i’m not really sure what’s going on in these pictures, but the cats seem so well organized i just had to share:
this paper expands on Bates’ 1996 article about information seeking of interdisciplinary scholars, so you’re pretty much obliged to go read this thing now.
one particular interesting point for me as a librarian is taken from the result of the authors’ survey of physics and astronomy faculty on their perceptions of how interdisciplinary they thought the literature in their special areas of research was. those that felt their area’s literature was fairly concentrated (as opposed to “scattered,” or broad) had the highest rate of e-print archive usage. this has potential implications for the kinds of archives/back files of e-journals that a library may choose to purchase. it would be advantageous for a library to understand the perceived interdisciplinarity of a field before the purchase; if the field considers its literature to be more concentrated than scattered, the higher the use of the back files will be.
article in press: Jamali, H. R., & Nicholas, D. Interdisciplinarity and the information-seeking behavior of scientists. Information Processing and Management (2010), doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2009.12.010
inspired by the self improvement post over at scatterplot, in which the author describes her attempt to read the top 25 most cited articles in sociology, i went in search of the same in information & library science. i ended up finding a list in the 2009 article by levitt and thelwall, which ranks the top 82 in the field based on disciplinarity, annual citation patterns, and first author citation profiles. these are the 5 that top the list:
1. Hu M (1962) Visual-Pattern Recognition by Moment Invariants
2. Davis FD (1989) Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology
3. Pawlak Z (1982) Rough Sets
4. Gruber TR (1993) A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications
5. Deerwester S, Dumais ST, Furnas GW, et al. (1990) Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis
i read a lot and was surprised by how many articles in this list i haven’t seen before. it makes me wonder if “top citations” equal “essential reading.” what do YOU think? what would you consider essential articles in our field? would these 5 make your list?
Levitt, J.M., and Mike Thelwall (2009). The Most Highly Cited Library and Information Science Articles: Interdisciplinarity, First Authors and Citation Patterns. Scientometrics 78:1, pp. 45-67. DOI: 10.1007/s11192-007-1927-1
Last semester was a great start to a new faculty speaker series. We had an average of 22 people in attendance at the three presentations. We’re broadening our scope this semester, including two presenters with creative works to share, and two with traditional book publications. We’re also matching the title of the series, Pub Night, with snacks appropriate for a pub.
http://libguides.lmu.edu/pubnight
Paul A. Harris: “Translating Architecture into Letters: Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Six Sections in Succession”
Paul T. Zeleza: Barack Obama and African Diasporas: Dialogues and Dissensions
Wendy Binder: “What Teeth Tell Us: The Lives and Deaths of Sabertooth Cats, Dire Wolves and Other Extinct Large Carnivores”
Carla Bittel: Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America
i’m reading through an article about how high energy physicists organize themselves to do their work, with the traditional model of publishing as the surprising second step, the first step being sharing via pre-print environments such as arXiv. though the pre-print environment helps them do their work quickly, they still value the second step of publishing in journals.
SPIRES data shows that … papers submitted to arXiv and not published in a journal have an impact factor approximately 5 times lower than that of papers submitted to arXiv and published in a journal. Peer-review seems to result in increased citation, indicating that the field still values quality control, in addition to other functions provided by journals such as permanent archiving.
“Organizing a research community with SPIRES: Where repositories, scientists and publishers meet”
Travis C. Brooks
Information Services & Use 29 (2009) 91-96.
