Wolfgang G. Stock

Impact and Relevance of LIS Journals: A Scientometric Analysis of International and German-Language LIS Journals—Citation Analysis Versus Reader Survey

The goal of the scientometric analysis presented in this article was to investigate international and regional (i.e., German-language) periodicals in the field of library and information science (LIS). This was done by means of a citation analysis and a reader survey. For the citation analysis, impact factor, citing half-life, number of references per article, and the rate of self-references of a periodical were used as indicators. In addition, the leading LIS periodicals were mapped. For the 40 international periodicals, data were collected from ISI’s Social Sciences Citation Index Journal Citation Reports (JCR); the citations of the 10 German-language journals were counted manually (overall 1,494 source articles with 10,520 citations). Altogether, the empirical base of the citation analysis consisted of nearly 90,000 citations in 6,203 source articles that were published between 1997 and 2000. The expert survey investigated reading frequency, applicability of the journals to the job of the reader, publication frequency, and publication preference both for all respondents and for different groups among them (practitioners vs. scientists, librarians vs. documentalists vs. LIS scholars, public sector vs. information industry vs. other private company employees). The study was conducted in spring 2002. A total of 257 questionnaires were returned by information specialists from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Having both citation and readership data, we performed a comparative analysis of these two data sets. This enabled us to identify answers to questions like: Does reading behavior correlate with the journal impact factor? Do readers prefer journals with a short or a long half-life, or with a low or a high number of references? Is there any difference in this matter among librarians, documentalists, and LIS scholars?

Informational cities: Analysis and construction of cities in the knowledge society

Informational cities are prototypical cities of the knowledge society. If they are informational world cities, they are new centers of power. According to Manuel Castells (1989), in those cities space of flows (flows of money, power, and information) tend to override space of places. Information and communication technology infrastructures, cognitive infrastructures (as groundwork of knowledge cities and creative cities), and city-level knowledge management are of great importance. Digital libraries provide access to the global explicit knowledge. The informational city consists of creative clusters and spaces for personal contacts to stimulate sharing of implicit information. In such cities, we can observe job polarization in favor of well-trained employees. The corporate structure of informational cities is made up of financial services, knowledge-intensive high-tech industrial enterprises, companies of the information economy, and further creative and knowledge-intensive service enterprises. Weak location factors are facilities for culture, recreational activities, and consumption. Political willingness to create an informational city and e-governance activities are crucial aspects for the development of such cities. This conceptual article frames indicators which are able to mark the degree of “informativeness” of a city. Finally, based upon findings of network economy, we try to explain why certain cities master the transition to informational cities and others (lagging to relative insignificance) do not. The article connects findings of information science and of urbanistics and urban planning.

Tag Clusters as Information Retrieval Interfaces

The paper presents our design of a next generation information retrieval system based on tag co-occurrences and subsequent clustering. We help users getting access to digital data through information visualization in the form of tag clusters. Current problems like the absence of interactivity and semantics between tags or the difficulty of adding additional search arguments are solved. In the evaluation, based upon SERVQUAL and IT systems quality indicators, we found out that tag clusters are perceived as more useful than tag clouds, are much more trustworthy, and are more enjoyable to use.

Government and Social Media: A Case Study of 31 Informational World Cities

Social media platforms are increasingly being used by governments to foster user interaction. Particularly in cities with enhanced ICT infrastructures (i.e., Informational World Cities) and high internet penetration rates, social media platforms are valuable tools for reaching high numbers of citizens. This empirical investigation of 31 Informational World Cities will provide an overview of social media services used for governmental purposes, of their popularity among governments, and of their usage intensity in broadcasting information online.

Practitioners and academics as authors and readers: the case of LIS journals

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between practitioners and academics in scholarly communication in library and information science (LIS) journals.Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a reader survey, a citation analysis and an editor survey. The reader survey identifies both differences in journal rankings between practitioners and academics and the contribution of practitioners to LIS journals. The editor survey provides the proportions of practitioners and academics for the journals. The citation analysis shows the disparities in information exchange between the journals mainly preferred by practitioners and those more favoured by academics. Furthermore, it is possible to explore if practitioner journals differ from academic journals in the citation indicators and in other data collected in the editor survey.Findings – It is found that: practitioners play an active role both as readers and as authors of articles in LIS journals; there is only a low level o...

Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society: Core Services of Libraries in Informational World Cities

Abstract Informational Cities are the prototypical spaces of the knowledge society. Public libraries play an important role as parts of the digital, smart, knowledge and creative infrastructures of these Informational Cities. Libraries have economic value as location factors in the two spaces of Informational Cities, the physical and the digital. For this reason, we divided the library services into two main groups, namely the digital library and the physical library. For 31 specified Informational World Cities, we empirically analyzed the core services of their public libraries via content analysis of the libraries’ Web pages. Additionally, we studied these libraries’ social media activities. Many libraries provide free e-resources (above all, e-books, e-journals and bibliographical databases) to their customers. Libraries offer digital reference services, mainly via e-mail and Web forms. Their presence in social media is dominated by posts on Facebook and Twitter. Nearly all public libraries we analyzed represent attractive architectural landmarks in their region. Besides offering spaces for children, the libraries provide rooms for learning and getting together and, to a lesser degree, modular working spaces. Most libraries provide Wi-Fi inside their buildings; more than half of those we investigated work with RFID technology. The prototypical public library in the knowledge society has two core services: (1) to support citizens, companies and administrations in their city and region with digital services, namely e-resources as well as reference services, and to communicate with their customers via social media; and (2) to provide physical spaces for meeting, learning and working, as well as areas for children and other groups, in a building that is a landmark of the city.

“Power tags” in information retrieval

Purpose – Many Web 2.0 services (including Library 2.0 catalogs) make use of folksonomies. The purpose of this paper is to cut off all tags in the long tail of a document‐specific tag distribution. The remaining tags at the beginning of a tag distribution are considered power tags and form a new, additional search option in information retrieval systems.Design/methodology/approach – In a theoretical approach the paper discusses document‐specific tag distributions (power law and inverse‐logistic shape), the development of such distributions (Yule‐Simon process and shuffling theory) and introduces search tags (besides the well‐known index tags) as a possibility for generating tag distributions.Findings – Search tags are compatible with broad and narrow folksonomies and with all knowledge organization systems (e.g. classification systems and thesauri), while index tags are only applicable in broad folksonomies. Based on these findings, the paper presents a sketch of an algorithm for mining and processing pow...

On relevance distributions

There are at least three possible ways that documents are distributed by relevance: informetric (power law), inverse logistic, and dichotomous. The nature of the type of distribution has implications for the construction of relevance ranking algorithms for search engines, for automated (blind) relevance feedback, for user behavior when using Web search engines, for combining of outputs of search engines for metasearch, for topic detection and tracking, and for the methodology of evaluation of information retrieval systems.

Looking for friends and followers: a global investigation of governmental social media use

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify governmental social media use in cities with enhanced information and communications technology infrastructures (i.e. Informational World Cities) and high Internet penetration rates. Social media platforms are increasingly being used by governments to foster user interaction and it was investigated if social media platforms are valuable tools for reaching high numbers of citizens. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on an iterative content and Web analysis from November 2012 till January 2013 and offers a comparison of different social media service types and the particular use. Findings – This empirical investigation of 31 Informational World Cities provides an overview of social media services used for governmental purposes, of their popularity among governments and of their usage intensity in broadcasting information online. Even as cities in a globalized world become more similar, a variety in the use of social media by governments was d...

The Inflation of Impact Factors of Scientific Journals

For many years, the scientific community made use of the Journal Impact Factor, created by Garfield and Sher in 1963 and commercially distributed by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI—today part of Thomson Reuters), to approximate the standing of an academic periodical. Nowadays, we are confronted with a multitude of different impact factors, namely, the (old) ISI Impact Factor, the (new) five-year Thomson Reuters impact factor, the trend line of Elsevier’s Scopus, the H index of journals, the SCImago index by the Spanish SCImago Group, and the Eigenfactor score created by Carl Bergstrom. How can we keep an overview? What do these indices measure? What does “standing of a journal” mean: its impact on the scientific community, its perceived reputation, its value, its quality, its prestige, its influence? Is there a kind of toolbox with different infometric tools to describe and evaluate scholarly journals? Is there a leading indicator? And—above all—are journal impact indicators really useful?