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This paper offers a definition of the core of information science, which encompasses most research in the field. The definition provides a unique identity for information science and positions it in the disciplinary universe.

After motivating the objective, a definition of the core and an explanation of its key aspects are provided. The definition is related to other definitions of information science before controversial discourse aspects are briefly addressed: discipline vs. field, science vs. humanities, library vs. information science and application vs. theory. Interdisciplinarity as an often-assumed foundation of information science is challenged.

Information science is concerned with how information is manifested across space and time. Information is manifested to facilitate and support the representation, access, documentation and preservation of ideas, activities, or practices, and to enable different types of interactions. Research and professional practice encompass the infrastructures – institutions and technology –and phenomena and practices around manifested information across space and time as its core contribution to the scholarly landscape. Information science collaborates with other disciplines to work on complex information problems that need multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to address them.

The paper argues that new information problems may change the core of the field, but throughout its existence, the discipline has remained quite stable in its central focus, yet proved to be highly adaptive to the tremendous changes in the forms, practices, institutions and technologies around and for manifested information.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into publication practices from the perspective of academics working within four disciplinary communities: biosciences, astronomy/physics, education and history. The paper explores the ways in which these multiple overlapping communities intersect with the journal landscape and the implications for the adoption and use of new players in the scholarly communication system, particularly open-access mega-journals (OAMJs). OAMJs (e.g. PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports) are large, broad scope, open-access journals that base editorial decisions solely on the technical/scientific soundness of the article.

Focus groups with active researchers in these fields were held in five UK Higher Education Institutions across Great Britain, and were complemented by interviews with pro-vice-chancellors for research at each institution.

A strong finding to emerge from the data is the notion of researchers belonging to multiple overlapping communities, with some inherent tensions in meeting the requirements for these different audiences. Researcher perceptions of evaluation mechanisms were found to play a major role in attitudes towards OAMJs, and interviews with the pro-vice-chancellors for research indicate that there is a difference between researchers’ perceptions and the values embedded in institutional frameworks.

This is the first purely qualitative study relating to researcher perspectives on OAMJs. The findings of the paper will be of interest to publishers, policy-makers, research managers and academics.

This paper reports on research exploring the intersections between researchers and communication professionals' perspectives on the objectives, funders and organizational influences on their science communication practices.

Examining one context, the inter-organizational BCDC Energy Research project based at five different research organizations in Finland, this paper presents data from semi-structured interviews with 17 researchers and 15 communication professionals.

The results suggest that performance-based funding policies that drive the proliferation of large-scale research projects can create challenges. In particular, a challenge arises in generating a shared sense of identity and purpose amongst researchers and communication professionals. This may have unintended negative impacts on the quality and cohesiveness of the science communication which occurs.

The study was exploratory in nature and focuses on one organizational and institutional environment. Further research with a wider number of projects, as well as funders, would be conducive to a greater understanding of the issues involved.

On a practical level, this research suggests that the creation of clearer communications awareness and guidance may be helpful in some large-scale projects, particularly involving broad numbers of organizations, individual researchers and funders.

This is one of the first studies examining the perspectives of both researchers and communication professionals working over one project, drawing together a range of different institutional and disciplinary perspectives. The results highlight the importance of the influences of funding on science communication aims, assumptions, cultures and structures. The article articulates the need for further research in this area.

This paper aims that privacy research is divided in distinct communities and rarely considered as a singular field, harming its disciplinary identity. The authors collected 119.810 publications and over 3 million references to perform a bibliometric domain analysis as a quantitative approach to uncover the structures within the privacy research field.

The bibliometric domain analysis consists of a combined directed network and topic model of published privacy research. The network contains 83,159 publications and 462,633 internal references. A Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model from the same dataset offers an additional lens on structure by classifying each publication on 36 topics with the network data. The combined outcomes of these methods are used to investigate the structural position and topical make-up of the privacy research communities.

The authors identified the research communities as well as categorised their structural positioning. Four communities form the core of privacy research: individual privacy and law, cloud computing, location data and privacy-preserving data publishing. The latter is a macro-community of data mining, anonymity metrics and differential privacy. Surrounding the core are applied communities. Further removed are communities with little influence, most notably the medical communities that make up 14.4% of the network. The topic model shows system design as a potentially latent community. Noteworthy is the absence of a centralised body of knowledge on organisational privacy management.

This is the first in-depth, quantitative mapping study of all privacy research.

In this study, the authors develop knowledge and insights on how the perception of interestingness influences the structure and focus of conversations in entrepreneurial education (EE) research. In particular, the authors elaborate on what is perceived as interesting among different subgroups of EE researchers, and not least, how EE researchers can identify and engage in scholarly conversation within the field.

The study is based on a unique database with web-based responses from 465 EE researchers from around the world. The authors conduct analyses of both open-ended and closed questions. The open-ended questions are analyzed by inductive categorization. The closed questions are subject to factor and cluster analyses.

The findings suggest that EE research is a topic-oriented field, characterized by a strong focus on novel and challenging research issues. In addition, the field is individualistic and fragmented, and the perception of interestingness differs between five subgroups of EE researchers, whose members have a somewhat different perception of interestingness. Accordingly, the authors also find different core conversations going on within the field. Obviously, these conversations tend to be triggered by the field's obsession with novelty and challenging research, but several conversations are related to practically relevant research, as well as methodological and theoretical discussions.

This is the first study to elaborate on the perception of interestingness among EE researchers and the conversations going on within the field. In the study the authors have explored the characteristics of EE research based on the perception of interestingness among the researchers within the field. In this respect, this study contributes insights on how current and aspiring EE researchers can find and build scholarly conversations embedded in passionate interest, while concurrently disseminating and accumulating knowledge on EE together with like-minded peers.

Research has shown that science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) self-beliefs and enjoyment are critical factors for predicting female students’ persistence in STEM degrees and careers. Studies have shown the positive effects of informal STEM learning experiences on female students’ self-beliefs. However, with the rise of all-female STEM learning experiences, such as summer camps, considering the potential advantages and disadvantages of co-ed options is important. Further, prior STEM education research has focused on sex differences in students’ self-efficacy and STEM career interests. Our study aims to examine within sex differences in secondary, female students (n = 104) who attend either a co-ed STEM camp or a same-sex STEM camp.

To examine potential differences, we conducted independent sample t-tests.

Results of the study include statistically significant differences in mathematics and science self-efficacy as well as STEM career interest after participating in their respective camps.

Further, prior research in STEM education has focused on between sex differences in students’ self-efficacy and STEM career interest.

Neo-liberal “reform” has in many countries shifted services across the boundary between the public and private sector. This policy re-opens the question of what structural and managerial differences, if any, differences of ownership make to healthcare providers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the connections between ownership, organisational structure and managerial regime within an elaboration of Donabedian’s reasoning about organisational structures. Using new data from England, it considers: how do the internal managerial regimes of differently owned healthcare providers differ, or not? In what respects did any such differences arise from differences in ownership or for other reasons?

An observational systematic qualitative comparison of differently owned providers was the strongest feasible research design. The authors systematically compared a maximum variety (by ownership) sample of community health services; out-of-hours primary care; and hospital planned orthopaedics and ophthalmology providers (n=12 cases). The framework of comparison was the ownership theory mentioned above.

The connection between ownership (on the one hand) and organisation structures and managerial regimes (on the other) differed at different organisational levels. Top-level governance structures diverged by organisational ownership and objectives among the case-study organisations. All the case-study organisations irrespective of ownership had hierarchical, bureaucratic structures and managerial regimes for coordinating everyday service production, but to differing extents. In doctor-owned organisations, the doctors’, but not other occupations’, work was controlled and coordinated in a more-or-less democratic, self-governing ways.

This study was empirically limited to just one sector in one country, although within that sector the case-study organisations were typical of their kinds. It focussed on formal structures, omitting to varying extents other technologies of power and the differences in care processes and patient experiences within differently owned organisations.

Type of ownership does appear, overall, to make a difference to at least some important aspects of an organisation’s governance structures and managerial regime. For the broader field of health organisational research, these findings highlight the importance of the owners’ agency in explaining organisational change. The findings also call into question the practice of copying managerial techniques (and “fads”) across the public–private boundary.

Ownership does make important differences to healthcare providers’ top-level governance structures and accountabilities and to work coordination activity, but with different patterns at different organisational levels. These findings have implications for understanding the legitimacy, governance and accountability of healthcare organisations, the distribution and use power within them, and system-wide policy interventions, for instance to improve care coordination and for the correspondingly required foci of healthcare organisational research.

Although the number of blue-collar industrial workers has been declining, manufacturing jobs continue to have considerable importance, even in technologically advanced economies. This study gives a voice to this often-overlooked group of workers, focusing on the Finnish vehicle industry.

The study assessed how manual workers in automotive manufacturing describe their job pride and how their accounts were related to conceptualizations of work orientation. The data included semi-structured interviews and an open-ended survey question on situations in which the respondents had felt proud of their work. The data were analysed using thematic analysis.

According to the results, the respondents had a high level of job pride in general, but the meaning given to this attitude varied considerably, depending on the situation. The study participants' work orientation was a mixture of instrumental and intrinsic traits. However, there were also respondents who did not experience job pride or who had lost it because of the work circumstances.

Relatively little research has assessed the importance of job pride in the context of industrial manufacturing. Recognizing job pride in its variety is crucial information for employers who aim to develop working conditions and employee retention.

This paper aims to introduce a new integrated strategic framework entitled, “The corporate identity, total corporate communications, stakeholders’ attributed identities, identifications and behaviours continuum” and elucidates the central and strategic importance of corporate identity apropos corporate communications, corporate image, attributed stakeholder identifications and resultant behaviours. The strategic importance of corporate identity is noted. The continuum incorporates a variety of disciplinary/theoretical perspectives.

The paper/framework is informed by corporate marketing and strategic perspectives; legal theory of the firm; social identity branch theories; and stakeholder theory. The effects and management of corporate identity are seen as a continuum. The framework accommodates Tagiuri’s (1982) scholarship on corporate identity.

This paper formally introduces and explicates “The corporate identity, total corporate communications, stakeholders’ attributed identities, identifications and behaviours continuum”. Corporate identity management is an on-going strategic senior management/strategic requisite. Notably, the legal theory of company law – routinely overlooked – and its impact on corporate identity management is accepted, acknowledged and accommodated. The importance of stakeholders and stakeholder identification (a derivative of social identity theory) is underscored.

Via the explication of the continuum, managers can comprehend the nature and importance of corporate identity; appreciate that corporate identity adaptation/change is on-going; comprehend its interface/s with corporate communications, stakeholder attributed identities, identifications and the business environment; understand the need for on-going fidelity to an institution’s legally based core purposes and corporate identity traits (juridical identity); cognise the efficacy of constant stakeholder and environmental analysis. Corporate identity sustainability requires corporate identity to be advantageous, beneficial, critical, differentiating and effectual. Stakeholder prioritisation is not solely dependent on power, legitimacy and urgency but on legality, efficacy, ethicality and temporality.

The resultant framework/approach, therefore, aims to make a meaningful advance on the territory and, moreover, seeks to be of utility to scholars and practitioners of corporate marketing, strategy and company law. Arguably, therefore, the framework is more ambitious than extant framework on the domain. The resultant framework/approach, therefore, aims to make a meaningful advance on the territory and seeks to be of utility to scholars and practitioners of corporate identity, communications, images, identification, stakeholder theory, company law and, importantly, corporate strategy.