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As an important platform for academic communication and knowledge acquisition, academic social network (ASN) has attracted worldwide researchers. The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the differences of corporation researchers in ASN utilization from the two aspects of social performance and academic performance.

Applying knowledge-based theory, this paper decoupled ASN into social network and academic network and measured utilization of users by social performance and academic performance. Hypotheses were proposed from the perspectives of research areas and corporate reputation. In the part of empirical research, the top 92 research corporations were selected as the sample, and relevant metric data from the member profile pages on ResearchGate was collected for comparing analysis to explore their utilization characteristics.

The results show that users of different research corporations have certain favoritism in their utilization of ASNs. Science and technology-oriented corporations are better in comprehensive social performance and academic quality. Science-oriented corporations are better at utilizing the interactive functions. However, neither social utilization nor academic utilization, technology-oriented corporations perform well.

This paper focuses on corporation researchers, who have started to embrace ASNs but whose behaviors were less studied. The research paradigm is an expansion and enrichment of the dual network decoupling theory in the field of ASN research. It also deepens the research on ASN utilization of corporation researchers and could give references for ASNs to improve service for corporation users in different research areas.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-12-2019-0389

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that influence college students’ smartphone use for academic purposes by identifying the task-technology fit (TTF) of smartphones. A research model is proposed to explain how TTF of smartphones affects college students’ perceived academic performance and smartphone use.

Online surveys were administered to college students at a South Korean university that has offered online academic services for more than five years, and 1,923 valid responses were analyzed. The study used partial least squares path modeling to evaluate the measurement model, and the bootstrapping technique to test the significance of the hypotheses.

The findings highlight that the TTF of smartphones has a direct influence on students’ perceptions of performance impact and an indirect influence on smartphone use through a precursor of utilization, such as attitude toward smartphone use, social norms and facilitating conditions.

Despite a reasonably large sample, a single cross-sectional survey has a likelihood of selection bias in the sample.

This study applies the TTF model to smartphone use among college students and suggests an effective way to motivate them to use mobile technologies for their academic activities.

The present study develops an empirical model to assess the adoption of smartphones and its effect on college students’ academic performance. Above all, the study identifies a causal relationship among TTF, precursor of utilization, smartphone use and a perceived impact on academic performance based on the development and validation of the TTF constructs of smartphones.

The quality of teaching, research and community service of lecturers coupled with their publication in any university system may depend on the quality of the electronic database they use. Electronic database awareness use is very important to the teaching, research and community service activities of lecturers in the Nigerian university system. It has been established that lack of awareness is the main factor militating against effective use of electronic databases. The study aims to investigate awareness and use of electronic databases as determinants of research productivity of academic staff in private universities in South-West Nigeria.

The descriptive survey research design of the correlational type was adopted. Out of the 27 private universities established and approved between 1999 and 2012 in South-West Nigeria, 21 were purposively covered in the study. The stratified random sampling technique based on probability proportionate to size method was adopted in selecting 1,656 (60 per cent) academic staff from the population size of 2,760. The main research instrument used to collect data for the study was questionnaire. Data generated were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Spearman’s rank was used to test hypothesis at 0.05 level of confidence.

There was a significant positive correlation between awareness and utilisation of electronic databases (r = 0.690; p < 0.05).The result of the analysis showed that there was average level of awareness of electronic databases among academic staff in private universities in South-West, Nigeria.

The study selected 21 out of the 27 private universities established and approved between 1999 and 2012 in South-West, Nigeria.

Based on the findings, the paper recommends increased investment in ICT facilities at the surveyed universities in line with the emerging digital trend in universities around the world to raise the level of awareness of electronic databases utilisation by academic staff in research.

Across the world, many universities are dealing with a pressure on resources, caused by both organisational developments and ageing campuses. Space utilization studies have a strategic role, providing information on how space is being used, thereby informing decisions about the type and scale of facilities that are needed.

This study reports on the space use measurements conducted at TU Delft over the past five years, complemented by their use to make decisions about the university's real estate portfolio.

The education spaces of the university are found to perform well in terms of frequency rates and can be improved in terms of occupancy rates. The information helped to support short- and long-term decision-making. The study places of the university have a satisfactory occupancy in some types of study places, while in others there is room for improvement. More research is needed here to understand the relationship between space norms and space use.

The space utilization studies have supported discussions with the student council and decision makers on which interventions are required and which current facilities meet students' needs best.

Not much space utilisation studies are reported in the academic literature, and those that do have several limitations. This study may serve as a best practice for benchmarking by other universities and as evidence in other research for the planned and actual use of university facilities.

“Sleeping beauties” are very common in science, so this paper aims to uncover the reasons and formulation mechanism of information awakening on a more general level. Based on this, the paper will further propose useful strategies to awaken those “sleeping beauties” earlier.

Explanation‐building of case study is used to develop some models of information awakening and also to uncover different types of reasons for triggering academic information to be awakened.

Based on the three basic elements of information utilisation, namely, information value, access channel and user needs, the paper summarises several reasons for information awakening: the information value is re‐mined because of the relevance among various information; different uses of information are discovered; information availability and visibility are improved; information is placed into the appropriate place; and, with time passing by, demands for the information rise.

The presence of excessive “sleeping beauties” is not only a kind of idleness and waste to knowledge, but also may result in aggravation of information redundancy and increasing cost of storage. The revelation of its essence and reasons is not only helpful to establish better management mechanism to awaken “sleeping beauties” and thus to maximise their value, but also helpful to distinguish “sleeping beauties” from “pseudo‐sleeping beauties” as early as possible, so that all that worthless information can be cleared up without hesitation.

Most existing studies remain on the level of collecting instances and interpreting specific cases, but this paper investigates reasons from a more general level. What is more, current understandings are very one‐sided in that they treat information awakening and delayed recognition as the same, so this paper clarifies their differentiation and summarises the reasons comprehensively.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between the perceived performance, software usability, and attitude of academics to use online technology to perform their tasks in the academic context.

The paper assesses the acceptance and utilization of university lecturers for an online educational system using the technology-to-performance chain model. The evaluation process is conducted via an online survey which is administered to 180 university staff meanwhile objective measurements describing the actual utilization are considered during the analysis. Partial least squares path modeling is used in this study in tandem with other statistical methods to test the significance and influence of different constructs and factors related to the user.

The usability of information systems plays a crucial role compared to the attitude and social norms for lecturers to actually utilize technological products. Meanwhile, the TTF is observed to have more influence than the actual utilization for the perceived impact on performance. For the individual’s characteristics, the study indicates that the age is an influential factor on the utilization and performance in contrast to the gender which has a marginal impact.

The study describes a model to assess the acceptance of technology by academics based on combining self-reported data and objective quantitative measures which describe the actual utilization of the user. Further, the usability estimated using the well-known System Usability Scale is integrated within the developed model to reflect the ease of use for technology. Further, covariate analysis is conducted to explore how different types of users interact and react to educational systems for different factors including age, gender, academic qualifications and experience.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic drastically changed work arrangements, but COVID-19's impact on employee leave utilization is unclear. The authors sought to understand how sick leave and vacation leave utilization changed during the pandemic among clinical and non-clinical departments at an academic medical center (AMC).

Clinical departments were defined as work units with a primary mission of providing direct patient care. Per-person, per-month leave utilization data were obtained from the AMC's time-keeping system for 3 clinical departments and 4 non-clinical departments in the first 12 months of the pandemic and the preceding 12 months. Monthly data for each department were analyzed with mixed-effects regression.

Available data represented 402 employees from 3 clinical departments and 73 employees from 4 non-clinical departments. The authors found no statistically significant change in sick leave utilization among either clinical or non-clinical departments. Vacation leave utilization decreased during the pandemic by 5.9 h per person per month in non-clinical departments (95% confidence interval [CI]: −8.1, −3.8; p < 0.001) and by 3.0 h per person per month in clinical departments (95% CI: −4.3, −1.7; p < 0.001).

Among employees in clinical departments, the authors found no increase in sick leave utilization and a decrease in vacation utilization. These findings are concerning for presenteeism, risk of burnout or understaffing resulting in workers' inability to take time away from work in clinical departments.

This study aims to explore the extent of Web 2.0 adoption by libraries of top universities in Africa. It focuses on identifying the extent of utilization, types of Web 2.0 technologies adopted and how these technologies are used.

The content analysis method was used. Data was collected by analyzing library websites of 82 top universities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Also, a combination of literature review and document analysis was applied.

About half of the libraries in the study adopted one or more Web 2.0 applications. Social networks were the most widely adopted while social bookmarking and tagging were the least used applications. Web 2.0 utilization in African academic libraries was still in early stages.

This study is mainly based on analysis of library websites. Web 2.0 platforms that were password protected and accessible through intranet were not studied. Therefore, studies that are based on feedback of librarians and patrons are warranted to further investigate Web 2.0 utilization in African libraries.

Web 2.0 plays a key role in facilitating information sharing, collaboration, and communication between librarians and patrons, and among librarians. It is essential for African libraries to integrate these technologies into library services to enhance the quality of services.

This is likely the first study about Web 2.0 applications in African academic libraries. It is a useful source for implementing web-based technologies in libraries.

This study aims to enhance the simultaneous utilization of measure in product design by mapping out the possible and potential uses of a measure for both academicians and practitioners.

To map out a way for the simultaneous utilization of measure, the authors assessed and portrayed the diverse facets of a four-factor measure for the development of mobile devices by adopting pluralistic techniques through a series of studies and three different study samples.

This study provided a solution for enhancing the usability of measure in product management, showing that a measure can be developed using a pluralistic methodology so that the results can be incorporated into the practitioners’ design activities that occur and when the gap between theory and practice is a knowledge production problem.

The main positioning of this study involves the science-design interface (Simon, 1992) to bridge the important gap between theory and practice by showcasing a measure development for product design as a strategy of intellectual arbitrage (Van De Ven and Johnson, 2006). Relying on the design scientific approach, the authors focused this study on a prescriptive procedure rather than a more rigorous methodological procedure.

The authors provided product managers with a systematic and synergistic approach to developing a measure and recommended several usages of the developed measure to enhance its simultaneous utilization between academics and practitioners.

Emphasizing pluralistic methodology in the measure development, the authors recommended the concept of intra-examination. The first-order intra-examination, utilizing Bayesian Networks, makes available the thick descriptions of the measure and supports reasoning under uncertainty. The second-order intra-examination examined nomological networks regarding the pragmatic relationships between the four factors that comprise the measure and other important constructs.

Dynamic technologies have revolutionized human socio-economic activities, including health care, higher education, business and improved customer service in academic sectors. Leveraging the latest technology leads to high productivity, confidence, improved management skills, satisfactory performance and innovative academic services. In the era of technocentrism, the purpose of this paper is to find out whether useful technologies and competent user managers support users in the use of resources, increasing research productivity and improving academic library services.

This study is based on primary data collected from students at universities in the provincial capital using a printed research questionnaire. The authors followed the Likert scale for instrument development and contacted service professionals prior to distribution to test the applicability. Based on the technology acceptance model, this study established a conceptual model with multiple associated hypotheses to test the suitability of the research model. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling software for path analysis and model development.

The results of this study show that technological advances greatly accelerate the use of library resources, strengthen management skills, improve user performance and ultimately enhance academic performance and services. In addition to deploying and leveraging technology, expert leadership has also had a positive impact on improving user productivity and maintaining proactive academic library services.

The TAM-based theoretical model will prove to be a useful tool in the future for delivering technology, improving management skills, promoting the use of library resources, increasing user productivity and providing advanced library services.

Based on primary data collected from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa degree students, this study provides an insight into the actual state of technology used to improve academic performance for the first time. In addition, the study also explores executive collaboration to improve employee and user efficiency and service reform in academic libraries.