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Astronomy has experienced a rapid rate of discovery and change in the recent past, particularly because of the space program and general technological development. Through information gathered from artificial satellites, radio astronomy, orbiting observatories, and space probes, astronomy has advanced rapidly since the 1950s. This progress has also affected standard reference sources in the field.

The purpose of this study is to examine different aspects of information seeking behaviour, and specifically the information seeking behaviour and information needs of Indian astronomy/astrophysics academics, including the relationship between various variables such as academic, rank‐wise statuses, age‐wise of characteristics, and methods for keeping their knowledge up‐to‐date.

A stratified random sample survey was used for gathering data. However, to support and authenticate the data quantitative and qualitative approaches were used. The questionnaire was mailed and was also available online. Some 400 academics from 12 astronomy and astrophysics information centres and libraries were surveyed using the questionnaire and were interviewed. The questionnaire response rate was 72 percent (288/400).

The study findings show: differences in information seeking behaviour and needs for various academic is sub‐fields of Indian astronomy/astrophysics, and highlights the value of information seeking behaviour to scientists working in astronomy/astrophysics. The study concludes that astronomy/astrophysics academics were making use of Astrophysics Data System followed by their use of e‐archives for education and research. Astronomy/astrophysics academics work in a unique setting with specialized needs. The study findings underscored the need to continue accessing specialized needs to find innovative solutions. There are challenges and opportunities for exciting new initiatives.

This is the first in‐depth study in India exploring the information seeking behaviour and information needs of astronomy/astrophysics academics. It also gives the latest account of information seeking behaviour of information users in astronomy/astrophysics discipline. The study is also expected to guide other information service organisations to cope with their users' needs, by adopting survey methods, tools, protocols used in this study.

The present study aims to overview Brazilian human resources and scientific output in astronomy, immunology and oceanography during the last decade.

Data on human resources and on scientific output were obtained from the Brazilian database, the Directory of Research Groups. Scientific outputs were also analysed from a set of journals catalogued by the Institute for Scientific Information: the 20 journals with the largest number of articles in 2003.

Compared with the other two fields, the number of Brazilian researchers in astronomy has not grown from 1997‐2002, but they are the most qualified and more than 90 per cent of them have a PhD degree. Most astronomy publications are in international journals and they are well cited. The most cited astronomy papers are on international topics, but this is not true for the oceanography papers.

These data are derived from a particular set of publications and should be interpreted as trends rather than as definitive.

This study, which covers three fields with different structures and traditions, provides a snapshot of some features of the whole of Brazilian science, and will provide evidence for new science policies.

Seeks to characterise world astronomy research during the last decade by an analysis of papers in the Science Citation Index identified with a special filter and to study Indian output in order to identify the leading institutions and authors.

Lists of specialist journals and title words of papers were selected to create a filter giving high precision and recall for astronomy papers. Some biology papers were erroneously retrieved because of ambiguous title words. Potential citation impact was determined from journal citation scores, and multiple regression was used to evaluate leading countries.

Title words added almost a quarter to the list of papers in specialist journals, and the final file contained over 96,000 papers. Potential impact increased with more authors per paper and more addresses; it was greater for papers from Canada, the UK and the USA, and less for papers from China, India and Russia; for other countries the effects of the author's location on potential impact were not statistically significant. Indian astronomy output has increased in potential impact, partly through greater international co‐authorship, but also through indigenous papers.

The study was confined to one subject area, and impact was determined on the basis of journals, not of individual papers.

Use of title words in addition to journal lists is essential to sub‐field definition in order to have high precision and recall. Because of the confounding effects of authorship numbers, it is necessary to use multiple regression analysis in order to see whether research from a given country is significantly better or worse than average.

Characterises world astronomy research during the last decade by an analysis of papers in the Science Citation Index identified with a special filter.

This paper gives an account of important aspects of Smith’s methods in An Inquiry Concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (WN). I reinterpret Smith’s distinction between natural and market prices, by focusing on Smith’s account of the causes of the discrepancies of market prices from natural prices. I argue that Smith postulates a “natural course” of events in order to stimulate research into institutions that cause actual events to deviate from it. Smith’s employment of the fiction of a natural price should, thus, not be seen merely as an instance of general or partial equilibrium analysis, but, instead, as part of a theoretical framework that will enable observed deviations from expected regularities to improve his theory. For Smith theory is a research tool that allows for a potentially open-ended process of successive approximation. These are the Newtonian elements in Smith. I provide evidence from Smith’s posthumously published Essays on Philosophical Subjects (EPS, 1795), especially “The History of Astronomy” (“Astronomy”), that this accords with Smith’s views on methodology.¹ By way of illumination, Smith’s explanation of the introduction of commerce in Europe is contrasted with that of Hume as presented in “Of Commerce.” I argue that Smith’s treatment is methodologically superior.

The researchers conducted a collective case study to investigate how families engaged in making activities related to aerospace engineering in six pop-up makerspace programs held in libraries and one museum. The purpose of this paper is to support families’ engagement in design tasks and engineering thinking, three types of discussion prompts were used during each workshop. The orienting design conjecture was that discussion prompts would allow parents to lead productive conversations to support engineering-making activities.

Within a collective case study approach, 20 consented families (22 adults, 25 children) engaged in making practices related to making a lunar rover with a scientific instrument panel. Data included cases of families’ talk and actions, as documented through video (22 h) and photographs of their engineering designs. An interpretivist, qualitative video-based analysis was conducted by creating individual narrative accounts of each family (including transcript excerpts and images).

Parents used the question prompts in ways that were integral to supporting youths’ participation in the engineering activities. Children often did not answer the astronomer’s questions directly; instead, the parents revoiced the prompts before the children’s engagement. Family prompts supported reflecting upon prior experiences, defining the design problem and maintaining the activity flow.

Designing discussion prompts, within a broader project-based learning pedagogy, supports family engagement in engineering design practices in out-of-school pop-up makerspace settings. The work suggests that parents play a crucial role in engineering workshops for youths aged 5 to 10 years old by revoicing prompts to keep families’ design work and sensemaking talk (connecting prior and new ideas) flowing throughout a makerspace workshop.

The frequency and consistency of selection by Physics Abstracts of astronomical articles from three major journals, Nature, Astrophysical Journal, and Icarus, have been investigated. This has involved an examination of the probability of selection of an article as a function of its subject matter. As a result, it is possible to specify which fields of astronomy are best covered by Physics Abstracts. The time‐lag between the appearance of these articles and the subsequent appearance of their abstracts has also been examined.

This chapter provides a critical assessment of an article on higher education and economic development, by analyzing the ways the authors reflect on the importance of building technological capabilities. The need to demonstrate the use of evolutionary economics and innovation systems approach in demonstrating higher education contribution to economic growth motivated the article. The critique begins by examining the dominant theories and reflective pieces used by scholars to explain higher education’s contribution to economic development, and then situate the evolutionary economics and innovation systems approach used in the article in this discourse. This critical assessment also delves into how the article approaches the subject matter of higher education; and, the methods used to gather evidence for the case of higher education in South Africa. The chapter then condenses popular views on the role of higher education in economic development and assesses whether “building technological capabilities” is one such view or it is an emerging role. In conclusion, the chapter synthesizes the various sections in the article and isolates the key issues that underpin each of the sections and how each issue is manifested in the higher education sector. The conclusion unloads the overall construction of the article to succinctly knit the bigger argument advanced by the article and provide reasons for the viewpoints supported by this assessment.