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During the past decades, journal impact data obtained from the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) have gained relevance in library management, research management and research evaluation. Hence, both information scientists and bibliometricians share the responsibility towards the users of the JCR to analyse the reliability and validity of its measures thoroughly, to indicate pitfalls and to suggest possible improvements. In this article, ageing patterns are examined in ‘formal’ use or impact of all scientific journals processed for the Science Citation Index (SCI) during 1981‐1995. A new classification system of journals in terms of their ageing characteristics is introduced. This system has been applied to as many as 3,098 journals covered by the Science Citation Index. Following an earlier suggestion by Glnzel and Schoepflin, a maturing and a decline phase are distinguished. From an analysis across all subfields it has been concluded that ageing characteristics are primarily specific to the individual journal rather than to the subfield, while the distribution of journals in terms of slowly or rapidly maturing or declining types is specific to the subfield. It is shown that the cited half life (CHL), printed in the JCR, is an inappropriate measure of decline of journal impact. Following earlier work by Line and others, a more adequate parameter of decline is calculated taking into account the size of annual volumes during a range of fifteen years. For 76 per cent of SCI journals the relative difference between this new parameter and the ISI CHL exceeds 5 per cent. The current JCR journal impact factor is proven to be biased towards journals revealing a rapid maturing and decline in impact. Therefore, a longer term impact factor is proposed, as well as a normalised impact statistic, taking into account citation characteristics of the research subfield covered by a journal and the type of documents published in it. When these new measures are combined with the proposed ageing classification system, they provide a significantly improved picture of a journal‘s impact to that obtained from the JCR.

In today’s business world, adopting social commerce for day-to-day operations has increasingly become an important phenomenon. Several factors have been identified by previous researchers regarding the adoption of social commerce, but academic research is scarce on the relationship between the factors influencing social commerce adoption and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the post-COVID-19 situation. This study aims to identify the impact of technological, environmental and entrepreneurial factors on the adoption of social commerce by SMEs in Sri Lanka.

A quantitative study utilised the deductive approach and collected data through a field survey by distributing a five-point Likert scale questionnaire to conveniently selected respondents from Sri Lankan SMEs. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used for the analysis of 384 responses.

The results revealed that technological factors [technology availability (TA) and cost-effectiveness (CE)], environmental factors [bandwagon effect (BE)] and entrepreneurial factors [attitude (AT), innovativeness (IN) and IT knowledge (IK)] have a significant impact on the social commerce adoption of SMEs in Sri Lanka. This study, as the first of its type, offers insightful information on the influence of variables on the adoption of social commerce after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Similar to any research, this study also has inherent limitations. Due to time and financial restrictions, the study’s convenience sampling method was adopted. The study’s possible limitation is its narrow focus, which could mean that it only examines a select few social media (SM) networks. The study’s conclusions might be less generalised since it focused on the western province of Sri Lanka. Future studies should take a cross-cultural strategy to explore the influence of social commerce adoption to improve the generalisability of research findings.

This study provides an in-depth assessment of critical factors, facilitating policymakers, owners, leaders and managers (decision-makers) to gain insight into the real influencing factors on social commerce adoption and the significance of SM. The study helps them comprehend how outstanding governance and knowledge of influencing factors can boost SME success in various ways. For example, research reveals that various factors have a major influence on social commerce adoption.

There has been limited research conducted on social commerce adoption after the COVID-19 pandemic period; thus, this study looked at the variables influencing it amongst SMEs in a South Asian developing country like Sri Lanka after the pandemic lasted for two years. By placing a strong emphasis on the role of entrepreneurial characteristics and the available technology within one single framework in the context of SMEs and their involvement with social commerce adoption, this study contributes to the past literature by emphasising the role of several significant factors in SMEs' adoption of social commerce. Whilst previous studies looked at multiple factors influencing the adoption of social commerce globally, this study focussed on how these factors have a significant impact on SMEs in Sri Lanka.

This study developed a multi-perspective framework combining technological, environmental and entrepreneurial factors influencing SMEs to adopt social commerce. The study provides a contribution to the literature on social commerce adoption from the perspective of SMEs in a developing country like Sri Lanka after COVID-19. Exclusively, it examines the impact of entrepreneur-related factors on social commerce adoption.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the relationship between the access mode of research articles [Open Access (OA) and Toll-Access (TA)] and their subsequent citation counts in Biological and Physical Sciences in three Impact factor zones (High, Medium and Low).

Three subjects each from Biological Sciences (Biochemistry, Cell Biology and Genetics) and Physical Sciences (Astronomy, Oceanography and Optics) were selected for the study. A comprehensive list of journals (TA and OA) in select subjects of Biological and Physical Sciences was prepared by consulting Journal Citation Report’s Master Journal List (for the compilation of both Open Access and Toll Access journal list) and Directory of Open Access Journals (for the compilation of Open Access journal list). For each journal, essential details like content language, format, year of publication, access mode (Open Access or Toll Access), etc. were obtained from Ulrich’s Periodical Directory. Web of Science (WoS) was used as citations indexing tool in this study. The data set was run on the WoS to collect the citation data.

The results of the study indicate that open mode of access is not a prerequisite for higher citation boost as in the majority of the cases in this study, TA articles have garnered a greater number of citations as compared to open access articles in different Impact factor zones in Biological and Physical Sciences.

A novel approach has been adopted to understand and compare the research impact of open access (OA) and toll access (TA) journal articles in the field of Biological and Physical Sciences at three Impact factor zone levels to reveal the citation metrics encompassing three parameters, i.e. citedness, average citation count and year wise distribution of citations in select subjects of Biological and Physical Sciences.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/[DOI]/10.1108/OIR-01-2021-0029

The problem of design changes in the construction industry is common worldwide, and the Jordanian market is no exception. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors causing design changes in construction projects in Jordan in both the public and private sectors. Furthermore, this research will examine the effect of these factors on project's performance during the construction phase.

This research commences by identifying the factors causing design changes in construction projects worldwide through an intensive literature review. The identified factors were then filtered to those applicable to the Jordanian construction market based on the results obtained from a questionnaire survey and real case construction projects. In total, 252 professionals from the Jordanian construction industry and 10 completed and/or ongoing construction projects in different parts of Jordan were compared.

The results find that the top major factors affecting design changes are owner's requirements; design errors and omissions and value engineering. The research also studies and documents the impacts of design changes on project cost, schedule and quality.

The results obtained from this research will assist the construction professionals representing owners, consultants and contractors in applying control measures to minimize the occurrence of the identified factors causing design changes and to mitigate their sever impacts on projects in terms of cost, schedule and quality.

The authors describe a computer‐based planning system which can be used to find continuous near‐linear routes for utilities subject to numerous constraints. A major difficulty resolved was to analyse accurately the discrete valued impact surface over an area in excess of 2700 square miles in extent. The planning system involves the application of computer procedures to an extensive data bank and the use of computer graphics techniques. The authors discuss the determination of orthogonal impact factors, data base development and the development of computational modules to provide discrete impact scaling. Of particular importance is the development of the Newkirk Cascade Algorithm to combine impact predictions.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and then evaluate perceived risk factors influencing variability between contract sum and final count, and to develop a fuzzy risk assessment model for evaluating the overall impact of established critical risk factors impacting on variability between contract sum and final account in government-funded construction projects. Construction projects are characterised by risk factors that significantly impact on variability between the contract sum and final account.

A research approach integrating questionnaire survey, mean scoring ranking and principal component factor analysis (PCFA) methods was adopted to evaluate and classify the critical risk factors. A fuzzy synthetic evaluation method was sequentially applied to compute the overall risk impact (ORI) of eight critical risk factors’ impact on variability between contract sum and final account.

Initial results showed that eight critical risk factors have high impact on variations between contract sum and final account, namely (in order): project funding problems, underestimation of quantities, variations by client, change in scope of works, inadequate specification, change in design by client, defects in design and unexpected site (ground) conditions. PCFA produced two factor solutions: “professional-related factors” and “client factors”. The fuzzy model further showed that the ORI is 5.48, indicating that these risk factors have a high impact on variability between contract sum and final account in public construction projects. The client factors have a very high impact (5.59), while the professional-related factors indicated a high impact (5.41) on project cost variability.

A practical model is proposed to evaluate the key risks associated with cost overruns in public projects. By giving effective and sustained attention to these factors, variability between contract sum and final account, a common situation in Ghana, can be controlled to achieve cost savings in public infrastructure projects.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and assess the extent of occurrence and impact of risk factors responsible for the variation between the forecast and actual construction cash flow.

The study was conducted through a structured questionnaire administered to UK contracting organizations. Adopting a project‐by‐project approach, respondents were asked to provide opinions on the extent of occurrence of some identified risk factors and their impacts on cash flow forecast. Respondents were split into three groups of small, medium and large contracting firms based on their annual turnover so as to be able to investigate statistical differences of opinions between the groups. Statistical analyses were carried out using mean response analysis and univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) in order to determine significant risk factors and also to investigate differences of opinions between respondents' groupings.

The research identified 11 significant risk factors out of 26 research risk variables. These significant risk variables can be grouped under three generic factors of “changes in the design or specification”, “project complexity” and “natural inhibition”. The significant risk variables are those ranking high in “extent of occurrence” and with critical impacts on cash flow forecast. The research further showed that there is no statistically significant difference in the opinions of different categories of contractors regarding the extent of risk occurrence and impacts on cash flow forecast.

The research showed that the order of extent of risk occurrence is different from the order of impact in case of occurrence. This suggests that further work needs to be done to measure the impact more objectively on a ratio scale so as to provide an avenue for a more quantitative measure of risk impacts on cash flow forecast. This objective is the next focus of this study.

Based on the finding, it is evident that the knowledge of the identified significant risk factors provides invaluable information to the construction contractor as regards what risk variables to focus attention on in cash flow forecasting.

The paper makes an original contribution of exploring the extent of risk occurrence and its impact on construction cash flow forecast from an objective point of view rather that the usual subjective point of view. The epistemic nature of the investigation makes the finding of practical value to the construction contractor in cash flow forecasting.

Despite the huge capital outlay in tertiary education building projects (TEBP), these projects undoubtedly failed in meeting the set objectives of cost, time and quality, among others. Therefore, rather than the impacts of risks on the overall project performance, which is common in the construction management literature, the purpose of this study is to assess the impacts of risk factors on the criteria for measuring the success of public TEBP.

The paper adopted a quantitative research method where the data collection was via a questionnaire survey. The researcher administered 452 questionnaires to the client representatives, consultants and contractors involved in building projects across five public tertiary education institutions in Ondo State, Nigeria. Of 452 questionnaires, 279 were retrieved and suitable for the analysis, translating to a 61.73% response rate. The reliability analysis of the research instrument showed 0.965 and 0.807, via Cronbach’s alpha test, indicating high reliability of the instrument used for data collection.

The study found different risk factors affecting the criteria for measuring the success of TEBP. For instance, the environmental risk factor significantly impacted completion to cost, while financial and political risk factors significantly impacted completion to time. In addition, while environmental, legal and management risks significantly impacted end-user satisfaction, safety performance was significantly impacted by logistic, legal, design, construction, political and management risks. Besides, the logistic, legal, design, construction, financial, political and management risk factors impacted profit. However, despite profit being one of the criteria for measuring the success of building projects, it recorded the highest risk impacts amounting to 41% variance.

The findings are limited to the public tertiary education building projects procured via competitive tendering; therefore, the results might differ when considering other procurement methods.

The practical implication is that rather than focusing on all risk factors, the project stakeholders could give adequate attention to the significant risk factors impacting each of the parameters for measuring the success of education building projects.

The study revealed specific risk factors impacting the criteria for measuring the success of TEBP, which extend beyond the use of the overall project performance approach.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the factors that affect Industry 4.0 applications, the expected impacts of Industry 4.0 applications in companies and to analyze the importance of these factors and the importance of expected impacts correlatively.

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the factors affecting the adoption of Industry 4.0 transformation and its impacts on the companies. The paper is based on 103 valid answers to a questionnaire-survey distributed among companies in Turkey. The Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to determine the correlation between independent variables and dependent variables. Regression analyses were used to test the proposed hypotheses. A multiple regression analysis was used to investigate the causal relationship between independent and dependent variables. Linear regression method and stepwise regression method was employed for regression analyses. The factors that influence Industry 4.0 applications were determined as company size, technological level of products, budget allocation for R&D department, level of lean applications, level of agility/flexibility and level of automation; and the expected impacts of Industry 4.0 applications were determined as traceability of production processes, traceability of supply chain, flexibility of supply chains, communication between the partners of supply chain, productivity, real-time data analysis, integration between companies and integration in the company according to the literature review

The results of this research study revealed that, there is a stronger relationship between level of Industry 4.0 transformation and level of automation than there is between Industry 4.0 transformation and the other independent variables. From the analyses conducted, it can be stated that budget allocation for R&D and level of lean applications and level of automation had greater impacts on Industry 4.0 transformation than company size has. The independent variables included in the regression analysis had a positive effect on Industry 4.0 transformation of companies. However the effects of company size, technological level of products and level of agility/flexibility on Industry 4.0 transformation was weak. When the impacts of Industry 4.0 on companies were analyzed, it can be stated that there is a stronger relationship between Industry 4.0 transformation and real-time data analysis, traceability of production processes, integration in companies and productivity than there is between Industry 4.0 transformation and integration between companies, traceability of supply chains, flexibility of supply chains and communication between the partners of supply chain. It was determined that Industry 4.0 transformation generally impacts internal factors of company, while Industry 4.0 had limited impacts on the supply chains.

Although there are studies that separately investigated the factors affecting Industry 4.0 transformation and the impacts of Industry 4.0 transformation on companies, the present study provides important contributions to the literature in terms of considering the importance levels of the factors affecting Industry 4.0 transformation and the importance level of impacts of Industry 4.0 transformation on companies as a whole and in relation to each other.

The interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become burgeoning in the construction industry as firms are under constant pressure from socially conscious stakeholders to demonstrate their efforts to address various CSR issues. This study aims to unveil the key practices and impact factors (KPIFs) of CSR implementation in construction firms and the interrelationships among different key impact factors toward attaining CSR practices.

Mobilizing the integrated institutional, stakeholder and self-determination theories, a theoretical framework was first developed to elaborate the potential inter-relationships among the key impact factors toward CSR implementation. Data were collected from extra-grade contractors through an online questionnaire survey and was then analyzed by the partial least square structural equation modeling method.

The results show that construction firms' CSR practices could be classified into eight distinct key dimensions, e.g. shareholders' interests, government commitment and environment preservation. It is found that three groups of key impact factors – external institutional factors (especially coercive-normative factors), intrinsic factors (especially strategic business direction and organizational culture) and identified factors (i.e. the perceived importance of CSR practices) – have statistically significant positive impacts on most key dimensions of CSR practices.

The research findings have implications for top management to better understand CSR implementation, thereby helping them secure legitimacy to survive and advance in the competitive construction businesses.

The findings contribute to the theoretical body of knowledge in CSR by modeling and empirically demonstrating the influence mechanism of CSR implementation in construction within an integrated model.