Editorial

This issue of the Journal contains three interesting articlesabout central aspects of public opinion research, as well asan equal number of research notes that reflect the range oftopics that interest all public opinion researchers. Toshio Takeshita takes a turn at reconceptualizing agenda-settingstudies, using a taxonomy     

The use of personal digital assistants in the health sciences: results of a survey.

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study is to determine how personal digital assistants (PDAs) are used on an academic health sciences campus to define the level of training and support the library can provide to the students and faculty. METHOD: A Web-based questionnaire was developed. A total of 1,538 health sciences faculty and residents were sent an email message requesting participation. Data from the returned surveys were analyzed with SPSS. RESULTS: Sixty-one percent of survey respondents used PDAs. The address book, date book, and calculator were the most common uses reported for PDAs. Residents also reported a high use of drug databases on their PDAs. Most survey respondents indicated they would like to learn more about clinical resources for PDAs. CONCLUSIONS: Many opportunities exist for librarians to provide training and support for PDAs, in addition to evaluation and promotion of clinical software for PDAs.     

Online journals' impact on the citation patterns of medical faculty.

PURPOSE: The purpose was to determine the impact of online journals on the citation patterns of medical faculty. This study looked at whether researchers were more likely to limit the resources they consulted and cited to those journals available online rather than those only in print. SETTING: Faculty publications from the college of medicine at a large urban university were examined for this study. The faculty publications from a regional medical college of the same university were also examined in the study. The number of online journals available for faculty, staff, and students at this institution has increased from an initial core of 15 online journals in 1998 to over 11,000 online journals in 2004. METHODOLOGY: Searches by author affiliation were performed in the Web of Science to find all articles written by faculty members in the college of medicine at the selected institution. Searches were conducted for the following years: 1993, 1996, 1999, and 2002. Cited references from each faculty-authored article were recorded, and the corresponding cited journals were coded into four categories based on their availability at the institution in this study: print only, print and online, online only, and not owned. Results were analyzed using SPSS. RESULTS: The number of journals cited per year continued to increase from 1993 to 2002. The results did not indicate that researchers were more likely to cite online journals or were less likely to cite journals only in print. At the regional location where the number of print-only journals was minimal, use of the print-only journals did decrease in 2002, although not significantly. CONCLUSION/DISCUSSION: It is possible that electronic access to information (i.e., online databases) has had a positive impact on the number of articles faculty will cite. Results of this study suggest, at this point, that faculty are still accessing the print-only collection, at least for research purposes, and are therefore not sacrificing quality for convenience.     

Automated Classification to Improve the Efficiency of Weeding Library Collections

Previous studies have shown that weeding a library collection benefits patrons and increases circulation rates. However, the time required to review the collection and make weeding decisions presents a formidable obstacle. This study empirically evaluated methods for automatically classifying weeding candidates. A data set containing 80,346 items from a large-scale weeding project running from 2011 to 2014 at Wesleyan University was used to train six machine learning classifiers to predict a weeding decision of either ‘Keep’ or ‘Weed’ for each candidate. The study found statistically significant agreement (p?=?0.001) between classifier predictions and librarian judgments for all classifier types. The naive Bayes and linear support vector machine classifiers had the highest recall (fraction of items weeded by librarians that were identified by the algorithm), while the k-nearest-neighbor classifier had the highest precision (fraction of recommended candidates that librarians had chosen to weed). The variables found to be most relevant were: librarian and faculty votes for retention, item age, and the presence of copies in other libraries.     

Mandatory Student Fees and the Academic Library

As academic libraries' budgets remain flat while their expenditures rise, library leaders must seek out alternative sources of funding. One option is a mandatory student fee dedicated to the library. This article presents the results of a survey of 152 deans and directors of public R1 and R2 research universities that were asked whether their libraries benefit from mandatory student fees. While a library-specific fee is unusual, nearly half of responding libraries are eligible to receive some portion of another mandatory student fee. Study results can serve as evidence for libraries preparing to make a case for the significant, positive impact possible through even a modest library fee.     

Russian Science Citation Index: Areas for Development Identified by Active Users

The current state of the Russian Science Citation Index is analyzed. Several areas for its further development identified by long-standing active users, such as data searching, refinement, and storage; current user alerts; data input with the Science Index license; patent information; and the application programming interface (API) are investigated.     

Historical case study: A research strategy for diachronic analysis

History and case study are two diachronic research strategies commonly used to study political discourse as it relates to public libraries. Though suitable for some studies, these strategies are inexhaustive. A new, blended research strategy is therefore needed to accomplish what history and case study alone cannot. This hybrid strategy, historical case study, must analyze cases from the distant past to the present, using eclectic data sources, in order to produce both idiographic and nomothetic knowledge. To develop historical case study, the universal components of diachronic analysis are first identified. A general research design for historical case study is then introduced. Finally, historical case study is tested in an actual research project. Findings from this project reveal that historical case study is a successful diachronic research strategy. Historical case study is a new and valuable research design suitable for addressing questions related to change, continuity, development, and evolution.