Naiemeh Bahraini; Mahdieh Mirzabeigi; Hajar Sotudeh
Abstract
Background and Objectives: The present study aimed to investigate the impact of users’ verbal, imagery and bimodal cognitive style, and browsing experience on their disorientation level during web browsing. Methodology: In order to extract the data obtained from users’ transaction files, ...
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Background and Objectives: The present study aimed to investigate the impact of users’ verbal, imagery and bimodal cognitive style, and browsing experience on their disorientation level during web browsing. Methodology: In order to extract the data obtained from users’ transaction files, a hybrid approach, including the content analysis method and the think-aloud technique, was utilized. The statistical population in this study included all of the undergraduate students at Shiraz University, and the sample consisted of 90 voluntary undergraduate students. Findings: According to the results, no significant difference was observed among the cognitive styles as far as disorientation level was concerned. However, novice users experienced higher levels of disorientation in comparison with experienced users. In addition, it was observed that there is a significant difference between the users who had different levels of experience and cognitive styles in terms of disorientation in browsing. The verbal and novice users also experienced higher levels of disorientation compared to the verbal and experienced users. Discussion: Due to the limited understanding of the role which cognitive style plays in guiding users during web browsing, the results of the present study appeared to be useful in providing a better understanding of the factors influencing the users’ performance in browsing process and thereby the need to consider them in user modeling and training.
zohreh Cheraghi; Farideh Osareh; Hajar Sotudeh
Abstract
Abstract Background and Objectives: Most of the budget and revenues of each country are spent on research and development processes in order to achieve scientific progress. But the success of each country in achieving this goal is not simply measurable. Evaluation of scientific achievements is ...
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Abstract Background and Objectives: Most of the budget and revenues of each country are spent on research and development processes in order to achieve scientific progress. But the success of each country in achieving this goal is not simply measurable. Evaluation of scientific achievements is based on two main pillars of quantity and quality. The purpose of this study is to investigate the status of citation competition of Iranian researchers' articles in national journals and identify Iranian core journals in the three groups of citation core journals, publishing core journals and Matthew core journals. Methodology: The present study was a citation analysis one. The sample was consists of scientific articles of the top five universities in Iran. The sample size includes 49328 articles that have been published in 6658 journals. Since the data of this research is taken from Scopus citation database, instead of using the impact factor index, the "journal cite score" is used to show the journal citation impact. The cite score of each journal shows the average number of citations per article over a three-year period for each journal, so it can be used as the expected value for all articles in that journal. For this purpose, in this study, to calculate the number of citations expected for each journal. In this study, core journals were divided into three groups. The first group is Publishing Core Magazines (PCJ), the second group is Citation Core Magazines (CCJ) and the third group is Matthew Core Magazines (MCJ); These are journals that contain half of Iran's articles, journals that contain half of the citations received by Iran, and journals that contain half of Matthew's citations (either positive or negative) in Iran. Findings: Researchers in the study sample have published in a total of 6658 journals, which includes a total of 49328 articles. With the condition of publishing at least ten articles from Iran in the five years under review for each journal, 994 journals remained as a collection of national journals in Iran. The number of journals in the collection of national journals of Iran (994 journal titles) is only 15% of the total journals (6658 journal titles) that Iranian researchers have selected to publish the article during the five years of study. It is noteworthy that this small percentage of journals, more than half of the articles (55.64%) and up to 70% of the total citations. This information indicates the importance of these journals and the concentration of a large number of articles and citations in a small group of journals. Among the core journals, Matthew Negative Nuclear Magazines is the largest group, accounting for 193 journals and nearly 20% of the total INJS journals. After that, the group of publishing core journals (182 journals) and citation core journals (107 journals) had the largest number of journals, respectively. Matthew Core Negative Magazines, on the other hand, have the lowest number of citations in the period under review, despite having the highest number of journals. This indicates that there are a large number of journals in the collection of national journals of Iran that have not had a proper visibility for Iranian articles. But the positive group of Matthew Core Magazines, which is the smallest group of Core Magazines, despite the very small number of magazines (only 14 titles), but accounted for approximately 11% of the total citations. The main feature of these magazines is that they have been able to occupy half of the citations of Matthew in Iranian magazines. Discussion: A review of the collections of core journals showed that more than half of the journals do not belong to any of the core groups. On the other hand, in this study, it was found that Matthew core positive journals, the journals that contain half of the citation performance of Iranian articles, are only 14 titles. Perhaps by adopting better publishing strategies and offering advice to Iranian scientists, the number of these journals can be increased. Recently, Iran has always had brilliant rankings in number of articles, so that sometimes it has even surpassed the global growth rate. However, a review of the core journals shows that these journals have not performed well in obtaining citations and credibility, and a large group of them are in the group of negative Matthew core journals (49 titles). This shows that the increase in quantity and number of articles does not necessarily lead to an increase in citation and scientific credibility. Therefore, it is better to choose solutions to increase the visibility of scientific works so that in parallel with increasing the number of articles, appropriate recognition can be received. In general, it seems that the adoption of appropriate research and publishing strategies, as well as the selection of a strong and credible journal, is necessary to improve the citation performance of Iranian articles in the field of scientific competition. Obviously, this does not happen overnight and requires the design and implementation of appropriate short-term and long-term scientific development programs. Ideally, a country magazine collection should be the most reputable collection. However, for countries with poor scientific infrastructure, this may in itself be detrimental; because the acceptance process and, consequently, the quantity of their products affects. Therefore, such systems can, as a suitable alternative, seek to find a set with more visible chances (Sotoudeh, 2011).
Hajar Sotudeh; Kianoosh Rashidi
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Nowadays, we are passing through an era of transition from analog to digital format. Most valuable information is either digitally born or digitized which require digital preservation to ensure their safety and survival for long-term maintenance and access for posterity. Several ...
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Background and Objectives: Nowadays, we are passing through an era of transition from analog to digital format. Most valuable information is either digitally born or digitized which require digital preservation to ensure their safety and survival for long-term maintenance and access for posterity. Several web preservation programs have been launched around the world, each of which having its own properties and area of activities in line with policies and goals of the user organization. The present study aimed to explore the activities and properties of the existing top web preservation projects and programs in terms of their time coverage, scopes of preservation, and types of resources preserved, access models and authorized users.
Methodology: A documentary method was used to identify and analyze the relevant available literature such as papers, handbooks, web sites, etc. The programs’ people-in-charge were also questioned via a short questionnaire sent by Email. Top web preservation programs and projects were identified using Google Search, as well as analyzing the program interfaces and documents, directories and the related literature. After being verified and filtered, 61 top programs were selected to be studied.
Findings: The verification of the launching dates of the programs revealed that “Internet Archive” is the oldest one dating back to 1996. Most recent programs were “Anarchism Web Archive” and “Web Harvesting Project of the German National Library”, of which the first was subject specific while the other was that of a specific nationality. While some programs cover a global scope as wide as the web, some others limit their borders to web resources published in a specific country, region, subject, organization, and/or document type. The first and oldest digital preservation program, i.e. “Internet Archive” has selected to cover the world-wide web as its preservation scope, thus its time coverage goes back to as far as 1996. For some programs, the time coverage is very limited and covers 2-9 years prior to their launching dates; examples are: “The Cyber Cemetery”, “LAC (Electronic Collection of Library and Archives Canada)” and “Portuguese Web Archive”. However, these programs are apparently depending on macro programs such as “Internet Archive” for the web resources published prior to their launching dates. It was also revealed that 50% of these programs run at national level and 13.4 % cover a specific subject. Politics, Culture, Religion, Science, Economy, Slavery, Government, Anarchism, Human Rights, Social Issues, Computer and Information Science are among the subjects that are most frequently dealt with by the programs. Some programs selected only one or two document types while others covered a combination of document types for preservation. Access to the archived version of the preserved documents ranges on a continuum from fully open, through semi-open to restricted access. Of all the programs the majority (39.1%) apply a full open access model; next comes those adhering to a restricted access model (23/9%). The semi-open access model had the least frequency (6.7%). Some programs offer their services to people throughout the world and do not limit themselves to specific users (6.3%) of which a prominent example is the “Internet Archive” that is open to all users around the globe. For some other programs (15.2%), access is restricted just for authorized users; for example, “Web Harvesting Project of the German National Library” and “AOLA (Austrian Online Archive)” are limited to students and researchers.
Discussion: The results of the present study revealed that the importance of web preservation is duly recognized all over the world so that a wide range of countries are found to be engaged in this endeavor. The programs under study can be classified into two main groups including R&D related and operational ones. Most of them are found to have chosen their national domains for preservation; this results in the perseveration of all document types in almost all subjects available in their cyberspaces. There are also many programs found to provide open access to the preserved contents for all kinds of users throughout the world.
Hajar Sotudeh; Maryam Yaghtin
Abstract
Aim: The present study aims to compare Iran's scientific productivity in different disciplines during 1991-2011 based on their publication per capita. Method: Using a scientometric method, data were obtained from the Thompson-Reuters citation websites using the SCI. The researchers’ subject matters ...
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Aim: The present study aims to compare Iran's scientific productivity in different disciplines during 1991-2011 based on their publication per capita. Method: Using a scientometric method, data were obtained from the Thompson-Reuters citation websites using the SCI. The researchers’ subject matters were classified in two different ways: (1) based on the journals’ subject categories and (2) based on the researcher’s educational or research department as reflected in his/her affiliation. Findings: The findings of this study revealed that the overall publication per capita for Iranian researchers was 51.7 in a 21-year period. The chemistry and agricultural sciences subject categories had the highest and lowest publication per capita respectively. The highest and lowest rate of publication per capita also belonged to the biophysics and the pathobiology departments respectively. Test results showed a significant difference among various subject categories and departments in terms of publication rate per capita. This difference was observed among the biology and biochemistry, chemistry, engineering, material science and several other disciplines. Such a difference was also observed between the chemistry department and some of the other departments. Conclusion: Results indicated that paying attention to the standard of the absolute number of scientific papers had failed to provide a comprehensive picture of the reality of research, and that paying attention to other standards such as publications per capita in which the number of researchers is taken into account in addition to the number of papers can provide a more accurate and comprehensive picture of scientific productivity.
