State of the art of expert searching: results of a Medical Library Association survey.

OBJECTIVES: Medical Library Association (MLA) members were surveyed to gather background about the current state of expert searching in institutions. The survey results were intended to guide the recommendations of the Task Force on Expert Searching for promoting the importance of expert searching and implementing those recommendations. METHODS: MLA members were surveyed, and data obtained from the survey were compiled and analyzed to answer three general questions: what is the perceived value of searching skills to the institution, how do health sciences librarians maintain and improve their searching skills, and how are searching services promoted and/or mandated in the institution. RESULTS: There were 256 responses to the survey. Over 95% of the respondents saw their expert-searching skills were of value to their institutions, primarily through performing mediated searches and search consultations. Over 83% of the respondents believed that their searching skills had improved over the past 10 years. Most indicated that continued training was very important in maintaining and improving their skills. Respondents promoted searching services most frequently through orientations, brochures, and the libraries' Web pages. No respondent's institution mandated expert searching. Less than 2% of respondents' institutions had best practice guidelines related to expert searching, and only about 8% had guidelines or policies that identified situations where expert searching was recommended. CONCLUSIONS: The survey supports the belief that health sciences librarians still play a valuable role in searching, particularly in answering questions about treatment options and in providing education. It also highlights the need for more expert searching courses. There has been minimal discussion about the perceived need for expert-searching guidelines in the institutions represented by survey respondents.     

Google Scholar's Coverage of the Engineering Literature 10 years Later

In 2008 Meier and Conkling first tested Google Scholar's coverage of the engineering literature against citations gathered from the Compendex database. Since that time, other studies have used the same methodology and found improvement in Google Scholar's coverage. This study uses engineering dissertations from Proquest Dissertations & Theses to create a data set of citations for the comparison of fee-based databases, Compendex and Scopus, against Google Scholar. From 1950 to 2017 Google Scholar outperformed both Compendex and Scopus in discoverability of citations in nine engineering subjects. These results have implications for collection management and information literacy program planning for librarians.     

The Professional Career and Life of Valerie Bross

ABSTRACT

The career path and significant professional accomplishments of librarian Valerie Bross (1954–2016) are described in this article. The awards and recognition she received are recounted and the influence of outside activities on her career is assessed. An attempt is made to capture what she was like as a professional, as well as what her unique characteristics were. A bibliography of her writings and a photograph are included.     

Why Users Share the News: A Theory of Reasoned Action-Based Study on the Antecedents of News-Sharing Behavior

Social media have become an integral part of online news use, affecting how individuals find, consume, and share news. By applying the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), this study investigates the effects of motives, attitude, and intention on news-sharing behavior among German social media users (n = 333). Findings show that news-sharing attitude and subjective norms have a positive effect on news-sharing intention, which in turn has a positive effect on actual news-sharing behavior. Taken together, we see that a new media behavior in the early phases of its societal diffusion—like social media news sharing in Germany in 2015—can mainly be explained by a rational choice logic and is rooted in the motives of socializing and information seeking. This finding thus reflects the double nature of social media as a means for both information retrieval and social grooming.     

The Role of Consistency in Detecting Deception: The Superiority of Correspondence over Coherence

Inconsistency is often considered an indication of deceit. The conceptualization of consistency used in deception research, however, has not made a clear distinction between two concepts long differentiated by philosophers: coherence and correspondence. The existing literature suggests that coherence is not generally useful for deception detection. Correspondence, however, appears to be quite useful. The present research developed a model of how correspondence is utilized to make judgments, and this article reports on four studies designed to elaborate on the model. The results suggest that judges attend strongly to correspondence and that they do so in an additive fashion. As noncorrespondent information accumulates, an increasingly smaller proportion of judges make truthful assessments of guilty suspects. This work provides a basic framework for examining how information is utilized to make deception judgments and forms the correspondence and coherence module of truth-default theory.     

基于专利数据的技术融合研究综述

[目的/意义]基于专利数据开展技术融合研究是技术融合研究的主要方式和热点方向,面向为技术融合后续研究工作开展提供参考和启发的目标,对国内外基于专利数据的技术融合研究现状进行较为全面的综述.[方法/过程]将已有研究按研究内容划分为技术融合测度及预测方法研究、特定领域/多领域间/全领域的技术融合态势测度及趋势预测、技术融合...     

A CRISPR/Cas12a-empowered surface plasmon resonance platform for rapid and specific diagnosis of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was partially due to the challenge of identifying asymptomatic and presymptomatic carriers of the virus, and thus highlights a strong motivation for diagnostics with high sensitivity that can be rapidly deployed. On the other hand, several concerning SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron, are required to be identified as soon as the samples are identified as ‘positive’. Unfortunately, a traditional PCR test does not allow their specific identification. Herein, for the first time, we have developed MOPCS (Methodologies of Photonic CRISPR Sensing), which combines an optical sensing technology-surface plasmon resonance (SPR) with the ‘gene scissors’ clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) technique to achieve both high sensitivity and specificity when it comes to measurement of viral variants. MOPCS is a low-cost, CRISPR/Cas12a-system-empowered SPR gene-detecting platform that can analyze viral RNA, without the need for amplification, within 38 min from sample input to results output, and achieve a limit of detection of 15 fM. MOPCS achieves a highly sensitive analysis of SARS-CoV-2, and mutations appear in variants B.1.617.2 (Delta), B.1.1.529 (Omicron) and BA.1 (a subtype of Omicron). This platform was also used to analyze some recently collected patient samples from a local outbreak in China, identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This innovative CRISPR-empowered SPR platform will further contribute to the fast, sensitive and accurate detection of target nucleic acid sequences with single-base mutations.