Reference

TELECOMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS AND SERVICES DIRECTORY —ISSUE TWO, edited by John Schmittroth Jr. and Martin Connors (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1984--$170.00 for the first edition, being issued in three parts, paper)

THE BOOK PUBLISHING ANNUAL: HIGHLIGHTS, ANALYSES & TRENDS (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1984---$49.95)

THE COMPUTER AND BUSINESS EQUIPMENT INDUSTRY MARKETING DATA BOOK (Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association, 311 First Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001--price not given, paper)

THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC IMPACT OF VIDEOTEX, TELETEXT AND COMPUTERS: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, by Roberto Valdez, et al., and THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC IMPACT OF TELEPHONES by Elena Pernia, et al. (Honolulu, Hi.: East-West Center, 1984--price not given, but cost covers reproduction and postage, paper)

WHAT'S IN PRINT: THE SUBJECT GUIDE TO MICROCOMPUTER MAGAZINES, by W.H. Wallace (Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania: TAB Books, 1984--price not given, paper)

DICTIONARY OF NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ACRONYMS, by M. Gordon, et al. (London: Kogan Page/Detroit: Gale Research, 1984--$56.00)

THE VIDEOTEX MARKETPLACE (Bethesda, Md.: Phillips Publishing, 1984--$97.00, paper)

A VIDEOTEX/TELETEXT BIBLIOGRAPHY (Videotex Industry Association, 1901 Ft. Myer Drive, Suite 200, Rosslyn, VA 22209--$25.00, paper)

AUDIO VIDEO MARKET PLACE: A MULTIMEDIA GUIDE 1984 (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1984--$45.00 paper)

THE INTERACTIVE CABLE TV HANDBOOK (Bethesda, Md.: Phillips Publishing, 1984--$97.00, paper)

COMPUTERIZED LITERATURE SEARCHING: RESEARCH STRATEGIES AND DATABASES, by Charles L. Gilreath (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984--$25.00)     

Darwin's Down house

Six years after his return from the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin moved his family to the country, where he spent the rest of his life conducting experiments, writing, and raising a family. English Heritage recently purchased Down House and is restoring the house and grounds to look as they did during Darwin's life.     

A Study of General Education Astronomy Students’ Understandings of Cosmology. Part V. The Effects of a New Suite of Cosmology Lecture-Tutorials on Students’ Conceptual Knowledge

This is the final paper in a five-paper series describing our national study of the teaching and learning of cosmology in general education astronomy college-level courses. A significant portion of this work was dedicated to the development of five new Lecture-Tutorials that focus on addressing the conceptual and reasoning difficulties that our research shows students have with frequently taught cosmology topics, such as the expansion of the universe, the Big Bang, and dark matter. We conducted a systematic investigation of the implementation of these new Lecture-Tutorials and resulting learning gains in order to test the efficacy of these new Lecture-Tutorials. Our investigation included classroom observations, results from pre–post testing using four conceptual cosmology surveys, and comparisons between classes in terms of the class time spent on cosmology topics and other instructional strategies used to teach cosmology. We used this combination of qualitative and quantitative research results to evaluate the conceptual understandings of students who used the new cosmology Lecture-Tutorials compared to those students who did not. The analysis of our data shows that, in many cases, classrooms that used the cosmology Lecture-Tutorials saw a greater increase in their students’ conceptual cosmology knowledge compared to classrooms that did not use the cosmology Lecture-Tutorials. However, our results also indicate how instructors implement the Lecture-Tutorials into their classrooms strongly influences their students’ learning gains.     

Developing female middle-managers in Australian universities

Universities should be developing female middle-managers for reasons of gender balance (Aitkin in The Last Boilerhouse Address, Canberra University 2001), the skills shortage, pending mass retirements (Chesterman in Not doable jobs?’ Exploring senior women’s attitudes to leadership roles in universities. Women’s Higher Education Network Conference, Bolton, 2004) and sustainable, post-bureaucratic organizations (Kira and Forslin in J Organ Change Manage 21(1): 76–91, 2008). Investigating the learning and development of women managers is timely. Research assumes that women in academe have the qualifications, experience and skills for management. Is this the case? The paper provides the first national demographic and development profile of women middle-managers in academic and the research-neglected administrative streams in Australian universities, with a sample of 342 women (46% response rate). Age is a particularly notable demographic with the majority of academics within 5–10 years of retirement. Nearly 60% of academics experienced few current development opportunities and their discipline-based qualifications did not prepare them for management. However, a greater number of administrative managers received relevant preparatory training. Once in their current management roles women experienced markedly fewer development opportunities. If higher education institutions are learning organizations, continuous learning should be evident (Watkins in Adv Dev Hum Res 7(3): 414, 2005). Our research shows this is far from the case.     

Modeling a century of citation distributions

The prevalence of uncited papers or of highly cited papers, with respect to the bulk of publications, provides important clues as to the dynamics of scientific research. Using 25 million papers and 600 million references from the Web of Science over the 1900–2006 period, this paper proposes a simple model based on a random selection process to explain the “uncitedness” phenomenon and its decline over the years. We show that the proportion of cited papers is a function of (1) the number of articles available (the competing papers), (2) the number of citing papers and (3) the number of references they contain. Using uncitedness as a departure point, we demonstrate the utility of the stretched-exponential function and a form of the Tsallis q-exponential function to fit complete citation distributions over the 20th century. As opposed to simple power-law fits, for instance, both these approaches are shown to be empirically well-grounded and robust enough to better understand citation dynamics at the aggregate level. On the basis of these models, we provide quantitative evidence and provisional explanations for an important shift in citation practices around 1960. We also propose a revision of the “citation classic” category as a set of articles which is clearly distinguishable from the rest of the field.