Search results

This study aims to investigate how a very particular learning environment, namely, partition rooms, affect students’ teaching experience and further explore if students’ learning styles is a pertinent determinant. Partition rooms are very common in Saudi Arabia when lectures are held by male instructors for female students. The male instructor delivers his lesson behind a glass wall, creating an environment of limited visual and auditory interaction. Various digital tools are present, meant to overcome the gap caused by the lack of direct student–teacher contact.

The researchers collected data from a sample of 109 female students who are studying at Level 4 Computer Science Department, College of Computer Sciences and Information Technology, at a public university in Saudi Arabia. All of them experienced a minimum of two courses undertaken in a partition room. The survey consists of two parts with a total of 53 questions. The first 20 questions were adopted from the perceptual learning style preference questionnaire (PLSP).

Research findings reveal that students are affected differently by the various dimensions of the partition room depending on their learning style.

There are fewer results in the literature that study learners of our particular group, namely, Saudi females. The study focuses on students studying IT and related fields. This study is almost unique, as most studies of the kind are related to the experience of females learning English as a foreign language. Therefore, the authors’ research gives much-needed insight into the conditions and perceptions of female students studying toward their degree in a technical field.

Nearly ten years ago Alan Pritchard, in a ‘Documentation Note’ in this journal, reviewed the use of the term statistical bibliography, and, being dissatisfied with it, proposed bibliometrics as a better name for the subject. He con‐cluded his note by expressing a hope ‘that this term bibliometrics will be used explicitly in all studies which seek to quantify the process of written communication and will quickly gain acceptance in the field of information science’. That hope was indeed quickly realized. In the subsequent years the new term has gained almost—but not quite—universal acceptance by librarians and information scientists, and Pritchard's note, in turn, has been frequently cited in support of the new term's use.

Meadows analysed the citations appearing in the 1963–5 volumes of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, eliminating duplicate citations from consideration. He concluded, with certain assumptions, that a library of the twelve top‐ranking journals (which I assume to be ranked by number of citations per title), each held in a fifteen‐year back‐run, would meet approximately two‐thirds of the British demand for astronomical articles.

Since 1960, and especially during the past three years, many papers have appeared about particular manifestations and applications of a certain class of empirical laws to a field that may be labelled conveniently ‘Bibliometrics’. This term, resuscitated by Alan Pritchard (see page 348), denotes, in my paraphrase, quantitative treatment of the properties of recorded discourse and behaviour appertaining to it.

As a pioneering and influential journal in the field of library and information science (LIS), the Journal of Documentation (JDoc) needs to be evaluated from a bibliometric perspective. This study aimed at conducting a bibliometric overview and visualization of the scientific output of JDoc from its inception in 1945–2018.

In this bibliometric study, 2056 papers published in JDoc were analyzed. All needed data were extracted from Scopus in 9 July 2019 in CSV format. Bibliometric analyses were done in Microsoft Excel. Visualization was done by Vosviewer software and applying techniques such as co-citation, co-authorship and co-occurrence. As a limited altmetric study, JDoc highly mentioned papers and the rate of their presence in social media were extracted from Altmetric LLP, too.

There was an increasing trend in published papers and received citations. Highly cited and most influential authors in JDoc are well-known in the field. However, the contributions of developing countries and their affiliated institutions to the journal were relatively low. This is true in case of author, country and institute co-authorship patterns. Highly frequent keywords and keyword co-occurrence patterns showed that the journal considered most topics related to LIS, including newly emerged ones. The authors and sources (generally journals) cited by JDoc are all prolific and influential ones.

The results of this study can be beneficial to JDoc editorial team for decision making on its further development as well as helpful for researchers and practitioners interesting in LIS field to have better contact with and contributions to the journal.

Kent Messenger papers go electronic A £350,000 drive to improve its electronic publishing system is nearing completion for the Kent Messenger Group (KM) of newspapers. When complete, the new system will handle the total advertisement and editorial input and sub‐edit, copy make‐up and accounts for all seventeen KM titles. Among them the various publications generate some 1,200 tabloid pages each week — all of which will be individually composed online at each regional office (as soon as the system is complete) and then transmitted to KM's central production plant for typesetting, make up and printing.

Looking down a list of library systems currently on the market, it is interesting to see that a relatively high proportion run under the PICK operating system. It therefore seemed appropriate to include in this issue some background on PICK and some reasons why it has proved a suitable environment for library systems.