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The purpose of the study is to use a multidimensional perspective on the analysis of scholarly articles published in the top-tier Library and Information Science (LIS) journals. The relationships between the impact factors (Altmetric attention score [AAS], citation count and Mendeley readership) were analyzed, and reader profiles were characterized and studied.

This paper examined citation count, AAS and Mendeley readership of the most cited articles published in the top-tier LIS journals – The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Government Information Quarterly and Library and Information Science Research. A total of 61 articles were analyzed. Data were recorded on an Excel spreadsheet and exported to the statistical software package SPSS 18.0 for Windows to perform the descriptive and correlation analysis.

This study suggests that Mendeley readership and AAS could be used as supplemental measurements for assessing the impact of a publication or author in the LIS. AAS and Mendeley readership are positively correlated with citation count, and the correlation between Mendeley readership and citation count was stronger than AAS and citation count. Librarians are dominant readers of the top-tier LIS journals, followed by social sciences, computer science and arts and humanities professions.

This study introduces two newly launched metrics for measuring the research impact factor and discusses how they correlated with citation count. Moreover, the study details the spectrum of Altmetric for discovering readership of LIS top-tier journals. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that presents the spectrum of AAS and Mendeley readership of the most cited articles published in top-tier of LIS journals. The study reveals an alternative way of measuring LIS publication’s impact factor that enables researchers, librarians, administrators, publishers and other stakeholders in LIS to assess the influence of a publication from another angle.

The purpose of this study is to investigate undergraduate student information self-efficacy to find out how much the students learned from library instruction classes and to determine whether information seeking skills can be developed with a library instruction class.

A quantitative research method was conducted to collect survey data and to perform statistical analysis. A Web-based survey was distributed to undergraduate students who were enrolled in the Fall term of 2014. In all, 98 students completed the survey.

The study reported that undergraduate students’ capability of information finding, retrieving, analyzing, evaluating and presenting were on and above medium level (M = 3.40). They reported higher skills in information evaluation and information objects and types but lower skills in using catalog/database and organizing/synthesizing information. Students in the multiple library instruction group showed a significantly higher information self-efficacy. One-single instruction has a limited effect on improving information seeking skills.

The number of students who participated in library instruction classes was relatively low. More data need to be collected to give credence to the findings in the future, and data collected from individual class would yield more accurate result.

This study extends the literature on information literacy and library instruction. The findings suggest that information literacy instruction should go beyond the one-session mode and should offer hands-on practices that will foster students’ critical thinking behavior more effectively.