Bulletin, December/January 2006
Selected Abstracts from JASIS&T
note: We invite JASIS&T authors to submit structured abstracts of
their articles for possible inclusion in the Bulletin, particularly those
that might be of interest to practitioners.
From JASIS&T v. 56 (12)
Meho, L.I., & Spurgin, K.M. (2005). Ranking the research
productivity of LIS faculty and schools: An evaluation of data sources and
research methods, 1314-1331.
This study evaluates the data sources and research methods used in earlier
studies to rank the research productivity of Library and Information Science (LIS)
faculty and schools.
The study identifies both tools and methods that generate more accurate
publication count rankings as well as databases that should be taken into
consideration when conducting comprehensive searches in the literature for
research and curricular needs. Results show:
That there are only ten databases that
provide significant coverage of the LIS indexed literature
That restricting the data sources to
one, two, or even three databases leads to inaccurate rankings and erroneous
conclusions. Because no database provides comprehensive coverage of the LIS
literature, researchers must rely on a wide range of disciplinary and
multidisciplinary databases for ranking and other research purposes.
The primary limitation of this study is that the lists of publications used to
evaluate the databases were not compiled from a random sample of faculty
members. However, any potential sources of unreliability in this study were
assumed to have been alleviated by including a large number of schools and
faculty members, covering publication lists spanning lengthy periods of time,
and by taking into consideration all important document types and including a
wide variety of research areas. The potential sources of unreliability have also
been lessened by making use of data published in earlier studies and by
conducting several tests on them to verify the results obtained here.
From JASIS&T v. 56
Chau, M., Fang, X., and Sheng, O. R. L. (2005). Analysis of the
query logs of a website search engine, 1363-1376.
Study and Results: In
this study, we analyzed the search logs of the
What’s New? Most previous Web log analyses only focused on general-purpose
search engines such as Excite and few have reported on the analysis of search
logs for search engines that are limited to particular websites. Our findings
are useful for website developers wishing to improve the performance of their
services and for researchers conducting further research in this area.
The analysis also can be applied in e-government research by
investigating how information should be delivered to users on government
Limitations: As the study was conducted on a
single website, more studies will be needed for generalizing the results to
other domains and websites.
Kruschwitz, U. and Al-Bakour, H. (2005). Users want more
sophisticated search assistants: Results of a task-based evaluation,
Study and Results: This
paper gives a detailed account of a task-based evaluation that compares a search
system that utilizes automatically acquired domain knowledge against a standard
search system. Using TREC's interactive track guidelines, we compared two search
systems, 16 subjects and eight tasks. The main conclusion is that users prefer a
system that can suggest query modifications over a standard search engine that
simply presents a ranked list of documents.
What’s New?: Tasks such as searching,
browsing and question answering can
all benefit from domain-specific knowledge. In applications such as simple
search we do not need very deep knowledge structures, such as ontologies, but
can get a long way with a model of the domain that consists of term hierarchies.
We combine domain knowledge automatically acquired by exploiting the documents'
markup structure with knowledge extracted on the fly to assist a user with ad
hoc search requests. Such a search system can suggest query modification
options derived from the actual data and thus guide a user through the document
Limitations: We restricted the evaluation to
a single domain of documents, the BBC News website. Furthermore, we concentrated
on difficult tasks, that is, tasks that typically involved several interactions
with the search system to locate an appropriate match.
Stefl-Mabry, J. (2005). The
reality of media preferences: Do professional groups vary in awareness? 1394-1404.
Study and Results: Studies in various disciplines rely upon
self-report. This study examines the extent to which individuals and groups are
self-aware of the judgment profiles they employ in evaluating information source
scenarios. Three groups of professionals – law enforcement, medicine and
education – were examined to determine if preference profiles cluster around
professions or around demographic and or other background variables. Significant
differences between self-perceived and empirically inferred information source
preferences were associated with professional group affiliation. Law enforcement
professionals demonstrated a higher level of self-awareness than educators. No
association was found between perceived and inferred information source
preferences based upon gender or education level.
What’s New?: Social
judgment analysis (SJA) is a methodology used to identify information judgment
preferences. Additionally, users’ empirical data is compared to self-reported
data along the same measure. It might be hypothesized that because law
enforcement professionals experience training requiring deliberate consideration
of environmental cues this training affects their ability to self-assess.
Limitations: The research represents an
exploratory study based on purposive samples, and therefore the findings of this
study are not generalizable. Further research on more general populations to
test these hypotheses in large-sample studies or in meta-analyses of other case
studies with sufficient numbers will be needed.
Articles in this Issue
Selected Abstracts from JASIST