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Factors influencing the use of mobile phone technologies for agricultural market information access remain a mixed debate, and there are contradictive views among studies. This study examined factors influencing the use of mobile phone technologies for agricultural marketing information access. The study is anchored on the technological acceptance model (TAM).

A descriptive cross-sectional research design was adopted with a sample size of 400 grape smallholder farmers. A structured questionnaire and focus group discussions (FGDs) were used to gather data. Descriptive, ordinal logistic regression and thematic approaches were used in data analysis.

The study confirmed grape smallholder farmers generally considered mobile phone technologies as an appropriate communication channel to stay informed about agricultural marketing information. It was found that reliable electricity supply, relevance, timeliness, perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU) of mobile phone technologies influenced the level of agricultural marketing information access.

This research is limited to a selected number of grape smallholder farmers in Dodoma, Tanzania, and leaves out those without mobile phones. Also, the study was cross-sectional in nature, so it may not be necessarily capable of consistently providing critical and consistent information about the same population over a series of times.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge by integrating the use of mobile phone technologies to access marketing information in informing policy and decision-making processes to promote grape marketing.

There is a contradictive debate on factors influencing mobile phone usage awareness among scholars. This study aims to examine factors influencing mobile phone usage awareness for accessing agricultural marketing information.

A descriptive cross-sectional research design was used with 400 smallholder grape farmers. The use of structured questionnaires, focus group discussions and key informant interviews helped to collect primary data. Data analysis was subjected to descriptive, ordinal logistic regression and thematic approaches.

This study found that farmers were mostly aware of voice calls helping to access buyers and price information. Education, age and sex were the critical factors influencing mobile phone usage awareness among grape smallholder farmers.

This study contributes to scientific knowledge by providing an understanding of the perceived factors on mobile phone usage awareness within the grape subsector to inform policymakers.

The purpose of this scientometric study was to conduct an analysis of the research productivity and scholarly impact of academic librarians in Tanzania for a period of 30 years from 1984 to 2013.

Data were obtained using the Publish or Perish software which uses Google Scholar to retrieve scholars’ publications, citations and related metrics. For each librarian, the retrieved metrics were the number of papers, papers per author, citation counts, average citations per paper, average papers per author, average citations per year, average citations per author and four indices, namely, the h-index, g-index, Hc-index and the HI-norm.

The study findings indicate that 434 publications were recorded for all librarians, giving an average of 14.5 publications per year. The year 2008 had the most (9.9 per cent) publications followed by 2010 (7.8 per cent), while the years 1985 and 1987 had the lowest (0.2 per cent) number of publications. About 43 per cent of the publications were single-authored and the degree of collaboration was 0.57. The top-ten ranked librarians contributed more than half (53.2 per cent) of all publications, although they showed considerable variation among different metrics. Only three journal articles had 25 or more citations.

Previous studies on the topic are scarce, and, therefore, this paper provides useful recommendations to library and information science (LIS) schools, libraries and universities to improve research productivity of their academic librarians in Tanzania and other countries with a similar setting.

This paper aims to determine factors that influence people living with HIV (PLHIV) to engage in internet-based HIV information seeking behaviour in selected Tanzanian public regional hospitals.

The authors conducted a questionnaire-based survey to 221 PLHIV in two regional public hospitals in Mwanza and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They assessed the validity and reliability of the measurement model by using exploratory factor analysis and also used hierarchical regressions to examine the research hypotheses by using Statistical Package for Social Science.

The study found that there is low usage of internet (24.3 per cent) to search online HIV information. Factors related to attitude and information source accessibility predicted usage intentions of internet, while facilitating conditions, information source accessibility and usage intention of internet determined actual use of internet among PLHIV. Age moderated the effects of information source quality and social influence on usage intention of internet, and the effects of the information source accessibility and social influence on actual use of internet. The findings imply that younger PLHIV were more likely to use internet to access HIV information than the older respondents due to perceived ease of accessing information and quality of the online content. Further, older PLHIV were more influenced by the views of others when making decisions to use internet.

Health-care providers and libraries need to conduct regular studies on health needs of patients, and promote benefits of accessing online information; website designers need to design user-friendly databases; public libraries need to include a section on health information; hospital and public librarians need to provide catalogues of health information resources on their websites; and health-care providers need to improve technological infrastructure.

This is a comprehensive study that provides empirical findings to better understand the HIV information seeking behaviour from actual internet users, particularly factors that may influence PLHIV to seek online information in Tanzania.

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether quality antecedents and individual characteristics can influence faculty members’ continued usage intention of electronic resources (e-resources) in selected public universities in Tanzania.

A total of 204 faculty members participated in the study from three public universities in Tanzania. The study used structural equation modelling, ANOVA and t-tests to perform analyses.

Better educated and middle-aged faculty members with a wide experience of using e-resources are more likely to continue using e-resources. Information quality had positive relationship with continued usage intention of e-resources while service quality had indirect impact to continued usage intention through information quality and system quality.

Based on the DeLone and McLean information systems success model, this study integrates quality factors (information, service and system quality) and individual characteristics as antecedents to the continued usage intention of e-resources. The study comprehensively documents empirical findings on impacts of quality factors and individual characteristics on e-resources in a developing country. The study reveals results that are useful for enhancing usage of e-resources by faculty in other institutions with similar conditions.

Despite the vast potential of mobile phone use, grape smallholder farmers’ satisfaction with mobile phone use has attracted insufficient attention among scholars in Tanzania. The study examined factors influencing satisfaction with mobile phone use for accessing agricultural marketing information.

The study used a cross-sectional research design and a mixed research method. Structured questionnaire and focus group discussions were used to collect primary data from 400 sampled grape smallholder farmers. Data were analysed inferentially involving two-way analysis of variance, ordinal logistic regression and thematic analysis.

The findings indicate a statistically significant disparity in grape smallholder farmers’ satisfaction across different types of agricultural marketing information. Grape smallholder farmers exhibited higher satisfaction levels concerning information on selling time compared to all other types of agricultural marketing information (price, buyers, quality and quantity). Factors influencing grape smallholder farmers’ satisfaction with mobile phone use were related to perceived usefulness, ease of use, experience and cost.

This study contributes to scientific knowledge by providing actionable insights for formulating unique strategies for smallholder farmers’ satisfaction with agricultural marketing information.

This study aims to examine the availability and persistence of universal resource locators (URLs) cited in scholarly articles published in selected health journals based in East Africa.

Four health sciences online journals in East Africa were selected for this study. In this study, all Web citations in the selected journal articles covering the 2001-2015 period were extracted. This study explored the number of URLs used as citations, determined the rate of URLs’ loss, identified error messages associated with inaccessible URLs, identified the top domain levels of decayed URLs, calculated the half-life of the Web citations and determined the proportion of recovered URL citations through the Internet Wayback Machine.

In total, 822 articles were published between 2001 and 2015. There were in total 17,609 citations of which, only 574 (3.3 per cent) were Web citations. The findings show that 253 (44.1 per cent) Web citations were inaccessible and the “404 File Not Found” error message was the most (88.9 per cent) encountered. Top-level domains with country endings had the most (23.7 per cent) missing URLs. The average half-life for the URLs cited in journal articles was 10.5 years. Only 36 (6.3 per cent) Web references were recovered through the Wayback Machine.

This is a comprehensive study of East African health sciences online journals that provides findings that raises questions as to whether URLs should continue to be included as part of bibliographic details in the lists of references. It also calls for concerted efforts from various actors in overcoming the problem of URL decay.