Book reviews

^cAbd al‐Malik b. Habib. Kitāb al‐Ta'rij (La historia). Edición y estudio por Jorge Aguadé. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas & Instituto de Cooperación con el Mundo Arabe, 1991 (Fuentes Arabico‐Hispanas, 1). 163 + 224 pp. [Arabic title: Kltāb al‐Ta'tikh]

Kedar, Benjamin Z., ed. The Horns of Hattin. Jerusalem and London: Yad Izhak Ben‐Zvi, Israel Exploration Society and Variorum 1992. 368 pp., 12 plates; $74.75 (cloth).

Köprülü, Mehmed Fuad. The Seljuks of Anatolia: Their History and Culture According to Local Muslim Sources. Translated and edited by Gary Leiser. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1992. xi +101 pp., $22.00 (cloth).

Cameron, Averil and Conrad, Lawrence I., eds. The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East: Problems in the Literary Source Material (Papers in the First Workshop on Late Antiquity and Early Islam). Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1992. xiv + 428pp., 12 plates; $29.25 (cloth).

Vereno, Ingolf. Studien zum ältesten alchemistischen Schrifttum. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1992 (Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, 155). 414pp.

Tolan, John. Petrus Alfonsi and his Medieval Readers. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1993. xv + 288pp., $34.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper).

Lassner, Jacob. Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994. 281 pp., $19.95 (paper), $49.95 (cloth).

Menocal, María Rosa. Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994. xv + 295pp., $34.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).

Massignon, Louis. The Passion of al‐Hallāj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam. Translated and edited by Herbert Mason. Abridged edition, Bollingen Series XCVIII. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. xxxi + 293pp.

Viguera Molins, Maria Jesús. El Islam en Aragón. Saragossa: Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada, 1995 (Colección “Mariano de Pano y Ruata”, 9), 174 pp., 182 ills. in colour, maps, diagrams, charts etc No price stated.     

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.     

科学博物馆与科学中心——发展历史及其根源①

本文以科学博物馆和科学中心的发展阶段为线索,综述了几个世纪以来科学传播的历史发展,阐述了科学实践如何嵌入到博物馆的展览实践之中并从中发展起来,以及关于科学在社会中的地位的观念变化如何在科学博物馆和科学中心得到反映,还展现了日益受到关注的科学传播如何在科学博物馆和科学中心层面体现出以公众需求为本。     

Runaway Train: Ex Machina and the Rebel Girls

Courtship is a fertile setting for culturally defined strategies. A common form of competition is criticizing the other group for being inadequate mates. Stories about romance between human beings and non-human participants allow such criticism. Movies about men finding mechanical partners are common. Non-human females are seen as more satisfactory than women, especially when women are transforming their roles to be less subservient.     

Questioner or question: Predicting the response rate in social question and answering on Sina Weibo

With the noted popularity of social networking sites, people increasingly rely on these social networks to address their information needs. Although social question and answering is potentially an important venue seeking information online, it, unfortunately, suffers from a problem of low response rate, with the majority of questions receiving no response. To understand why the response rate of social question and answering is low and hopefully to increase it in the future, this research analyzes extrinsic factors that may influence the response probability of questions posted on Sina Weibo. We propose 17 influential factors from 2 different perspectives: the content of the question, and the characteristics of the questioner. We also train a prediction model to forecast a question's likelihood of being responded based on the proposed features We test our predictive model on more than 60,000 real-world questions posted on Weibo, which generate more than 600,000 responses. Findings show that a Weibo's question answerability is primarily contingent on the questioner versus the question. Our findings indicate that using appreciation emojis can increase a question's response probability, whereas the use of hashtags negatively influences the chances of receiving answers. Our contribution is in providing insights for the design and development of future social question and answering tools, as well as for enhancing social network users’ collaboration in supporting social information seeking activities.