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.     

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.     

Design and evaluation of a personal digital assistant- based alerting service for clinicians.

PURPOSE: This study describes the system architecture and user acceptance of a suite of programs that deliver information about newly updated library resources to clinicians' personal digital assistants (PDAs). DESCRIPTION: Participants received headlines delivered to their PDAs alerting them to new books, National Guideline Clearinghouse guidelines, Cochrane Reviews, and National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Alerts, as well as updated content in UpToDate, Harrison's Online, Scientific American Medicine, and Clinical Evidence. Participants could request additional information for any of the headlines, and the information was delivered via e-mail during their next synchronization. Participants completed a survey at the conclusion of the study to gauge their opinions about the service. RESULTS/OUTCOME: Of the 816 headlines delivered to the 16 study participants' PDAs during the project, Scientific American Medicine generated the highest proportion of headline requests at 35%. Most users of the PDA Alerts software reported that they learned about new medical developments sooner than they otherwise would have, and half reported that they learned about developments that they would not have heard about at all. While some users liked the PDA platform for receiving headlines, it seemed that a Web database that allowed tailored searches and alerts could be configured to satisfy both PDA-oriented and e-mail-oriented users.     

Web usage mining at an academic health sciences library: an exploratory study.

OBJECTIVES: This paper explores the potential of multinomial logistic regression analysis to perform Web usage mining for an academic health sciences library Website. METHODS: Usage of database-driven resource gateway pages was logged for a six-month period, including information about users' network addresses, referring uniform resource locators (URLs), and types of resource accessed. RESULTS: It was found that referring URL did vary significantly by two factors: whether a user was on-campus and what type of resource was accessed. CONCLUSIONS: Although the data available for analysis are limited by the nature of the Web and concerns for privacy, this method demonstrates the potential for gaining insight into Web usage that supplements Web log analysis. It can be used to improve the design of static and dynamic Websites today and could be used in the design of more advanced Web systems in the future.     

Character N-Gram Tokenization for European Language Text Retrieval

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum has encouraged research in text retrieval methods for numerous European languages and has developed durable test suites that allow language-specific techniques to be investigated and compared. The labor associated with crafting a retrieval system that takes advantage of sophisticated linguistic methods is daunting. We examine whether language-neutral methods can achieve accuracy comparable to language-specific methods with less concomitant software complexity. Using the CLEF 2002 test set we demonstrate empirically how overlapping character n-gram tokenization can provide retrieval accuracy that rivals the best current language-specific approaches for European languages. We show that n = 4 is a good choice for those languages, and document the increased storage and time requirements of the technique. We report on the benefits of and challenges posed by n-grams, and explain peculiarities attendant to bilingual retrieval. Our findings demonstrate clearly that accuracy using n-gram indexing rivals or exceeds accuracy using unnormalized words, for both monolingual and bilingual retrieval.     

Scholarly communication in the digital environment: what do authors want?

This article reports on a large‐scale international survey of authors' perception and experience of the journals system conducted by ciber in association with National Opinion Polls (NOP). It explores the factors that inform authors' decisions where to publish and, in particular, which groups of readers they perceive to be most important. It probes readership behaviour and the values that underlie authors' attitudes towards copyright and emerging business models, notably open access. It is concluded that many aspects of author behaviour are highly conservative and that a significant shift towards open access is, in the short to medium term, highly unlikely.     

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.     

Online Celebrity Bashing: Wrecking Ball or Good for You? Adolescent Girls’ Attitudes Toward the Media and Public Bashing of Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez

Journalists and readers of celebrity news regularly bash celebrities online, a behavior that is easily accepted among adolescents. This study investigates whether these attitudes of acceptance differ according to the perpetrator of the bashing (media versus public) and the likeability of the involved celebrity (liked versus disliked). Using a vignette study, we examine adolescent girls’ attitudes toward media (journalists’) and public (readers’) bashing of a generally disliked celebrity (Miley Cyrus) and a generally liked celebrity (Selena Gomez). All participants read an identical negative news story (media bashing) and two related negative reader comments (public bashing). Participants were randomly assigned to read this information about either Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez. Results of a mixed-design ANOVA showed that the girls had less negative attitudes toward media bashing compared with public bashing. Moreover, they more easily accepted the bashing of a disliked celebrity than the bashing of a liked celebrity.     

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.