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The purpose of this paper is to present a novel approach for mining scientific trends using topics from Call for Papers (CFP). The work contributes a valuable input for researchers, academics, funding institutes and research administration departments by sharing the trends to set directions of research path.

The authors procure an innovative CFP data set to analyse scientific evolution and prestige of conferences that set scientific trends using scientific publications indexed in DBLP. Using the Field of Research code 804 from Australian Research Council, the authors identify 146 conferences (from 2006 to 2015) into different thematic areas by matching the terms extracted from publication titles with the Association for Computing Machinery Computing Classification System. Furthermore, the authors enrich the vocabulary of terms from the WordNet dictionary and Growbag data set. To measure the significance of terms, the authors adopt the following weighting schemas: probabilistic, gram, relative, accumulative and hierarchal.

The results indicate the rise of “big data analytics” from CFP topics in the last few years. Whereas the topics related to “privacy and security” show an exponential increase, the topics related to “semantic web” show a downfall in recent years. While analysing publication output in DBLP that matches CFP indexed in ERA Core A* to C rank conference, the authors identified that A* and A tier conferences not merely set publication trends, since B or C tier conferences target similar CFP.

Overall, the analyses presented in this research are prolific for the scientific community and research administrators to study research trends and better data management of digital libraries pertaining to the scientific literature.

The College of St. Germain is a private, liberal arts college in the U.S. Midwest. Several faculty members developed and launched an academic business and economics conference. Despite of a lack of funding from the college, and a general apathy among other colleagues, the conference became financially self-sufficient and grew each year, with increasing attendance and submissions from many international scholars. Part A of the case focuses on the beginning, planning, and growth stages of the conference, and culminates with the successful conclusion of the third annual conference and planning for the fourth conference. Part B focuses on the fourth and fifth conferences, and concludes with the surprising cancellation of the sixth annual conference. The case highlights the challenges and accomplishments of the conference chairpersons and the organizing committee, as well as management, marketing, and leadership factors that contributed to the ultimate demise of the conference.

The academic community has warned that predatory journals may attempt to capitalize on the confusion caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to further publish low quality academic work, eroding the credibility of scholarly publishing.

This article first chronicles the risks of predatory publishing, especially related to misinformation surrounding health research. Next, the author offers an empirical investigation of how predatory publishing has engaged with COVID-19, with an emphasis on journals related to virology, immunology and epidemiology as identified through Cabells' Predatory Reports, through a content analysis of publishers' websites and a comparison to a sample from DOAJ.

The empirical findings show that there were 162 titles related to these critical areas from journals listed on Cabells with a range of infractions, but most were defunct and only 39 had published on the pandemic. Compared to a DOAJ comparison group, the predatory journal websites were less likely to mention slowdowns to the peer review process related to the pandemic. Furthermore, another 284 predatory journals with COVID-19 engagement were uncovered from the initial exploration. These uncovered journals mostly centered on medical or biological science fields, while 42 titles came from other broader fields in social science, other STEM or humanities.

This study does not prove that predatory publications have released misinformation pertaining to COVID-19, but rather it exemplifies the potential within a complex academic publishing space. As these outlets have proven to be vectors of misleading science, libraries and the broader educational community need to stay vigilant as information intermediaries of online research.

The purpose of this paper is to flesh out a truncated line of analysis in library and information science (LIS) of language analyses of power in the field.

Literature-based conceptual analysis of the problems engendered by neoliberalism in LIS and the productive approach of language analysis of Austin, Habermas, and Smith that allows us to account for neoliberalism’s effects in language and practices – doing things with words.

LIS has engaged a productive postmodern analysis of power relations that reflects social and economic progress, but Austin, Habermas, and Smith offer a sensible, practical explanation for the operation of neoliberal hegemony on the practices of librarianship.

Postmodern analyses are now being deployed in portions of LIS, but they fail to account for the full implications of the dominant public language (and policy and practices) of neoliberalism for librarianship. This is productive exploration of those implications to correct and round out those analyses.

The purpose of this paper is to explore bricolage as the missing link in understanding how cross-sector social partnerships form and operate in response to grand challenges. It is proposed that the weaving together of resources employed by members of cross-sector social partnerships (CSSPs) is bricolage in action and can be linked to Gray's (1985) facilitating conditions for collaboration. While existing research examines bricolage primarily at the individual level, this research studies collective bricolage, as implemented by a cross-sector social partnership in its process to address a grand challenge.

The authors follow the evolution of a Midwestern initiative aimed at the grand challenge of generational poverty. The deductive case study approach identifies the mechanisms of bricolage being employed in the initiative's evolution and ties these to Gray's (1985) seminal paper on interorganizational collaboration.

This case study has implications for academics conceptually struggling to understand grand challenges and the role of entrepreneurial initiatives in the public and nonprofit sectors, as well as practitioners currently involved in collaborative efforts to address said challenges.

This study enriches the discussion and enhances the link between the CSSP literature and new notions of social entrepreneurship that embrace the collective as their unit of analysis. This is the first work of its kind to link bricolage to a nascent CSSP and demonstrate how the entrepreneurial concept of bricolage is an inherent part of CSSP formation and operation.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the author’s serendipitous career and provide some lessons that might be of value to those pursuing the academic mission: teaching, research and service.

The method involves primary sources; mainly the author’s CV to jog recall of events and dates, some of his articles and the teachings and writings of many others that influenced or inspired various aspects of the author’s career.

The author’s experiences affirm that to achieve any degree of success in the professoriate, in addition to having some talent it is also helpful to be lucky. There is a lot to navigate at a university. Opportunities exist at every turn, some noticed some missed. When recognized, be prepared. Being a professor is not what you do, it is who you are. Preparation for an academic career involves becoming a self-improvement project (essentially, a life-long student learning lessons). It requires developing expertise (preferably excellence) in some field of study, as well as resourcefulness, resilience and perseverance.

Each individual’s story is unique. The author’s path seems to have included more twists and turns than most. Consequently, he tried to highlight the experiences with lessons learned in most sections, some obvious some less so, which he expects (at least hopes) will prove valuable to future educators.