International Journal of Information Science and Management
Volume:13 Issue: 1, Jan-Jun 2015

This paper aims to study the performance of the International Journal of Information Science and Management (IJISM) over a decade using scientometric approach. It also tries to study the co-authorship network of authors and institutions using different macro- and micro-level Social Network Analysis metrics. A total of 173 articles published in 23 issues of the IJISM covering the period 2003-2012 were analyzed in this study. The findings reveal that multi-authored articles published in the journal far outnumbered single-authored articles at 69.1%. Two-authored papers comprise the highest percentage (46.2%) of the total papers compare to other authorship patterns. Results show that the co-authorship network of authors in the IJISM is a small world network by demonstrating its short distance and scale free properties. Moreover, the famous notion of six degree of separation can be valid in this network. The study also identifies central and critical authors and institutions in IJISM’s collaboration network based on centrality, citation impact and productivity measures.

This research examines the association between co-authorship network centrality (degree, closeness, betweenness, eigenvector, Bonacich flow betweenness) and productivity of Information science researchers. The research population includes all those researchers who have published at least one record in one of the twenty journals of Information Science which has an impact factor of 0.635 as a minimum from the years 1996 to 2010. By using social network analyses, this study examines information science researchers’ outputs during 1996-2011 in ISI Web of Science database. In general co-authorship network of these researchers was analyzed by UCINET6 software. Results showed that there is a significant correlation between Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and all centrality measures except closeness centrality at P= 0.001. Results also showed that there is a significant correlation between productivity of authors and all centrality measures scores at P≥ 0.001. Also, regression reports direct relationship of degree, closeness and flow betweenness and inverse relationship of betweenness as well as Eigen vector centrality on productivity of researchers.

Persian follows a concatenative morphology, where new morphemes are generated by chaining different morphemes together to form a new compound word. Whenever, two morphemes bind to form a new morpheme, there is a possibility that the syllables at the morpheme boundaries undergo structural change. This study suggests that these syllabic alterations may be captured using a finite state approach. It further argues that syllabification may be incorporated into the process of lexicon building. This approach allows the syllabification rules to be encoded in the lexical knowledge, when a lexicon is built using the finite state methods. The rules captured here can also assist the processing of syllabic alterations in word boundaries as well. It is particularly useful to process meter in Persian poetry.

As a member of larger familyof formulaic sequences, lexical bundles play different discourse functions in written research articles. This study investigated the use of four-word lexical bundles in published research articles in medicine via natural language processing by computational linguistics. A corpus of 2,420,914 words was extracted from 790 research articles in 33 medical disciplines. For the identification of lexical bundles, a number of computer software products such as ABBYY FineReader 10 professional edition, Total assistant, Antconc 3.2.3, and WordSmith Tools 5 were used. The identified lexical bundles were classified structurally and functionally based on the taxonomies in the literature. The results of the study showed that 102 identified lexical bundles differ structurally and functionally and most of the writers of medical research articles rely on text-oriented bundles for establishing their written academic discourse. This study provided new insights in understanding the discipline-specific discourse of medical research articles and in doing further corpus-based research in written academic discourse and EAP. This research introduced stylistic linguistics point of view in information retrieval systems development.

University websites play an important role in disseminating educational and research information to universities. They are a vital port for accessing the universities'' scientific information for researchers, faculty members, and students. The goal of this study was to compare evaluation methods such as Web Assessment Index (WAI), Web Quality Evaluation Method (WebQEM), and webometrics for evaluating Iranian state university websites. In this analytical survey, the data collection tools were checklists prepared by the WebQEM, WAI, and webometrics. Descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and analytic statistics (Spearman''s rank-difference correlation coefficient) were used for data analysis. The results indicated that Iranian state university websites were in a good condition (mean=75.14) according to four main criteria in WebQEM, in a good condition (mean=69.52) according to five main criteria in WAI, and in a very good condition (mean=88) according to five main criteria in webometrics. Also, differences can be seen in ranking of university websites. Only Ferdowsi University of Mashhad was in first place in terms of the three assessment methods. The hypotheses assumed that there was a positive correlation between WebQEM, WAI, and webometrics. Using the results of this study could help university website designers to fix weaknesses in order to to reach an active participation in these websites.

As Google Analytics becomes increasingly popular, more detailed records of users’ behaviors can be captured and analyzed to better understand the performance of websites. However, current Google Analytics related research usually draws conclusions from rough estimation based on the observation of the dashboard or other basic statistical processing of the data. This study aims to provide a more accurate and informative analysis from both temporal and geospatial perspectives via clustering and GIS application. The results obtained from a resource website case study demonstrate that the proposed method is able to help web managers better examine the temporal effect on users’ visiting patterns based on accurate mathematical computation as well as provides more geographical insight into website performance through the constructed density measure and 3D graphic presentation. By offering in-depth quantitative information relying on mining data from web logs, such a study can help web stakeholders make better decisions on how to maintain and improve the websites, especially adjusting resources by considering temporal fluctuations and inequity in geographical distribution.

In the past, science was not as specialized as it currently is and scientists mastered miscellaneous sciences. Currently, human sciences are inter-related with mutual connections that have mutual effects with respect to defining their key themes. In this regard, the present study, while explaining the concept of business competition, which is among the key issues in economics,has sought to investigate some aspects of freedom of information such as the economy of information, being tax and capital related, and the government''s obligation to allow public access to this possession (which due to this very reason could serve as a legal foundation for competition). Freedom of information necessitates issues such as safeguarding (people’s) privacy which should also be surveyed.