ethnographic textiles, which creates new vistas for the interpretation of their cultural history.     

Research trends and collaborations by applied science researchers in South African universities of technology: 2007–2017

This paper analyses the publication patterns of researchers in the field of applied sciences at Universities of Technology in South Africa. Aspects investigated include publications in SCOPUS-listed journals; number of citations and countries of publication. Collaborative research patterns at national and international levels were also investigated. A bibliometric analysis approach was followed using SCOPUS as the main source of data and analysing the articles published in selected applied science disciplines. Results show that researchers in the field of applied sciences in universities of technology have increased their number of publications over the past 10?years and are also working in conjunction with other researchers both nationally and internationally. The analysis is an important addition to the field in South Africa which helps in measuring how institutions are positively responding to government incentives in research. The results are also important to information professionals who are increasingly playing an important role in research impact assessments.