Search results

This paper aims to use the technology acceptance model 2 (TAM2) to investigate the perceived ease of use, perceived benefits, barriers to use and acceptance of Arab scholars of informal communication tools in research writing.

This study adopted a quantitative approach using a questionnaire distributed among Arab scholars in Jordan, Egypt and Oman. The questionnaire based on the TAM2 model aimed to measure the acceptance of the sample of informal scholarly communication tools.

The study’s findings confirmed that the sample is considering informal scholarly communication tools are useful for their research. Informal scholarly communication tools increase the papers’ visibility, leading to a higher number of citations, building scholars’ reputation, creating new collaboration opportunities and maintaining the established collaboration.

The study’s findings can only be generalized on Arab scholars. The sample size could be one of the limitations, and the sample’s distribution was limited to three Arab universities in Jordan, Oman and Egypt. The authors recommend that future researchers use TAM2 model as a framework for studying the adoption of informal scholarly communication tools in different cultural contexts to achieve a better understanding of factors influencing the adoption of such tools.

A practical implication of this research is in drawing the attention of higher education institutions for the potentials of these scholarly communication tools in increasing the availability of publications of their scholars and increasing the citation of these publications, which would help in increasing the ranking of scholars, and the rank of these institutions which opens new opportunities of international research collaboration.

The outcomes of this research have several implications for the successful adoption of the TAM2 model. This study brings new knowledge to the literature related to informal scholarly communication adoption by the application of TAM2 constructs to determine the adoption behavior; the findings offered evidence of the TAM2 success in predicting adoption of such tools.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, adopting TAM2 in this research will add to knowledge by being one of the first studies to adopt TAM2 to measure acceptance of informal scholarly communication tools.

The purpose of this study is to investigate individuals’ perceptions and behavior when dealing with misinformation on social media platforms. While misinformation is not a new phenomenon, the COVID-19 outbreak has accelerated its spread through social media outlets, leading to widespread exposure to false or misleading information. This exposure can have serious consequences on individuals’ decision-making and behavior, especially when it comes to critical decisions related to education or healthcare. The use of social media as a source of information makes it essential to understand how people perceive and respond to misinformation to develop effective strategies for mitigating its harmful effects.

This large-scale study explores the Omani individuals’ perceptions and behaviour of misinformation on the social Web in a series of studies that seek to enhance the authorities’ response to misinformation. The study adopted a quantitative approach to collect data. Using WhatsApp as a social networking platform, a survey was disseminated to capture participants’ perceptions and behaviour among different segments of citizens in Oman.

The findings showed that Omani participants have high verification skills, implying high information literacy skills among them. Additionally, results indicated that misinformation had created doubt and anxiety among the participants. Moreover, it hindered many participants’ ability to take countermeasures and obtain reliable data.

This study was a large-scale study conducted in Oman, making it one of a few studies conducted in the region about perceptions and behaviour towards misinformation. The findings help to understand how different cultures interacted with COVID-19 misinformation. In addition, these findings offer useful insight that can help health information professionals to design preventive resources that help people to obtain accurate information during crises.

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study to explore the Egyptian social science scholars’ academic writing behaviour in local and international context. Understanding the challenges that scholars in social science and humanities face while publishing in the international outlets would help to suggest strategies to improve academic writing in non-Arabic journals.

This study deployed mixed methods approach. The quantitative data were collected using an online questionnaire. Interviews were conducted with a group of scholars in the five faculties to elucidate the publishing behaviour of the sample.

The interviews and the questionnaire showed that social science scholars in Egypt prefer local publishing outlets. The number of scholars who publish internationally is very low compared to scholars who publish locally. Scholars who tried to publish internationally faced many challenges, such as language barriers, lack of academic writing skills and lack of appropriate training.

This study was conducted in one university in Egypt. While the results can be generalised to Egyptian and Middle East universities, it cannot be generalised to non-Arab communities because of the differences in culture and education system.

This study provides insight on publishing practices in the international context among social science scholars in Egypt using a mixed methods approach. This helped to capture the scholarly publishing practices and the attitude toward international publishing and the main challenges that scholars face who attempt to publish in international outlets.

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study to investigate the changes in scholarly communication practices among a group of scholars in the UK and build upon the results that were published in a previous paper.

The study deployed a naturalistic inquiry approach using semi-structured interviews as a qualitative research tool. A sample of 40 participants from four UK universities was interviewed to explore the changes in informal scholarly communication behaviour.

The analysis of the interviews revealed that there are three ideal types of behaviour: the “orthodox” uses formal and traditional scholarly communication approaches; the “moderate” prioritises formal communication approaches, but at the same time is trying to get benefits from informal channels; and, the “Heterodox” uses all channels available in the scholarly communication.

The value of the current study lies in using a naturalistic inquiry approach to investigate the changes in scholarly communication practices, and to explore the different scholarly communication styles. In the context of this study, the use of a naturalistic approach and grounded theory principles in connection with coding provided a stance that allows for the gathering of rich information to enable understanding and explanation of scholarly communication activities in addition to uncovering themes that related to scholarly behaviour.

The purpose of this study is to explore the information-seeking behavior of Egyptian physicians serving in COVID-19 isolation hospitals.

A sample of 91 physicians serving in Egyptian isolation hospitals answered the study questionnaire.

Demographically, more than half of respondents were males. Over one-third of them are holding Doctor of Medicine (M.D), followed by one-third holding Master of Medicine (MMed). Respondents' age ranged from 30 to 60 years. Internal medicine is the most common specialty, accounting for nearly half of all physicians, followed by chest medicine and intensive care medicine. The information-seeking behavior of these three groups in their regular work is believed to be different, but since all of the participants are working in COVID-19 isolation hospitals, they should have the same information resources, Internet access and the same needs relevant to COVID-19 in order to make accurate clinical decisions. The physicians used traditional and electronic information sources to fulfill their information needs, the most important of which were to make a specific research, find an answer to a specific case, and deliver a medical lecture. Colleagues, coworkers, nurses and pharmacists were the most important channels pursued by Egyptian physicians to obtain information.

This study is the first study that focuses on investigating the information-seeking behavior of Egyptian physicians serving in isolation hospitals. Any findings resulted from this study may serve as a noteworthy reference that may be useful to the Egyptian health sector, experts, researchers, as well as policymakers in establishing strategic decisions for making the understating much better.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2020-0350

Social engineering is crucial in today’s digital landscape. As technology advances, malicious individuals exploit human judgment and trust. This study explores how age, education and occupation affect individuals’ awareness, skills and perceptions of social engineering.

A quantitative research approach was used to survey a diverse demographic of Egyptian society. The survey was conducted in February 2023, and the participants were sourced from various Egyptian social media pages covering different topics. The collected data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics, including independent samples t-test and ANOVA, to compare awareness and skills across different groups.

The study revealed that younger individuals and those with higher education tend to research social engineering more frequently. Males display a higher level of awareness but score lower in terms of social and psychological consequences as well as types of attacks when compared to females. The type of attack cannot be predicted based on age. Higher education is linked to greater awareness and ability to defend against attacks. Different occupations have varying levels of awareness, skills, and psychosocial consequences. The study emphasizes the importance of increasing awareness, education and implementing cybersecurity measures.

This study’s originality lies in its focus on diverse Egyptian demographics, innovative recruitment via social media, comprehensive exploration of variables, statistical rigor, practical insights for cybersecurity education and diversity in educational and occupational backgrounds.

The study aims to explore the classification of electronic games in Dewey decimal classification (DDC) and The Library of Congress classification (LCC) schemes.

The study adopted a comparative analytical method to explore the topic in both the DDC and the LCC schemes by comparing its processing method in both schemes. The study measures the extent to which both schemes succeed in allocating notations covering the topic’s literature.

The study reached several results, the most important of which are: the difference between the two main cognitive sections, to which they belong to the topic, namely, arts and recreation (700) in the DDC scheme and the geography section (G) in the LCC scheme, while they were found to share the same sub-section scheme. The two schemes do not allocate notations to address the subject of electronic games as literature and other notations that have not been embodied for electronic games themselves or in the form of a compact disc or other media.

As far as we know, this is the first paper that compares the treatment of video games in DDC and Library of Congress classification schemes. The study allows for understanding the difference in the treatment of topics in both schemes, which would help in the decision of the adoption of a particular classification scheme.

The rapid spread and severity of the coronavirus (COVID-19) virus have prompted a spate of scholarly research that deals with the pandemic. The purpose of this study is to measure and assess the coverage of COVID-19 research on social media and the engagement of readers with COVID-19 research on social media outlets.

An altmetric analysis was carried out in three phases. The first focused on retrieving all papers related to COVID-19. Phase two of the research aimed to measure the presence of the retrieved papers on social media using altmetric application programming interface (API). The third phase aimed to measure Mendeley readership categories using Mendeley API to extract data of readership from Mendeley for each paper.

The study suggests that while social media platforms do not give accurate measures of the impact as given by citations, they can be used to portray the social impact of the scholarly outputs and indicate the effectiveness of COVID-19 research. The results confirm a positive correlation between the number of citations to articles in databases such as Scopus and the number of views on social media sites such as Mendeley and Twitter. The results of the current study indicated that social media could serve as an indicator of the number of citations of scientific articles.

This study’s limitation is that the studied articles’ altmetrics performance was examined using only one of the altmetrics data service providers (altmetrics database). Hence, future research should explore altmetrics on the topic using more than one platform. Another limitation of the current research is that it did not explore the academic social media role in spreading fake information as the scope was limited to scholarly outputs on social media. The practical contribution of the current research is that it informs scholars about the impact of social media platforms on the spread and visibility of COVID-19 research. Also, it can help researchers better understand the importance of published COVID-19 research using social media.

This paper provides insight into the impact of COVID-19 research on social media. The paper helps to provide an understanding of how people engage with health research using altmetrics scores, which can be used as indicators of research performance.

This study investigates the effect of protection motivation theory (PMT) constructs on Arab women's feelings while seeking information during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study has adopted a mixed-method approach using semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire to explore PMT constructs' impact on women's feelings while seeking information on COVID-19. Several tests, such as standard deviation, mean, skewness, kurtosis and persons, were used to check the reliability of data and inter-relationships between constructs.

The study results show a significant positive correlation between PMT constructs (perceived vulnerability, perceived severity, response efficacy, self-efficacy and response cost) with the feelings of Arab women during information seeking on COVID-19. However, the relationship between threat appraisal and feelings during information seeking was more substantial than coping appraisal and feelings during information seeking. The researchers hope that this study creates a baseline of cross-cultural studies on PMT constructs' effect on women's feelings while seeking health information.

The current study was conducted on female participants only. While the study intended to examine Arab women's feelings during information seeking with PMT's application, the results may be affected by other factors that were not considered in the current study. Furthermore, the questionnaire was distributed in three Arab countries, which means that the results cannot be generalized in other geographical contexts. Therefore, similar studies need to be conducted in larger geographical areas as cultural factors may produce different results.

This study explores women's feelings while seeking COVID-19 information using the PMT constructs. As far as we know, this study is the first study to investigate Arab women's feelings while seeking health information during pandemics. PMT utilization is considered a new approach to discover and measure informational needs and feelings associated with it during pandemics.

Technological advancement has forced academic libraries to change their traditional services and routines by adopting emerging technologies to respond to the changing information needs of their users who are now more technologically inclined and prefer to access information remotely and in a timely manner. Smart technologies are the recent trends in academic libraries. This research aims to investigate the level of smart information service implementation at academic libraries in Jordan. It also aimed to investigate the correlation between the level of smart information services offered by the libraries and the level of digital competencies among the library staff.

This research is designed using survey design to collect comprehensive information from the study participants. A questionnaire was disseminated to 340 respondents, and 246 questionnaires were returned and were suitable for analysis with a response rate of 72.4%.

The results indicated a moderate level of smart information service offered by academic libraries, as well as a moderate level of digital skills associated with the advocacy of smart information services. The results also indicated a strong and positive relationship between the level of smart information services at the investigated libraries and the level of digital competencies among the librarians.

The findings will help other academic libraries understand how to respond to the emergent change in users’ information-seeking behavior by understanding their available human resources competencies and the requirement to undergo this emergent change.

This paper provides insights and practical solutions for academic libraries in response to global information trends based on users’ behaviors. This research was conducted in Jordan as one of the developing countries and hence it provides insights of the situation there. It will help academic libraries in Jordan and the region to handle and cope with the challenges associated with technology acceptance based on its staff level of digital competencies. The contribution of this research that it was done in a developing country where progress in the filed can be considered slow because of many factors, mainly economics, where institutions focus on essential library objectives, which are information resources development and databases subscriptions.