Open archives and their impact on journal cancellations

We report on a research study commissioned by ALPSP into the factors affecting journal cancellations and, in particular, on the impact of the free availability of journal articles via open access repositories.     

Quality and relevance of domain-specific search: A case study in mental health

When searching for health information, results quality can be judged against available scientific evidence: Do search engines return advice consistent with evidence based medicine? We compared the performance of domain-specific health and depression search engines against a general-purpose engine (Google) on both relevance of results and quality of advice. Over 101 queries, to which the term ‘depression’ was added if not already present, Google returned more relevant results than those of the domain-specific engines. However, over the 50 treatment-related queries, Google returned 70 pages recommending for or against a well studied treatment, of which 19 strongly disagreed with the scientific evidence. A domain-specific index of 4 sites selected by domain experts was only wrong in 5 of 50 recommendations. Analysis suggests a tension between relevance and quality. Indexing more pages can give a greater number of relevant results, but selective inclusion can give better quality.     

概说虚拟存储

虚拟是今天存储业界的热门话题,对数据的管理就是对存储的管理。大小客户如何利用虚拟存储解决方案并通过存储软件和存储硬件自身内部的分区来最大程度地利用自身的存储基础架构呢?与此同时,客户们仍在问究竟什么是虚拟存储呢?如何实现这些技术呢?企业自身的基础架构是否适合实现存储虚拟化呢?     

Back to Reality: The Complex Relationship Between Patterns in Immigration News Coverage and Real-World Developments in Dutch and Flemish Newspapers (1999–2015)

Although prior studies investigating immigration news typically documented a dominant focus on negativity and threats, only limited empirical research is available, which scrutinizes the way real-world developments affect these patterns in immigration news. This study aims to fill this void. First, we report results of a large-scale and longitudinal content analysis (N = 4,340,757) of trends in immigration news coverage in two Western European cases, Flanders (the northern, Dutch-speaking, largest region of Belgium) and the Netherlands, from 1999 to 2015. Both the salience of immigration as a news topic on itself and its linkages with three prominent issues (i.e., crime, terrorism, and socioeconomic issues) are explored. Second, this study builds on previous insights by comparing dynamics in immigration news to real-world events and developments. Overall, the results show that the linkage of immigration to issues of crime, terrorism, and the economy in Flemish and Dutch newspapers was considerable throughout the 17-year period under study. Yet there is limited evidence for a close relationship between news and real-life developments; hence, trends in immigration news seem largely unaffected by trends in society.     

A SYSTEMATIC FRAMEWORK FOR ADDRESSING TREATMENT INTEGRITY IN SCHOOL SETTINGS

School psychologists are tasked with ensuring treatment integrity because the level of intervention implementation affects decisions about student progress. Treatment integrity includes multiple dimensions that may impact the effectiveness of an intervention including adherence, dosage, quality, and engagement. Unfortunately, treatment integrity is not routinely monitored in consultation. A systematic framework is needed to better prepare practitioners to assess, analyze, and intervene when there are treatment integrity failures. A framework for monitoring and improving multiple dimensions of treatment integrity in natural settings is proposed to provide guidance to practitioners through two phases. The first phase focuses on improving initial treatment integrity and the second phase outlines a problem‐solving process for improving treatment integrity.     

A Process for Reviewing and Evaluating Generated Test Items

Testing organization needs large numbers of high‐quality items due to the proliferation of alternative test administration methods and modern test designs. But the current demand for items far exceeds the supply. Test items, as they are currently written, evoke a process that is both time‐consuming and expensive because each item is written, edited, and reviewed by a subject‐matter expert. One promising approach that may address this challenge is with automatic item generation. Automatic item generation combines cognitive and psychometric modeling practices to guide the production of items that are generated with the aid of computer technology. The purpose of this study is to describe and illustrate a process that can be used to review and evaluate the quality of the generated item by focusing on the content and logic specified within the item generation procedure. We illustrate our process using an item development example from mathematics drawn from the Common Core State Standards and from surgical education drawn from the health sciences domain.