No abstract.

Prior research has identified specific factors that hinder growth of teledensity in developing countries and specific strategies used to overcome such limitations both in Latin America and in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prior research also has reported on the perceptions that telecommunications stakeholders have on how various strategies can inform and assist in the enhancement of teledensity in each of the two continental regions. This study fills a gap in the literature by investigating similarities and differences in the telecommunication stakeholders' perspectives of specific strategies used to address teledensity limitations in Latin America as well as in Sub-Saharan Africa. Independent samples of survey participants (Latin America's and Sub-Saharan Africa's telecommunications stakeholders) analyzed the strategies. Using appropriate statistical procedures, we examined these stakeholders' perceptions to find areas of commonality and difference in their respective perspectives on the effectiveness of selected strategies. Qualitative comments to support the stakeholders' responses are reported, together with future research implications.

We conducted an experiment with a posttest, between-subjects design to evaluate the potential of emerging 3D telepresence technology to support collaboration in emergency health care. 3D telepresence technology has the potential to provide richer visual information than do current 2D video conferencing techniques. This may be of benefit in diagnosing and treating patients in emergency situations where specialized medical expertise is not locally available. The experimental design and results concerning information behavior are presented in the article "Exploring the Potential of Video Technologies for Collaboration in Emergency Medical Care: Part I. Information Sharing" (Sonnenwald et al., this issue). In this article, we explore paramedics' task performance during the experiment as they diagnosed and treated a trauma victim while working alone or in collaboration with a physician via 2D videoconferencing or via a 3D proxy. Analysis of paramedics' task performance shows that paramedics working with a physician via a 3D proxy performed the fewest harmful interventions and showed the least variation in task performance time. Paramedics in the 3D proxy condition also reported the highest levels of self-efficacy. Interview data confirm these statistical results. Overall, the results indicate that 3D telepresence technology has the potential to improve paramedics' performance of complex medical tasks and improve emergency trauma health care if designed and implemented appropriately.

We are investigating the potential of 3D telepresence, or televideo, technology to support collaboration among geographically separated medical personnel in trauma emergency care situations. 3D telepresence technology has the potential to provide richer visual information than current 2D videoconferencing techniques. This may be of benefit in diagnosing and treating patients in emergency situations where specialized medical expertise is not locally available. The 3D telepresence technology does not yet exist, and there is a need to understand its potential before resources are spent on its development and deployment. This poses a complex challenge. How can we evaluate the potential impact of a technology within complex, dynamic work contexts when the technology does not yet exist? To address this challenge, we conducted an experiment with a posttest, between-subjects design that takes the medical situation and context into account. In the experiment, we simulated an emergency medical situation involving practicing paramedics and physicians, collaborating remotely via two conditions: with today's 2D videoconferencing and a 3D telepresence proxy. In this article, we examine information sharing between the attending paramedic and collaborating physician. Postquestionnaire data illustrate that the information provided by the physician was perceived to be more useful by the paramedic in the 3D proxy condition than in the 2D condition; however, data pertaining to the quality of interaction and trust between the collaborating physician and paramedic show mixed results. Postinterview data help explain these results.

Although a number of investigations have been conducted on the information behavior of family historians, we know little about the degree to which they systematically collect information on the causes of death and major illnesses of ancestors. Such information, if reliable and accessible, could be useful to family physicians, the families themselves, and to epidemiologists. This article presents findings from a two-stage study of amateur genealogists in the USA. An initial state-wide telephone survey of 901 households was followed by in-depth interviews with a national sample of 23 family historians. Over half of the responding households in the general survey reported that someone in their family collects ancestral medical data; this practice appears to be more common among respondents who are women, older persons, and those with higher incomes. In-depth interviews revealed that this information is commonly collected by family historians, and typically comes from death certificates, secondarily from obituaries, and thirdly from word-of-mouth or family records; most of these respondents collected health information for reasons of surveillance of their own health risks. Social-networking approaches to encourage gathering of family data could aid in increased awareness and surveillance of health risks. Implications for health information seeking and applicable theories are discussed.

Hirsch-type indices are studied with special attention to the AR2-index introduced by Jin. The article consists of two parts: a theoretical part and a practical illustration. In the theoretical part, we recall the definition of the AR2-index and show that an alternative definition, the so-called AR21, does not have the properties expected for this type of index. A practical example shows the existence of some of these mathematical properties and illustrates the difference between different h-type indices. Clearly the h-index itself is the most robust of all. It is shown that excluding so-called non-WoS source articles may have a significant influence on the R-and, especially, the g-index.

I propose an approach to classifying scientific networks in terms of aggregated journal-journal citation relations of the ISI Journal Citation Reports using the affinity propagation method. This algorithm is applied to obtain the classification of SCI and SSCI journals by minimizing intracategory journal-journal (J-J) distances in the database, where distance between journals is calculated from the similarity of their annual citation patterns with a cutoff parameter, t, to restrain the maximal J-J distance. As demonstrated in the classification of SCI journals, classification of scientific networks with different resolution is possible by choosing proper values of t. Twenty journal categories in SCI are found to be stable despite a difference of an order of magnitude in t. In our classifications, the level of specificity of a category can be found by looking at its value of RJ (the average distance of members of a category to its representative journal), and relatedness of category members is implied by the value of J-J (the average J-J distance within a category). Our results are consistent with the ISI classification scheme, and the level of relatedness for most categories in our classification is higher than their counterpart in the ISI classification scheme.

The principal objective of this research was to understand the incentive structure in a mixed economic and social market for information. Prior research suggests that tangible incentives will crowd out intangible incentives; however, information markets invite special examination of this finding. Data representing four years of activity by 523 researchers who gave about 52,000 answers on the Google Answers Web site were collected. Analysis revealed that the main predictor for researchers' participation was the anticipation of tip (gratuity). Analysis of two researcher subgroups showed that in the case of the frequent researchers, the tip was followed by social incentives: interaction (comments) and ratings. For occasional researchers, the tip was followed by the price paid for answers and then by comments. The results suggest that a pure economic incentive serves as enticement; however, social incentives induce persistent participation by researchers and eventually lead to higher average economic gains. The market is catalyzed by social activity, not cannibalized by it, as may have been predicted by theory. This finding provides empirical evidence for "social capital" since social incentives were connected to higher economic gains. The practical implication is that a mixed incentive design is likely to generate lively information-exchange environments.

This article shows how a fuzzy ontology-based approach can improve semantic documents retrieval. After formally defining a fuzzy ontology and a fuzzy knowledge base, a special type of new fuzzy relationship called (semantic) correlation, which links the concepts or entities in a fuzzy ontology, is discussed. These correlations, first assigned by experts, are updated after querying or when a document has been inserted into a database. Moreover, in order to define a dynamic knowledge of a domain adapting itself to the context, it is shown how to handle a tradeoff between the correct definition of an object, taken in the ontology structure, and the actual meaning assigned by individuals. The notion of a fuzzy concept network is extended, incorporating database objects so that entities and documents can similarly be represented in the network. Information retrieval (IR) algorithm, using an object-fuzzy concept network (O-FCN), is introduced and described. This algorithm allows us to derive a unique path among the entities involved in the query to obtain maxima semantic associations in the knowledge domain. Finally, the study has been validated by querying a database using fuzzy recall, fuzzy precision, and coefficient variant measures in the crisp and fuzzy cases.

The related fields of ethnomethodology (EM), founded by Harold Garfinkel, and conversation analysis (CA), as epitomized by the work of Harvey Sacks, offer unique insights into the operation of virtual reference services (VRS). The tradition of phenomenology within library and information science (LIS) provides a context for this research, although EM/CA differs in important respects, providing a program for grounded empirical investigations. Relevant EM/CA research concerns include the documentary method of interpretation, trust, indexicality, instructed action, and sequential organization. Review of the LIS literature on reference interactions in both face-to-face and virtual settings reveals a tendency to impose analytic categories and classificatory schemes that obscure the extremely situated and collaborative nature of reference work; however, an EM/CA examination of transcripts from the first 4 months of a newly implemented VRS at a large university library suggests the need for a more nuanced approach. Close-order examination of two chat reference transcripts reveals the interactional complexities and nuances that characterize even the most succinct encounters. Analyzing the reference query as a service request demonstrates how librarians deploy their interactional skills to address "face" concerns and ameliorate potentially problematic aspects of the reference encounter.

Information behavior (IB) research involves examining how people look for and use information, often with the sole purpose of gaining insights into the behavior displayed. However, it is also possible to examine IB with the purpose of using the insights gained to design new tools or improve the design of existing tools to support information seeking and use. This approach is advocated by David Ellis who, over two decades ago, presented a model of information seeking behaviors and made suggestions for how electronic tools might be designed to support these behaviors. Ellis also recognized that IBs might be used as the basis for evaluating as well as designing electronic resources. In this article, we present the IB evaluation methods. These two novel methods, based on an extension of Ellis's model, use the empirically observed IBs of lawyers as a framework for structuring user-centered evaluations of the functionality and usability of electronic resources. In this article, we present the IB methods and illustrate their use through the discussion of two examples. We also discuss benefits and limitations, grounded in specific features of the methods.

No abstract.

Eigenfactor.org, a journal evaluation tool that uses an iterative algorithm to weight citations (similar to the PageRank algorithm used for Google), has been proposed as a more valid method for calculating the impact of journals. The purpose of this brief communication is to investigate whether the principle of repeated improvement provides different rankings of journals than does a simple unweighted citation count (the method used by the Institute for Scientific Information@ [ISI]).

No abstract.

When studying how ordinary Web users interact with Web search engines, researchers tend to either treat the users as a homogeneous group or group them according to search experience. Neither approach is sufficient, we argue, to capture the variety in behavior that is known to exist among searchers. By applying automatic clustering technique based on self-organizing maps to search engine log files from a corporate intranet, we show that users can be usefully separated into distinguishable segments based on their actual search behavior. Based on these segments, future tools for information seeking and retrieval can be targeted to specific segments rather than just made to fit the "the average user." The exact number of clusters, and to some extent their characteristics, can be expected to vary between intranets, but our results indicate that some more generic groups may exist. In our study, a large group of users appeared to be "fact seekers" who would benefit from higher precision, a smaller group of users were more holistically oriented and would likely benefit from higher recall, and a third category of users seemed to constitute the knowledgeable users. These three groups may raise different design implications for search-tool developers.

This article explores the Internet as a resource for political information and communication in March 2003, when American troops were first sent to Iraq, offering us a unique setting of political context, information use, and technology. Employing a national survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project, we examine the political information behavior of the Internet respondents through an exploratory factor analysis; analyze the effects of personal demographic attributes and political attitudes, traditional and new media use, and technology on online behavior through multiple regression analysis; and assess the online political information and communication behavior of supporters and dissenters of the Iraq War. The factor analysis suggests four factors: activism, support, information seeking, and communication. The regression analysis indicates that gender, political attitudes and beliefs, motivation, traditional media consumption, perceptions of bias in the media, and computer experience and use predict online political information behavior, although the effects of these variables differ for the four factors. The information and communication behavior of supporters and dissenters of the Iraq War differed significantly. We conclude with a brief discussion of the value of "interdisciplinary poaching" for advancing the study of Internet information practices.

This article analyzes the collaboration trends, authorship and keywords of all research articles published in the Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). Comparing the articles between two 10-year periods, namely, 1988-1997 and 1998-2007, the three-fold objectives are to analyze the shifts in (a) authors' collaboration trends (b) top authors, their affiliations as well as the pattern of coauthorship among them, and (c) top keywords and the subdisciplines from which they emerge. The findings reveal a distinct tendency towards collaboration among authors, with external collaborations becoming more prevalent. Top authors have grown in diversity from those being affiliated predominantly with library/information-related departments to include those from information systems management, information technology, businesss, and the humanities. Amid heterogeneous clusters of collaboration among top authors, strongly connected cross-disciplinary coauthor pairs have become more prevalent. Correspondingly, the distribution of top keywords' occurrences that leans heavily on core information science has shifted towards other subdisciplines such as information technology and sociobehavioral science.

To study the structure of Iranian chemistry research, we identified 43 Iranian and international chemists who were highly cited in 7,682 Iranian chemistry publications (defined as an article with at least one Iranian author address) indexed in Science Citation Index (SciSearch) between 1990 and 2006, inclusive. We collected cocitation data for these authors from the entire SciSearch file (Dialog, File 34) over the time period. A principal components analysis identified seven interrelated factors accounting for 78% of the variance in the cocitation matrix. Iranian and international authors tended to load on separate factors. Three factors - synthesis of carbonyl compounds, solvent-free synthesis of organic compounds and oxidation of organic compounds - had an inter-correlation of | 0.3 | or higher. Physical organic chemistry and ionophores (a mixed factor of Iranian and international authors) connected at a lower value, while crown ethers and analytical chemistry were essentially uncorrelated. The PFNet structure maintained the topical factor groupings and Iranian and international authors tended to appear in separate subnetworks. Geographic and institutional influences, apparently relating in part to institutional affiliation and in part to restricted research topics, appear to underlie the primary structural features of Iranian chemistry in this time period.

Lotka's law was formulated to describe the number of authors with a certain number of publications. Empirical results (Morris & Goldstein, 2007) indicate that Lotka's law is also valid if one counts the number of publications of coauthor pairs. This article gives a simple model proving this to be true, with the same Lotka exponent, if the number of coauthored papers is proportional to the number of papers of the individual coauthors. Under the assumption that this number of coauthored papers is more than proportional to the number of papers of the individual authors (to be explained in the article), we can prove that the size-frequency function of coauthor pairs is Lotkaian with an exponent that is higher than that of the Lotka function of individual authors, a fact that is confirmed in experimental results.

Pronominal anaphors are commonly observed in written texts. In this article, effective Chinese pronominal anaphora resolution is addressed by using lexical knowledge acquisition and salience measurement. The lexical knowledge acquisition is aimed to extract more semantic features, such as gender, number, and collocate compatibility by employing multiple resources. The presented salience measurement is based on entropy-based weighting on selecting antecedent candidates. The resolution is justified with a real corpus and compared with a rule-based model. Experimental results by five-fold cross-validation show that our approach yields 82.5% success rate on 1343 anaphoric instances. In comparison with a general rule-based approach, the performance is improved by 7%.