It's more fun than KFC :-)

 

 

The dots represent hits on the top page of the journal. The map is regularly updated and you can see it by scrolling down to the bottom of the page at http://InformationR.net/ir/

Peter Suber's Open Access Newsletter is always worth a read - and worth subscribing to, and this month's issue is particularly interesting, devoted as it is to the issue of quality in OA journals. Peter demolishes a number of myths, largely put about by the commercial publishers and provides links to lots and lots of evidence. If you are at all interested in open access, Peter's newsletter is a 'must read'.

Noted on the BOAI discussion list, this interesting report from Australia. (But does it really need a url of 206 characters?! Thank heaven for TinyURL)

The bottom line is that it would cost AuD10 million (i.e., a little under £4 million, or $7.5 million, or €6 million) to set up an Australia-wide archiving system for scholarly papers, but would deliver:

A benefit/cost ratio of 51 for the modelled impacts of open access to public sector research

Typically, however, the report considers only two alternatives as 'open access' - the 'author pays' model and the institutional repository. As long as committees of this kind are blind to the potential of subsidised journals, they will miss the opportunity of true open access.

For some time now I've had a volunteer proof-reader, RaeAnn Hughes from Seattle. However, Rae has been very ill and my last messages were returned by her e-mail service saying, No such user - I fear the worst.

Which leaves me looking for a replacement (or even two to share the load)

I need, as the subject line suggests, a pedantic nit-picker: someone who can work in English rather than American, who has a sense of good writing style, knows the intricacies of APA 5th ed. for citations and references and who can work to deadlines. And - if this wasn't enough, can do it without pay, since all work done for Information Research is voluntary, as the income is zero!

Also needed, a volunteer html-tidier: although we have a template and pretty good instructions on preparing papers, many authors don't get it exactly right. It takes me between half a day and a day per paper to sort out the code. A volunteer to help with this would be welcome: anyone who enjoys boring, tedious work would be a natural for the job.

All offers (I'm sure I'll be inundated!) to wilsontd@gmail.com

There's a very interesting item on 'hybrid open access journals' in the ever-useful newsletter on open access publishing produced by Peter Suber. The hybrid OA journal is one that provides open access on the payment of a fee by the author (or someone whom the author persuades to pay!). As Peter says, for the publishers it is a win-win situation - they still have their subscription income, so if the take-up is small (as I suspect it will be), they don't have a problem and if the take-up is large they are being paid twice (once by subscription, once by the author), unless they reduce their subscription rates along with the increased take-up by authors - NOT a likely scenario in my opinion.

Personally, I regard these moves by publishers as nothing more than window-dressing, a PR move against the OA movement, which, eventually, will amount to very little in actual access to the research literature. Pressures from funding agencies and, ultimately, governments (which have so far shown little interest in pitching against the publishers) will demand true OA, not some hybrid, which I don't regards as being OA under any proper definition.

This from Charles Bailey's excellent 'Current Cites'

Sale, Arthur. "The Acquisition of Open Access Research Articles" University of Tasmania EPrints Repository (2006). - In this e-print, Sale examines what happened when the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, the Queensland University of Technology, and the School of Computing at the University of Tasmania mandated the deposit of article e-prints. Based on an analysis of the deposit data at these academic units, Sale concludes: "What can be estimated is that a university-wide mandatory deposit policy takes at least three years to be (say) 80% effective, if it is the authors themselves who provide their documents. If the repository managers adopt a proactive policy of actively uploading missing documents on behalf of the authors, as at CERN http://public.web.cern.ch/ then the apparent transition will be faster, but the rise of self-archiving might be slowed due to lack of direct author incentive and involvement. Repository managerial promotion and assistance, such as that undertaken by the Library in QUT, matters very significantly under a mandatory policy, although under voluntary policies it seems to be largely a waste of money. . ." - CB

My thanks to Associate Editor, Terry Brooks for drawing my attention to WebCite, a newish service that fills a major gap for electronic journal editors - the problem of the dead link. WebCite will look up a non-journal Web page that you have referenced, cache it and give you a new, permanent URL so that the page is retrieved from the cache, rather than from the original source. Many news pages and company pages disappear from the Web or are moved to undiscoverable locations and are, to all intents and purposes, 'dead'.

I am asking all authors to review their papers and, where a linked page has a probability of disappearing from the Web, to use WebCite to creat a permanent URL. This will make life much easier for readers!

The following information is going into the Instructions for Authors tonight:

WebCite  WebCite is a free service that enables you to replace URLs likely to 'die' with URLs that are permanent links to cached versions of the same page. Please use this service for any URLs that are of this character such as links to news pages, company pages, Weblogs, etc..

You can use WebCite by going to the site and clicking on:

1. 'Archive' on the navigation bar at the top of the page. Enter a URL that you wish to archive and your e-mail address. The page will be archived and you will be sent a URL to use in the reference list; or
2. 'Bookmarklet' and following the instructions for creating a JavaScript bookmarklet; or
2. 'Comb' and uploading the file you wish to have reviewed for the identification of appropriate links. (In my experience it is best to click on 'Consider all links' and then select those that you wish to have cached.) WebCite will replace all of your URLs with permanent links to the cached pages.

Use the permanent URL only in the 'live' link to the page, citing the original page URL as part of the reference, thus:

Chris. (2003, March 24). Why a search engine crawler is not at all like Lynx. Message posted to http://www.searchguild.com (Search engine optimization (SEO) forums). Retrieved 8 June, 2006 from http://www.searchguild.com/tpage283-0.html

If you roll your mouse pointer over the live link, you will see that it points to www.webcitation.org, while the original URL is given below.

Quotation from an extract:

Dr. Liolios: At MEDNET 2005, you reported some interesting data on the citation rate of OA articles, showing that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles.

Dr. Eysenbach: The OA study was a longitudinal bibliometric analysis of a cohort of OA and non-OA articles. While there have been other studies before that claimed that OA articles are more frequently cited, these previous studies all suffer from huge methodologic problems because they just compared crude citation counts of openly accessible articles on the Internet. You can’t just compare OA articles vs non-OA articles without adjusting for the many different confounders. To my knowledge, the study I presented is the first rigorous study that applied multiple regression techniques to adjust for the many possible confounders -- and it still found, after adjustment, that OA articles are 3 times more likely to be cited than non-OA articles in the first 10-16 months after publication. This is clear evidence of the fact that OA accelerates the speed with which new findings are taken up by peers. It ultimately speeds up the pace of progress and knowledge translation....

Read the extract at Peter Suber's site

My only critical comment on this quotation is that Dr. Eysenbach, like many others, assumes that there are only two alternatives: author pays, and subscription journals. There are three, the third being the subsidised journal - like Information Research. Until the subsidy model is recognised as a viable 'third way', the goal of true open access will not be achieved.

Later in the extract, Dr. Eysenbach noted that the notion that OA journals were likely to have less rigorous peer-review processes was nonsense: he might actually have said that they were likely to be higher, especially in relation to the subsidised, free journal. A print journal has pages to fill, whereas a free, subsidised, electronic-only OA journal can be highly selective, since it can publish several papers or one paper in an issue.

The latest piece of nonsense to be perpetrated by the commercial world against the world of open availability of information is the action by the business yellow pages company Yell.com against the open access provider of the same kind of information, Yellowikis

This came to me via a BBC news broadcast, which included an interview with the daughter of the founder of Yellowikis (Paul Youlten) and with a lawyer unconnected with either - who seemed very keen, however, to find in favour of Yell (so much for the disinterested observer!).

Yell's case, apparently, is based on the premise that the user of Yellowikis may be so confused as to mistake it for Yell - such a user would have to be well into his or her cups to make that mistake! The two sites have practically nothing in common. Yell claims that the logo is similar - Yell's shows the Yellow Pages walking fingers, Yellowikis shows a target - both use the colour yellow and that is the only similarity.

Clearly, this is an attempt by Yell to shut down a competitor (although I hardly seem them as such myself, since Yell is much more complete!) and no doubt they hoped to frighten Youlten into just giving up: I hope that, when it does get to court, the Judge fines Yell for wasting court time, awards massive damages to Yellowikis and tells Yell to grow up and start acting like an adult company.

There's a new book out on open access publising: 'Open access: key strategic, technical and economic aspects', edited by Neil Jacobs and published by Chandos Publishing. However, on a quick scan, before doing a full review, I find that it seems to be concerned entirely with either author-charging by commercial and society publishers, or open archiving. There is no treatment of sponsorship as a business model. Since this is the model that delivers maximum social benefit, the omission is rather surprising, and the omission must be deliberate, since there are a number of open journals around that are published on this basis. As readers will know, one of these was described in Information Research Volume 11 No.3

The omission of sponsored journals is a not-too-subtle bias, which is dangerous, since books of this kind are promoted to lobbyists and politicians, who get the impression that author-charging is the only way to deliver open access when, in fact, such a system is 'closed' at the submission stage - 'open' access should be genuinely open and there are only two ways to deliver that - open archiving and free, sponsored journals.

I thought I'd re-run a search on Google Scholar to discover the most cited papers from Information Research - here they are. In parentheses after the Scholar score I give the number of citations found in Web of Knowledge - 'not found' means that, when I ran a search on the title of the paper, WoK failed to find the paper. I also give the number of hits on the page as reported today by the page counter.

1. The nonsense of 'knowledge management'
   TD Wilson Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2002. ...
   Hits 121,473 Cited by 72 (WoK 4)
2. The effect of query complexity on Web searching results
   BJ Jansen Information Research, Volume 6 No. 1 October 2000 The effect of query complexity on Web searching results, by Bernard J. Jansen ...
   Hits 4,370 Cited by 39 (WoK not found)
3. The duality of knowledge
   PJ Hildreth, C Kimble Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2002. ...
   Hits 34,587 Cited by 36 (WoK 0)
4. Business use of the World Wide Web: a report on further investigations
   YJP Hooi-Im Ng, TD Wilson Information Research, Vol. 3 No. 4, April 1998. ...
   Hits 13,111 Cited by 35 (WoK 12)
5. Searching heterogeneous collections on the Web: behaviour of Excite users
   A Spink, J Bateman, BJ Jansen Information Research, Vol. 4 No. 2, October 1998. ...
   Hits 8,570 Cited by 34 (WoK not found)
6. What is this link doing here? Beginning a fine-grained process of identifying reasons for academic …
   M Thelwall Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 3, April 2003. ...
   Hits 3,424 Cited by 33 (WoK 1)
7. The Semantic Web: Opportunities and Challenges for Next-Generation Web Applications
   S Lu, M Dong, F Fotouhi Information Research, Vol. 7 No. 4, July 2002. ...
   Hits 7,319 Cited by 31 (WoK not found)
8. Electronic journals and scholarly communication: a citation and reference study
   SP Harter, HJ Kim Information Research, Vol. 2 No. 1, August 1996. ...
   Hits 5,496 Cited by 31 (WoK not found)
9. A social network study of the growth of community among distance learners
   C Haythornthwaite Information Research, Vol. 4 No. 1, July 1998. ...
   Hits 9,939 Cited by 29 (WoK not found)
10. Information exchange in virtual communities: a typology
    G Burnett Information Research, Vol. 5 No. 4, July 2000. ...
    Hits 10,470 Cited by 29 (WoK not found)

The ratio of 'hits' to Scholar cites varies enormously - from the most 'productive', which is number 6, generating one Scholar cite for every 104 hits, to the least productive, number 1, which needs 1,687 hits to generate a Scholar cite. If we remove these two from the list, as being unusual in some respect or other, the average hits to cites is 352:1 Does anyone have a student looking for a dissertation topic? - all the data are there in the search and in the hit records on the papers. It would be nice to say to authors, 'For every 'x' hits on your paper you are likely to get a citation recorded by Google Scholar', and suddenly the virtue of publishing in free, open-access journals becomes evident :-)

Just in case you are one of those people who does NOT belong to one or other of the mailing lists I send announcements to, the July issue of Information Research is now online. It contains the first clutch of papers from the ISIC Conference, currently happening in Sydney, Australia, another clutch of 'normal' papers and book reviews, by tomorrow it will also have Terry Brooks's latest column. Just click on the issue number at http://InformationR.net/ir/

In the Editorial to the latest issue of the journal I promised to analyse the papers in Volume 11 to show the geographical distribution of authors. Here's the result:

Country	No. of papers
Australia	5
Canada	2
Chile	1
Finland	1
Greece	1
Hungary	1
Israel	1
Lithuania	1
S. Africa	1
Spain	4
Sweden	2
UK	2
USA	9

There were also three examples of international collaborations: 1 for Portugal and Chile; 1 for Finland and Hungary; and 1 for Mexico and Spain.

Some readers of Information Research may have noticed that there is a new feature at the bottom of the top page of the journal - you have to scroll down the page to see it. Click on the map and you are presented with a larger map of the world with the hits presented as clusters of red dots. The size of the dot indicates the number of hits from that location. A link on the page allows you to select a map with smaller clusters, which gives a little finer detail - but not much because the scale of the map is not sufficient for much detail. The map comes from ClustrMaps - go get one for yourself :-)

Business Week online has an interesting article about the trials and tribulations of Google, from class actions by the publishers to agro from human rights activists - Google seems untroubled by all this and its profits are growing.

The latest issue, Volume 11 No. 3, of Information Research is now available.

I think we have a very interesting issue, but I think that about all of them :-)

The subjects are diverse and some papers are of special interest: first, Terrence A. Brooks's, 'No bad Web pages'. After the paper had been refereed and the changes had been made, I suggested to the author that the paper had a structure, and a topic, that made it an ideal paper to experiment with the concept of 'screen rhetoric'; that is, the design of Web pages to reflect the fact that they are viewed on screen, rather than being read on paper. Terry seized upon this idea with enthusiasm and, using his Javascript skills, has produced a paper which the reader moves through screen by screen, rather than by scrolling down the page. If you want to see the paper as a whole or to print it out, just click on the Print Version link at the top of the page. Of course, this is only one way of implementing the idea: Terry already has ideas on other ways of doing it and we are engaged, in effect, in a continuing experiment into what the scientific paper should look like on screen in the 21st Century. We'd like you to play with the paper - move around it - tell us what you like and what you don't like and what you would do to improve it, or even how you would do it completely differently to achieve a similar result! I shall take all comments, favourable and unfavourable, and put them on a page linked to the paper. We hope to give other papers the 'screen rhetoric' treatment, in different ways, so if you have a paper that you would like us to experiment with, let us know. Both Terry and I will be very interested to have your feedback on the way this paper is presented.

Another 'special interest' paper is the first in a series of Case Studies, which I hope will appear issue by issue over the next year or so. The topic, appropriately, is open access publishing, and the case studies may report on specific journals, aids to open access publishing, alternative modes of open access, in fact, anything to do with the subject that can be presented in the form of a case study. This idea was suggested by Bo-Christer Björk, so it is appropriate that the first is by himself and Ziga Turk, describing the history and present status of ITcon, The Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction. If you would like to contribute to the series, please let either Bo-Christer or myself know.

Finally, among the 'specials' is a paper by Elena Macevičiūtė on the development of information needs research in Russia and Lithuania and a comparison with parallel developments in the West. I single this one out because this is a subject which, as far as I am aware, has not been examined before. As Elena's paper shows, sometimes developments in the East were ahead of those in the West, sometimes the other way round, but there is very little evidence, until recently, of the exchange of ideas between East and West. Things are changing, but this retrospective study demonstrates that the 'language barrier' is real, and has probably limited the development of information behaviour research over the past forty years.

I hope that you all enjoy these, and the other papers in this issue. It would be nice to know, occasionally, that you do—scholarly communication is supposed to be at least bi-directional, but I rarely hear from any of the readers.

For some years now, in fact, since 1999, I've been maintaining a list of free magazines and newsletters within the scope of Information Research, which is pretty wide and, today, I've been updating the links, so, by the time anyone checks after about 22.00 GMT tonight, it should be updated. To my surprise, the links are fairly resistant to change - however, I find that my spider (Xenu) doesn't track down all of the problems - URLs may persist, but they sometimes no longer identify what is in the list. So - use the list with caution and, if you come across oddities, do let me know.

The Call for Papers on Activity Theory and Information Studies ought to have mentioned the submission date: we need papers by September 1, 2006. The anticipated timetable is:

• September 1: papers submitted
• Mid-November: reports from referees and decisions sent to authors
• January 1 2007: final versions to Editor
• Mid-February: final corrections from authors
• April 15 2007: publication

There is already considerable interest in this Call and we look forward to an interesting issue of Information Research

Call for Papers: Activity Theory and Information Studies

Contributions are invited for a thematic issue of Information Research on Activity Theory in Information Studies to be published in April 2007. Activity Theory, developed in the Soviet Union in the 1930s has become widely used in education, information systems, and human-computer interaction. To date, its application in information management, information science and librarianship has been limited, but the potential for its application is considerable. We will particularly welcome contributions based on research in digital libraries, information systems development, information behaviour, information literacy and information management generally. Theoretical papers on the links between activity theory and other conceptual frameworks will also be welcome. All contributions will be peer reviewed.

The issue editor is Dr. Mark Spasser and contributions should be sent to him at mspasser@mail.mcg.edu with a copy to the Editor-in-Chief at wilsontd@gmail.com

Thanks to the vigilence of our Associate Editor (Book Reviews) - Elena Macevičiūtė - I discover that Information Research was given an ISI 'impact factor' for 2004, presumably this only happens when all the publications for 2005 are in, so I assume that a measure for 2005 will not happen until 2007.

I don't give these things much heed for a variety of reasons but for those who need to worry about them for reasons of promotion, etc., the factor is measured as 0.841. which puts the journal in the top 20 out of 54 in the category. I'm told that this is really quite remarkable, since the journal only went into ISI's databases in, if I remember aright, 2003.

Journals in the near vicinity of Information Research are shown in the table below:

Rank	Title	Total cites	Impact factor
15	LIBR QUART	207	0.933
16	J MED LIBR ASSOC	96	0.920
17	J INF SCI	366	0.899
18	J INF TECHNOL	217	0.850
19	LIBR INFORM SCI RES	214	0.842
20	INFORM RES	104	0.841
21	INFORM SYST J	108	0.727
22	SOC SCI COMPUT REV	191	0.687
23	J HEALTH COMMUN	201	0.671
24	INFORM SOC	219	0.667
25	ONLINE INFORM REV	93	0.581

The interesting point is not so much where the journal is in the rankings (allowing for some of the oddities that get into this category) but the well-regarded journals that are lower.

ARIST has the highest impact factor, which I imagine is not surprising, as it is an annual review publication.

I wonder if Information Research is the only e-journal, published by an individual, rather than a corporation or an institution, that has an impact factor? Can't be bothered to check it out myself :-)

In the early days of the Web, many Internet users thought they would become sophisticated online researchers in the future, but now it seems that everyone is just doing a kind of "search lurch": Enter some words, click through a few search results, and maybe you'll find what you're looking for in a second or two... or maybe you'll just give up and move on to something else.

Four Web experts — Jakob Nielsen, Jesse James Gerrett, Gerry McGovern and Tara Calishain — weigh in:

http://www.phptr.com/articles/article.asp?p=418857&rl=1

Garth Buchholz raises some interesting points and, by coincidence, they are things I've been thinking about myself for some time and, as a result, the April issue of the journal will contain a paper by Terry Brooks which adopts a novel format for the paper. When Terry's paper was accepted I suggested that he might like to look at the idea of 'screen rhetoric' and prepare a special version of his paper that reflected these ideas. Since then, he has been working away on several versions and the latest looks, to my mind, very good.

Whether we can adopt the style for all papers in the journal is debateable, since the mode of presentation would require more work of either the author or the editor. However, we can make the template available and those who wish to use the different style could do so. Watch out for the paper in April.

It's a highly technical field that requires years of academic training and discipline. Many people develop basic skills using this kind of code, but the number of specialists who excel in it are few and far between. On the Web, those who have advanced coding skills in this specialty can command top salaries in roles as diverse as CIOs, eCommerce managers, information architects, Web designers and usability consultants.

What code are we talking about? The English language. Or any language, for that matter.

Our written language is a code, and it is one of the most challenging codes for Web site developers to master, whether we speak about it as “editorial,” “Webitorial”, “digital text”, or simply “eText” for purposes of this article. We may as well consider eText to be alphanumeric as well, because much of our language and what we consider textual includes alphabetic characters as well as numeric characters and various ascii-type symbols.

The three facets of eText

eText content on the Web is one of the most technically layered forms of content because it is actually several things at once:

* eText is Code – It originates in a formal language; it has substantive meaning, it is used for communication; it is subject to interpretation; and it has affective and symbolic meaning;

* eText is Object – It is visual and spatial, appearing as blocks of text, chunks of text, text documents, text logos and text advertisements (promotional text);

* eText is Design – It is recognizable in many different designs and formats, whether through fonts, spacing, styles, colors and other attributes of design. If a picture paints a thousand words, then a picture of a word must paint a million nuances, meanings and subtexts. Each word has a literal, symbolic, cultural and contextual meaning; and the way it is handled as an object and as a design can affect the way it is communicated and the way it is received.

Is there any wonder that eText is one of the least understood and most poorly engineered forms of content on the Internet? So many people who are charged with authoring, editing, designing or otherwise manipulating eText have never been trained to work with its threefold qualities of Code, Object and Design. Those who are writing experts with a strong command of the subtleties of language often do not understand how to handle text as an object on a Web page or as an aesthetic element in a Web design. Those who understand how to design and layout eText for the Web often lack the skills to understand how language can be shaped for substance and symbolism.

That's not to say that you can't engineer eText content without expertise in all its aspects; process-driven content management allows many specialists to work with content and develop it properly for a Web environment; a writer can author the eText, a designer can design it and a Web publisher or Web information designer can shape it for the site so that it works most effectively. The development process, however, should not obscure the fact that, like all digital content, when you change one aspect, it alters the others. This is one of the reasons Web sites created and managed by perfectly competent and even talented staff can end up confusing, unintelligible and unusable. A writer writes in isolation, and doesn't have any input about how the eText will appear when published online; or a designer is handed a Word document but admonished not to make any changes to it for any reason; or a Web editor is faced with either having to change what the author and designer have done, or leave it as it is with minimal changes.

Are we making content re-cyclable — or disposable?

One of the most practical yet ultimately counter-productive trends is toward the re-use of content, which usually means structuring eText content so that each chunk of data in it and each aspect of it can be extracted from its original form and redeployed in another context using dynamic publishing. This reductionist approach essentially treats the code of language as simply a quantifiable mass of data that can be carved up without losing any intrinsic value, i.e. the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. While this may work at a practical level for organizations attempting to 1) improve quicker and easier access to content for different users in different contexts, and 2) extract the maximum value from existing content rather than having to constantly reinvent the wheel with new content, recycling content actually makes it more disposable. It mechanizes human communication and it mutes or eliminates its human complexities and shadings. It's the equivalent of the “voice to speech” software: you can make your PC speak words with a human-sounding voice, but the effect is in human and lacking in originality, nuance, emotion or spontaneity.

What makes eText different than other codes is the human element. eText engineering is not about the automation of language or about turning it into soulless digital output, as practical as that may seem when content managers are trying to find efficiencies for their sites. eText specialists are, by necessity, professionals who have a more sophisticated understanding of how eText moves, motivates, engages, impels and even challenges other human beings.

(Garth A. Buchholz, B.A., C.U.A. is a Canadian author, Web content strategist and Certified Usability Analyst.)

Information behaviour: an interdisciplinary perspective has been on my site for some years now, but recently a correspondent drew attention to the fact that the diagrams in Chapter 2 were pretty unreadable. So - no sooner the word - it's been redesigned and the figures made legible.

According to Google Scholar (or Scholar Google, or whatever we're supposed to call it) it hasn't had much in the way of citation, but, on the other hand, the paper in Information Processing and Management that was based on the report has had 124 cites, so perhaps people prefer to cite the journal source. Pity, really, since there's more in the report!

I'm very happy to welcome Ricardo Baeza-Yates to the Editorial Board of Information Research. Ricardo has dual appointments with Yahoo! Research in Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile. He is the joint author or editor of a number of key works in the field, including Modern Informaiton Retrieval (Addison-Wesley, 1999).

We've had occasional instances of the value of Weblogs in spreading news about papers in Information Research and we have another at the moment. Nahyun Kwon's paper on virtual reference service has been noted in a number of Weblogs and, as a direct result, the hits have soared to more than 2,400 in less than one month. By comparison, the other papers in the issue have an average hit rate of about 400. There's a lesson here for authors - if you want your paper to be noticed, make sure it's noticed in the 'blogosphere' - and you are the ones who will know which Weblog authors are likely to be interested, so get to it! :-)

Keen observers of Information Research will have noticed a change in the design of the top pages. I had begun to think that the previous design was looking a bit clunky and messy and decided to change it. This is just part of the general evolution of the journal and, one of these days, we might have some kind professional designer offering to re-design the entire InformationR.net site - come to think of it, someone might be willing to do that in return for their logo on the top page to recognise their 'sponsorship' of the journal.

Those who have been with us since the early days will know that the design has changed over the years. The Wayback Machine shows what it looked like in 1995, when there was no separate contents page, just a contents list at the top of the first page; in 1998; in 2002 and in the last redesign in 2003.

No doubt this latest design will not be the last!

Citations to papers in Vol.7 No.1 of Information Research

Eleven papers published, with 40 citations according to Google Scholar (Ave. 3.6). Three papers had no citations.

Analysis of the citations

Sources of citations	No.
Journal papers – online or print [Journal of Information Science, Information Research, Behavioral Science and the Law, JAMA, IEEE Trans. on Software Eng., Int. J. of Inf. Mgt., New Review of Info Behav Research, IFLA Journal, Arquivista.net, Strategic Change, Journal National Medical Association, Int. J. of Bank Marketing]	14
Conference proceedings	2
Conference papers on personal Websites – conference often unidentifiable.	7
‘Grey’ literature on personal or organizational Websites	8
Student papers [Two papers, one citing two different papers]	3
Course syllabus [Same syllabus citing two different papers.]	2
Information portal with document files	3
404 message	1

The list of journals suggest that the availability of papers in an open access e-journal not only increases the probability of citation as Steve Lawrence has shown, but perhaps also widens the range of journals that papers are likely to be cited in. A number of the journals listed could not be described as information science or information management journals by any stretch of the imagination.

I havenÂ’t done an analysis of the locations of the non-journal documents, but they range widely internationally from New Zealand and Brazil to Switzerland and the USA, and I suspect that the geographic span of citing sources is wider than one might expect with closed access journals.

This looks like an interesting project for a student paper - anyone like to take it on?

Further to my previous message on this topic, I have now attached a link to Google Scholar's citation search for each paper in the journal from Volume 1 no. 1 to Volume 9 no. 4. Check it out from the journal's top page. If you are an Information Research author and your paper doesn't have a link, it means that your paper has no citations (at least according to Google Scholar).

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

I have posted the following to the JESSE discussion list and one or two more, so forgive me if you've already seen it.

Three years ago I commented on the extent to which Web citation was growing as a means of assessing the impact of research outputs. There was an interesting discussion and, eventually, prompted by the debate, a paper on the subject in JASIST by Vaughan and Shaw (Volume 54, Issue 14, Pages 1313 - 1322).

I'm returning to the topic because of the emergence of Scholar Google as an interesting new venture in the field of bibliographic control, and by my testing of frequently hit papers in Information Research. The results suggest that for university administrations to rely upon the Web of Science citation counts and the associated journal impact measures as a means of assessing faculty for promotion is rather flawed. The same might be said of the decisions by the Research Assessment panels of the Higher Education Funding Councils in the UK to rely upon ranked lists of journals in assessing research outputs.

I'm aware, of course, of Peter Jasco's very interesting paper on Scholar and Web of Science in Current Science, v.89, no. 9, 1537-1547 and no doubt his criticisms of Scholar will provoke some changes. However, my strategy was not affected by the system's shortcomings, since I was looking for citations of known items and I weeded out the occasional 'false drops'.

I looked at the papers in Information Research that had received 10 or more citations, according to Scholar, and the results can be seen at my Weblog.

To take one example: The effect of query complexity on Web searching results, by BJ Jansen (Information Research, Volume 6 No. 1 October 2000) was said by Scholar to have 24 citations (actually, 26 were recorded) - WoS gave it zero citations - and yet the citations found by Scholar were as follows:

Peer reviewed journals - 9 citations (4 journals, all of which are covered by WoS)

Conference papers - 8 citations

University department paper archive - 7 citations

Research group report - 1 citation

Thesis - 1 citation

The paper also had about 200 Web citations, as measured by searching on Google.com

What then, are we to regard as "impact"? It would be wise for any candidate for promotion to press the case for a wider definition than measurement by WoS citations provides. There are problems with other measures but, for example, the international impact is likely to be measured better by either Scholar or Web citation generally. Similarly, in relation to the UK's Research Assessment exercise, it would be sensible for the Higher Education Funding Councils to offer better guidance on how the impact of research outputs should be assessed.

All of the papers in Information Research have counters, all that not all have had them since they appeared. However, they do offer some indication of popularity, and here are the most hit papers in each volume:

Volume 1 P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy An action research approach to curriculum development 39,465

Volume 2 Zita Correia and Tom Wilson Scanning the business environment for information: a grounded theory approach 31,977

Volume 3 Hooi-Im Ng, Ying Jie Pan, and T.D. Wilson Business use of the World Wide Web: a report on further investigations 11,947

Volume 4 Joyce Kirk Information in organisations: directions for information management 33,452

Volume 5 T.D. Wilson Recent trends in user studies: action research and qualitative methods 20,700

Volume 6 Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach 39,717

Volume 7 Chun Wei Choo Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning 42,809

Volume 8 T.D. Wilson The nonsense of knowledge management 93,701

Volume 9 Jannica Heinström Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour 24,856

Volume 10 Lynda M. Baker The information needs of female Police Officers involved in undercover prostitution work 4,087

Volume 11, No. 1 Liana Kourteli Scanning the business external environment for information: evidence from Greece 1,593

Interesting, the most hit paper in vol. 8 no. 2 is one of our contributions in Spanish:

Judith Licea de Arenas, Emma Santillan- Rivero, Miguel Arenas, and Javier Valles Desempeño de becarios Mexicanos en la producción de conocimiento cientifico ¿de la bibliometria a la politica cientifica? 6,048

I haven't had time to add the links, but you can find the papers through the author index at http://InformationR.net/ir/ if you are interested to follow up any of them.

The December 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/) is now available.

This issue contains seven articles, the 'In Brief' column, excerpts from
recent press releases, and news of upcoming conferences and other items of interest in 'Clips and Pointers'.  This month D-Lib features the Library of Congress Global Gateway: World Culture and Resources.

The articles include:

AIHT: Conceptual Issues from Practical Tests
Clay Shirky, New York University

Harvard's Perspective on the Archive Ingest and Handling Test
Stephen Abrams, Stephen Chapman, Dale Flecker, Sue Kreigsman, Julian
Marinus, Gary McGath, and Robin Wendler, Harvard University

The Archive Ingest and Handling Test: The Johns Hopkins University Report
Tim DiLauro, Mark Patton, David Reynolds, and G. Sayeed Choudhury, The
Johns Hopkins University

Archive Ingest and Handling Test: The Old Dominion University Approach

Michael L. Nelson, Johan Bollen, Giridhar Manepalli, and Rabia Haq, Old
Dominion University

The AIHT at Stanford University: Automated Preservation Assessment of
Heterogeneous Digital Collections
Richard Anderson, Hannah Frost, Nancy Hoebelheinrich, and Keith Johnson,

Parallel Worlds: Online Games and Digital Information Services
John Kirriemuir, Silversprite

Open Access Federation for Library and Information Science: dLIST and
DL-Harvest
Anita Coleman and Joseph Roback, University of Arizona

My attention was drawn by the LITA-L discussion list to an interesting article in Nature on a test of Britannica and Wikipedia. Nature sent out a total of 50 articles from the two encyclopedias for peer review and concluded that there was not much to choose between the two.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

As a result of the recent fuss over misleading articles in Wikipedia, some changes are being made. Specifically, 'stable' articles will be identified and will not be editable - only a separate version will be editable and that will replace the currently 'stable' version when it is deemed appropriate.

A busy day, today. My attention has just been drawn to another Google iniative - Google Base. As usual, it is in a beta phase at the moment, but the question is, what exactly is it intended to be? The stated principle is that you can deposit material in the base and Google will host it

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that we'll host and make searchable online. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle, Google Base and Google Local.

However, when one carries out a search on Google Base, it is difficult to determine what is hosted by Google and what is normal Web content. For example, I bought a nice fresh sea bass this morning and so went looking for a recipe and up popped a site for one Michael Thompson with, at the head, a recipe for 'Barbecued Squid with Hot Dipping Sauce (Squid Sate)' - sea bass was an alternative to the squid. When I searched on the Web, instead, the same site appeared - although lower down the listing. So, is this a Google-Base-hosted site or does Thompson have his own site?

A further interesting question relates to originality in the recipe field - I put the full recipe name into Google and came up with 370 identically named recipes - down to the parenthetically embraced 'Squid Sate'. Could someone claim to have been plagiarised? :-)

Another search brought up a quotation site - again, not evidently hosted by Google - which had a quotation from J.K. Galbraith that I rather enjoyed:

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong. - Galbraith, John Kenneth

Given Cheney's characterisation of Democratic politicians who have been speaking out against the war in Iraq as peddling 'cynical and pernicious falsehoods', that bit about the mendacity evident in the higher levels of public administration is highly relevant. There's an old saying about the pot calling the kettle black that springs to mind.

There's an interesting two-part article on ZDNet about Yellowikis - a free business directory source, which, according to the article is causing some perturbations in the breasts of those involved in the Yellow Pages industry. [Scroll to the bottom of the first page for the link to the second part.]

The interesting thing from my point of view is that the founder, Paul Youlten, has pretty well the same attitude to open access publishing as myself. Apparently industry reps. have been contacting him with questions like, 'Who's funding you?', 'How are you going to make money?' and 'Why would you do this for free?'

Paul was taken aback by these comments, because Yellowikis (like a lot of Web 2.0 businesses) was developed very cheaply, uses open source technology and relies on word-of-mouth for marketing.

The 'very cheaply' bit meant $500.

Part 2 of the article suggests that the Yellow Pages industry may not need to worry yet, but they are obviously keeping an eye on it, just in case it takes off.