Information Research Weblog

A small Christmas present to some of our authors - and, eventually, all of them. As a result of an earlier message, I looked at the practice of Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and liked the idea of showing how many citations a paper had in Google Scholar. That journal obviously uses scripts of some kind to access the Google site and deliver the results automatically, but I've achieved the same end with a more tedious route. I've started with the papers in volume 8 and am up to volume 9 no. 1. At the end of each paper, following the section, 'How to cite this paper' authors will now find a link 'Articles citing this paper, according to Google Scholar' - click on the link and you get the Scholar output. I've put this link on all papers for which citations were listed - if, at this point, you don't have any citations, there's no link (of course this may change). When our Technical Editor has a little more time, I'll ask him if something automatic can be done so that the feature is simply part of the template for papers.

I'm also gradually adding the links to Google Scholar and also to Google at the end of the reference list to enable readers to search quickly for related material. I've added Google for two reasons - first, some topics have much more material available on the Web in general: for example, the links on Kourteli's paper on environmental scanning in Greek companies produced 91 items in Google Scholar and 865 in Google. The other reason is that I have signed up to Google's Adsense programme, which means that, if readers click on any of the ads on the results page, a minuscule proportion of a cent wends its way to the Information Research funds. Who knows, if we get up to a million regular readers, the journal could be self-sustaining :-)

And - in case I don't get back to the Weblog before the 25th - I trust that you'll all have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and successful New Year