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The purpose of this study is to assess the awareness and preparedness level of the chief librarians (CLs) of the universities of Punjab and the Federal area in Pakistan concerning censorship. The study also aims to identify the preferred sources the respondents use to update their knowledge about censorship.

The research work is based on the survey method. A questionnaire was used to collect data from the CLs of 105 universities. The collected data was analysed descriptively.

The major findings of the study are that there is a dire need to improve the awareness level of the university library CLs regarding censorship. It was also found that a majority of the CLs do have not any formal written policy to handle censorship issues. However, religion was the main cause of censorship in a majority of cases. The study also indicated that social media was the most preferred source CLs use to update their knowledge.

The current study covers only the CLs of universities of Punjab and the Federal area. Therefore, its findings cannot be generalized to all the library professionals of Pakistan.

The study will help to understand the awareness level of CLs about censorship-related issues and provide an opportunity for university authorities to arrange training programs for the CLs to enhance their capabilities to deal with censorship issues.

The study will provide awareness and preparedness status of CLs regarding censorship issues.

Open-access repositories (OARs) are essential for openly disseminating intellectual knowledge on the internet and providing free access to it. The current study aims to evaluate the growth and development of OARs in the field of technology by investigating several characteristics such as coverage, OA policies, software type, content type, yearly growth, repository type and geographic contribution.

The directory of OARs acts as the source for data harvesting, which provides a quality-assured list of OARs across the globe.

The study found that 125 nations contributed a total of 4,045 repositories in the field of research, with the USA leading the list with the most repositories. Maximum repositories were operated by institutions having multidisciplinary approaches. The DSpace and Eprints were the preferred software types for repositories. The preferred upload content by contributors was “research articles” and “electronic thesis and dissertations”.

The study is limited to the subject area technology as listed in OpenDOAR; therefore, the results may differ in other subject areas.

The work can benefit researchers across disciplines and, interested researchers can take this study as a base for evaluating online repositories. Moreover, policymakers and repository managers could also get benefitted from this study.

The study is the first of its kind, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to investigate the repositories of subject technology in the open-access platform.

The current environment is unhelpful to female entrepreneurs, and they need to overcome numerous barriers when starting their own businesses. In this study, the researchers investigated the significant barriers that Pakistani female entrepreneurs require to overcome in this respect.

In this study, the researchers used a quantitative study and they used a questionnaire to survey the respondents and collect cross-sectional data. The researchers targeted female students who were undertaking bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in different Pakistani public and private sector universities. Accordingly, the researchers based this study’s findings on the usable samples received from 498 Pakistani female students.

The researchers used a structural equation model (SEM) in this study and its findings highlight that aversion to risk (ATR) has an insignificant impact on entrepreneurial inclinations (EI). In addition, fear of failure (FoF), lack of resources (LoR), aversion to hard work and stress (ASH) and the lack of social networking (LSN) have negative and insignificant effects on EI. The ATR factor has an insignificant effect on entrepreneurial success (ES), whereas FoF, LoR, ASH and LSN are negative and insignificant predictors of Pakistani female students’ ES.

This study’s findings may help Pakistani women to overcome the barriers to ES. In this respect, the researchers recommend that the Pakistan Government and policymakers develop significant strategies to provide the conducive business environment and to financially support Pakistani women to start their own businesses. Furthermore, this study’s findings contribute greatly to the vast amount of current literature and help to overcome the entrepreneurial conditions and barriers that potential entrepreneurs from advanced and developing countries experience frequently.

This study’s findings provide empirical evidence of EI and ES in Pakistan.

Health-care marketing typically entails a coordinated set of outreach and communications designed to attract consumers (patients in the health-care context) who require services for a better health outcome and guide them throughout their health-care journey to achieve a higher quality of life. The purpose of this study is to understand the progress and trends in healthcare marketing strategy (HMS) literature between 2018 and 2022, with a special emphasis on the pre- and post-Covid-19 periods.

The authors examine 885 HMS-related documents from the WOS database between 2018 and 2022 that were extracted using a keyword-based search strategy. After that, the authors present the descriptive statistics related to the corpus. Finally, the authors use author co-citation analysis (ACA) and bibliographic coupling (BC) techniques to examine the corpus.

The authors present the descriptive statistics as research themes, emerging sub-research areas, leading journals, organisations, funding agencies and nations. Further, the bibliometric analysis reveals the existence of five thematic clusters: Cluster 1: macroeconomic and demographic determinants of healthcare service delivery; Cluster 2: strategies in healthcare marketing; Cluster 3: socioeconomics in healthcare service delivery; Cluster 4: data analytics and healthcare service delivery; Cluster 5: healthcare product and process innovations.

This study provides an in-depth analysis of the advancements made in HMS-related research between 2018 and 2022. In addition, this study describes the evolution of research in this field from before to after the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings of this study have both research and practical significance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to use bibliometric analysis to identify advancements and trends in HMS-related research and to examine the pattern before and after Covid-19 pandemic.