What publishers can take away from the latest early career researcher research

Key points

• Early career researchers (ECRs) consider journals the central form of communication – but are concerned about pressure to publish.
• ECRs want to share but currently accept the closed publishing system because of the need to build a traditional reputation.
• ECRs know – and appear to care – little about publishers but trust them as publishing and reviewing facilitators.
• Editors are criticized for not managing peer review with better selection of reviewers.
• Megajournals are not seen as the future journal form and criticized for lack of selectivity.
• ECRs want open access/science in principle but are circumspect about their contribution to it.
• ResearchGate is a key force for change as ECRs consider it a mainstay communication and reputation platform.

     

Identifying top relevant dates for implicit time sensitive queries

Despite a clear improvement of search and retrieval temporal applications, current search engines are still mostly unaware of the temporal dimension. Indeed, in most cases, systems are limited to offering the user the chance to restrict the search to a particular time period or to simply rely on an explicitly specified time span. If the user is not explicit in his/her search intents (e.g., “philip seymour hoffman”) search engines may likely fail to present an overall historic perspective of the topic. In most such cases, they are limited to retrieving the most recent results. One possible solution to this shortcoming is to understand the different time periods of the query. In this context, most state-of-the-art methodologies consider any occurrence of temporal expressions in web documents and other web data as equally relevant to an implicit time sensitive query. To approach this problem in a more adequate manner, we propose in this paper the detection of relevant temporal expressions to the query. Unlike previous metadata and query log-based approaches, we show how to achieve this goal based on information extracted from document content. However, instead of simply focusing on the detection of the most obvious date we are also interested in retrieving the set of dates that are relevant to the query. Towards this goal, we define a general similarity measure that makes use of co-occurrences of words and years based on corpus statistics and a classification methodology that is able to identify the set of top relevant dates for a given implicit time sensitive query, while filtering out the non-relevant ones. Through extensive experimental evaluation, we mean to demonstrate that our approach offers promising results in the field of temporal information retrieval (T-IR), as demonstrated by the experiments conducted over several baselines on web corpora collections.     

Not so different after all: Malaysian researchers' cross‐discipline view of quality and trustworthiness in citation practices

This paper reports a survey on citation behaviour of Malaysian researchers. It is part of a wider study gauging quality and trustworthiness in scholarly communication in the emerging digital environment. The survey questionnaire was distributed between 1 October 2014 and 31 January 2015. A total of 391 respondents, from four research areas (humanities, life sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences) completed the questionnaire. The finding indicated that motivations for citing were complex and multi‐faceted, but in all four disciplines, researchers cite a work because they regard it as an authoritative and trustworthy source, which provides a context or building block to their own research. Although researchers have moved from a print‐based system to a digital one, it has not significantly changed the way they decide what to trust. Peer reviewed journals are still the most influential. Open access journals will be cited if they have been peer reviewed. Citing on the basis of high altmetrics and other social judgements, such as mentions, likes, and use, was not prevalent. Measures of establishing trust and authority do not seem to have changed profoundly in Malaysia.     

Predicting achievement of first semester university science students

This paper reports on 11 measures used as predictors of students' achievement in their first semester subjects. The students were enrolled in the same four core subjects of a university general science course. Although a number of statistically significant correlations were found, only one predictor variable, HSC aggregate mark, correlated significantly with each of the achievement variables. One predictor variable entered four of the achievement regression equations, while two variables entered the fifth, accounting for 34 to 54% of the variance. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A05A9011 00020     

Outside the library: Early career researchers and use of alternative information sources in pandemic times

Presents findings from a study into the attitudes and practices of pandemic-era early career researchers (ECRs) in regard to obtaining access to the formally published scholarly literature, which focused on alternative providers, notably ResearchGate and Sci-Hub. The study is a part of the Harbingers project that has been exploring the work lives and scholarly communication practices of ECRs in pre-pandemic times and during the pandemic, and utilizes data from two rounds of interviews with around 170 ECRs from the sciences and social sciences in eight countries. Findings show that alternative providers, as represented by ResearchGate and Sci-Hub, have become established and appear to be gaining ground. However, there are considerable country- and discipline-associated differences. ECRs' country-specific level of usage of the alternative providers is partly traceable to the adequacy of library provisions, although there are other factors at play in shaping ECRs' attitudes and practices, most notably convenience and time saving, as well as the fact that these platforms have become embedded in the scholarly dashboard. There is a dearth of evidence of the impact of the pandemic on ECRs' ways of obtaining scholarly papers.     

The English Translation of Arabic Puns in the Holy Quran

The pun is a tricky use of a word or phrase which has very different meanings that are closely interrelated, or of words with the same sound but different meanings. The Pun is a term with a dual meaning: “close” using obvious reference, and “far” using obscure reference. The hidden is usually meant. The close meaning is the sooner that comes to the listener’s mind. However, the speaker targets at the far one yet use the close to hide it. Translating the Quran text always raises several serious challenges in translation; these challenges are due to the different translations of puns and the misinterpretations between the intended meanings of a pun with their basic concepts, which could result in a certain amount of ambiguity. The study examines the Quranic corpus and its three versions of English translations. The study utilizes the typology of Delabastita?s for horizontal puns, Nida’s techniques of dynamic and formal equivalent and Newmark’s translation methods. This research attempts to investigate the semantic meaning of puns in the Quran translation and to define the translation techniques applied in translating the Quranic puns from Arabic into English.