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To evaluate various hedge programs designed to minimize the risk of an extreme monthly gas bill subject to a pre‐determined hedge program budget.Design/methodology/approach – Historical data were collected on natural gas spot and futures prices. Also, theoretical options prices were calculated. These data were then applied to derive the risk associated with extreme bills under different hedge strategies.Findings – In every instance, having a price cap hedge program is better for core customers of a utility company than not having a hedge program.Research limitations/implications – The better hedge performance is based on historical data. It may not apply to future scenarios. Also, the theoretical options prices may need refinements.Practical implications – Any utility company should seriously consider a price cap hedge program to protect its core customers. The exact program design will likely change but the basic principles and methods described in this paper are directly applicable.Originality/value – This paper provide/guidelines for a utility company to design its hedge programs for the benefits of core customers. Currently, there is no such guideline available and there is no study evaluating these hedge programs. This paper provides a first attempt.

Anyone who has tried to review studies relating to use of academic libraries may argue that a great deal of research exists on college students and how they use their libraries. Studies of reading habits and library use among college students have been appearing for more than fifty years, and the diligent student can compile an impressive bibliography of these studies. In spite of all we have learned about student interaction with library resources, there is still much we do not know.

In this time of rapidly increasing journal subscription costs and shrinking (or stable) acquisition budgets, it is imperative to acquire materials as effectively as possible. One method of doing this is to use citation analysis of the scholarly literature as a guideline. Citation analysis is the analysis of the references from a set of documents (such as an analysis of all of the citations from five years of College & Research Libraries or of all citations from geology dissertations at a university). Information received from the analysis includes: languages of items cited, age of items cited (to calculate a half‐life for the field), and rate of self‐citations. Broadus reviewed citation analysis, its use, validity, and reliability. In the past, citation analysis has been used in collection development to decide on the suitability of specific items (both journals and monographs), such as mentioned in Buzzard and Whaley. The method introduced here is to use the percentage of publication formats cited in the research literature to serve as a guideline for acquisitions budget breakdowns, i.e., percentages allocated to monographs versus that allocated to other formats, for each discipline. The reasoning behind this is that an effective method of acquiring materials is to purchase the materials that the library's clients will use in the formats in which they will use them. The key assumption is that the citations in a scholar's paper reflect the literature the scholar used.

We examine the citations from four international business (IB) journals over 2000‐2004 to show the areas, the journals, and the institutions that impact IB research. The leading works that influence IB research are primarily management journals, scholarly books, and IB journals. IB research is published in non‐IB journals, as well and this has influenced the recent research in IB journals. U.S. and non‐U.S. academic institutions and non‐academic organizations are among the top 100 institutions that impact IB research, indicating that this research is a truly global endeavor. Finally, recent IB research is influenced more by recent published research than by past research. Scholarly books have become less influential, while the economics, finance, and marketing journals show no change in the influence on IB research over time.

Review articles play a special role in the scientific literature by analysing and synthesizing recent work on a given topic. It is assumed that authors of review articles selectively cite relevant literature of the highest quality. These traits have suggested that articles frequently cited in reviews might be important, high quality articles for a subject literature. A method based on citation analysis has been proposed as a quality filtering system for medical literature.

This article presents a novel user‐oriented interface for generalised informetric analysis and demonstrates how informetric calculations can easily and declaratively be specified through advanced data modelling techniques. The interface is declarative and at a high level. Therefore it is easy to use, flexible and extensible. It enables end users to perform basic informetric ad hoc calculations easily and often with much less effort than in contemporary online retrieval systems. It also provides several fruitful generalisations of typical informetric measurements like impact factors. These are based on substituting traditional foci of analysis, for instance journals, by other object types, such as authors, organisations or countries. In the interface, bibliographic data are modelled as complex objects (non‐first normal form relations) and terminological and citation networks involving transitive relationships are modelled as binary relations for deductive processing. The interface is flexible, because it makes it easy to switch focus between various object types for informetric calculations, e.g. from authors to institutions. Moreover, it is demonstrated that all informetric data can easily be broken down by criteria that foster advanced analysis, e.g. by years or content‐bearing attributes. Such modelling allows flexible data aggregation along many dimensions. These salient features emerge from the query interface‘s general data restructuring and aggregation capabilities combined with transitive processing capabilities. The features are illustrated by means of sample queries and results in the article.

Developments in the technology of electronic transmission of information are rapidly transforming the tools available to the general public for gathering information about current events. Direct access to news and retrieval of bibliographic information pertaining to traditional printed news sources are a daily reality for a growing number of individuals, on the job, at home, through personal computer terminals or at libraries. The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of electronic databases providing access to news, as well as applications of these tools to various library settings.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.