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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of individual logistics-related factors, namely, supplier involvement (SI), length of supplier relationship (LSR), use of information technology (IT), and logistics integration (LI) on a firm's supply chain performance (SCP) and test for the mediating effect of LI in a multi-country survey conducted in Brazil, Korea and India. The paper also develops a composite variable, supply chain competency (SCC), as an overall measure of the quality of a firm's supply chain and demonstrate its effect on a firm's SCP.

The research methodology was based on designing and administering a survey instrument. Data collected from 187 organizations in Brazil, Korea and India were analyzed using the partial least squares structural equation modeling methodology.

Results show that for the combined data, the direct effects of SI, LSR and IT on SCP are insignificant while LI has a very significant direct effect on SCP. On the other hand, except for SI, LSR and IT have significant effects on SCP through LI establishing the mediating role of LI. The paper also finds that SCC has a significant effect on SCP. Further, when countries are considered individually the paper finds that IT has a significant indirect effect on SCP in the case of all the countries while LSR has a significant indirect effect on SCP, both in the case of Brazil and Korea. Additionally, in the case of Korea SI has a significant indirect effect on SCP.

Like other survey-based research, the findings of this paper are also limited by the sample size. Especially, the observations specific to individual countries are as good as the respective sample sizes. Also, since all the respondents belonged to manufacturing firms, the findings of this paper are relevant for the manufacturing sector.

This paper establishes the mediating effect of LI in assessing the impact of logistics-related factors on a firm's SCP. It confirms that although logistics-related factors are necessary for a firm's superior SCP, they are not sufficient unless their interactions are taken into consideration, as evidenced by the significant positive relationship between SCC and SCP.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first paper to study the effect of logistics-related factors on a firm's SCP and establish the mediating role of LI in a multi-country setting. This paper also develops a composite variable SCC and examines its effect on SCP.

Knowledge organization (KO) has been advancing at a progressively rapid pace under the influence of information technology. This study aims to explore the topics, characteristics, and trends of KO research in the 21st century.

The full text of 4,360 KO-related articles published from 2000 to 2021 is collected. Through content analysis, this study identifies the topics, research methods, and application areas of each article, and the statistics are presented through a series of visualizations.

In total, 13 main topics, 105 sub-topics, 16 research methods, and 57 application areas are identified. Notably, classification has always been an important topic, while linked data, automated techniques, and ontology have become popular topics recently. Significant changing features have also occurred. The versatile use of research methods has increased, with empirical research becoming the mainstream. Application areas show a trend of refinement from subject areas to specific scenarios. Construction techniques present a combination of automated techniques, crowdsourcing, and experts.

KO has evolved and diversified due to technological developments. This study is the first to focus on the continuous changing features over an extended, 21-year period, as opposed to sampling a few years. It also provides clues and insights for researchers and practitioners interested in KO to understand how it has changed in the Semantic Web and big data context.

China’s national carbon market will be officially launched in 2020, when it will become the world’s largest carbon market. However, China’s carbon market is faced with various major challenges. One of the most important challenges is its impact on the social and economic development of arid and semi-arid regions. By simulating the carbon price trends under different economic development and energy consumption levels, this study aims to help the government can plan ahead to formulate various countermeasures to promote the integration of arid and semi-arid regions into the national carbon market.

To achieve this goal, this paper builds a back propagation neural network model, takes the third phase of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) as the research object and uses the mean impact value method to screen out the important driving variables of European Union Allowance (EUA) price, including economic development (Stoxx600, Stoxx50, FTSE, CAC40 and DAX), black energy (coal and Brent), clean energy (gas, PV Crystalox Solar and Nordex) and carbon price alternatives Certification Emission Reduction (CER). Finally, this paper sets up six scenarios by combining the above variables to simulate the impact of different economic development and energy consumption levels on carbon price trends.

Under the control of the unchanged CER price level, economic development, black energy and clean energy development will all have a certain impact on the EUA price trends. When economic development, black energy consumption and clean energy development are on the rise, the EUA price level will increase. When the three types of variables show a downward trend, except for the sluggish development of clean energy, which will cause the EUA price to rise sharply, the EUA price trend will also decline accordingly in the remaining scenarios.

On the one hand, this paper incorporates driving factors of carbon price into the construction of carbon price prediction system, which not only has higher prediction accuracy but also can simulate the long-term price trend. On the other hand, this paper uses scenario simulation to show the size, direction and duration of the impact of economic development, black energy consumption and clean energy development on carbon prices in a more intuitive way.

This paper aims at understanding the current situation of research support services offered by academic libraries in world-leading universities and providing useful implications and insights for other academic libraries.

Of the top 100 universities listed in the QS World University Rankings in 2017, 76 libraries were selected as samples and a website investigation was conducted to explore the research support services. The statistical method and visualization software was used to generalize the key services, and the text analysis and case analysis were applied to reveal the corresponding implementation.

Research support service has become one of the significant services of academic libraries in the context of e-research and data-intensive research. The research support services can be generally divided into seven aspects, as follows: research data management (62, 81.58 per cent), open access (64, 84.21 per cent), scholarly publishing (59, 77.63 per cent), research impact measurement (32, 42.11 per cent), research guides (47, 61.84 per cent), research consultation (59, 77.63 per cent) and research tools recommendation (38, 50.00 per cent).

This paper makes a comprehensive investigation of research support services in academic libraries of top-ranking universities worldwide. The findings will help academic libraries improve research support services; thus, advancing the work of researchers and promoting scientific discovery.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the participants' attitudes toward the ethical issues caused by collecting social media data (SMD) for research, as well as the effects of familiarity, trust and altruism on the participants' attitudes toward the ethics of SMD research. It is hoped that through this study, scholars will be reminded to respect participants and engage in ethical reflection when using SMD in research.

This study adopted social media users as its research subjects and used Sina Microblog, the world's largest Chinese social media platform, as the example. Based on the 320 valid responses collected from a survey, structural equation modeling was employed to examine the research model.

The results indicated that altruism, familiarity and trust have significant influences on participants' attitudes toward the ethics of SMD research, and familiarity also influences attitudes through the mediating role of trust and altruism.

This study explored the mechanism underlying the relationship between the determining factors and participants' attitudes toward the ethics of SMD research, and the results demonstrated that the informed consent mechanism is an effective way to communicate with participants and that the guiding responsibility of the platform should be improved to standardize SMD research.

This paper aims to understand user information behaviours when they perform multilingual information retrieval. It also offers reference for the development of multilingual information retrieval systems and relevant service platforms.

The authors designed an experiment on multilingual information retrieval with WorldWideScience, utilized Camtasia studio7 (a screen capturing and recording tool) to record overall operational processes of subjects and collected participants’ thought processes with think-aloud protocols. Meanwhile, a questionnaire survey and interviews were used to examine the subjects’ background information, their feelings for the experiment and their ideas about the experimental platform, respectively. Thirty-two valid data points were obtained by 41 subjects.

The users preferred their own language for retrieval. Most users from social science chose general search or advanced search freely according to the tasks. The majority of the participants selected key words directly from the tasks as search terms. Doctoral candidates were more likely to construct a search query with logic symbols. Translation tools were utilized for assisting retrieval and solving doubts of translation. When facing obstacles, users stayed on the original web page to explore continually, followed by back to homepage.

This paper provides a study of user behaviour through investigating how users behave on the whole process of retrieving multilingual information. The findings offer advice for optimizing the function of multilingual information retrieval systems and service platforms.

This paper aims to explore the characteristics of knowledge diffusion in library and information science (LIS) to reveal the impact of knowledge in LIS on other disciplines and the disciplinary status of LIS.

Taking the 573 highly cited papers (HCP) of LIS during the years 2000–2019 in Web of Science and 85,638 papers citing them from non-LIS disciplines as the analysis object, this paper analysed the disciplines to which the citing papers belonged regarding the Biglan model, and the topics and their characteristics of the citing disciplines using latent Dirichlet allocation topic clustering.

The results showed that the knowledge in LIS was exported to multiple disciplines and topics. (1) Citations from other disciplines were overall increasing, and the main citing disciplines, mainly from applied science disciplines, were medicine, computer science, management, economics, education, sociology, psychology, journalism and communication, earth science, engineering, biology, political science, chemistry and agronomy. However, those disciplines had fewer citations to LIS during for the years from 2000 to 2004, with rapid growth in the next three time periods. (2) The citing papers had various topics and showed an increasing trend in quantity. Moreover, topics of different disciplines from 2000 to 2019 had various characteristics.

From the perspective of discipline and topic, this study analyses papers citing the HCP of LIS from non-LIS disciplines, revealing the impact of knowledge in LIS on other disciplines.

This paper explains the formation of government resistance to open data based on the cognition of stakeholders in Chinese context.

Adopting grounded theory, this study interviewed 22 stakeholders to collect data. Through continuous coding, this study identified the main categories and then constructed theoretical models.

This study identified and explained five main categories that relate to resistance: practice, perception, organizational culture, motivation and resistance strategies. Then, a framework was developed that conceptualizes the government' resistance to open data. Based on the division of the forms of motivation, there are three paths through which government departments resist open data, namely, avoiding disadvantages to the organization, being unwilling to increase the workload and being unwilling to take the initiative.

This paper reveals the internal logic of government departments' resistance to open data and provides a process explanation beyond causality. It also provides a reference for other countries in the same preliminary stage as China with respect to open data implementation.

This paper aims to understand the current development situation of scientific data management policy in China, analyze the content structure of the policy and provide a theoretical basis for the improvement and optimization of the policy system.

China's scientific data management policies were obtained through various channels such as searching government websites and policy and legal database, and 209 policies were finally identified as the sample for analysis after being screened and integrated. A three-dimensional framework was constructed based on the perspective of policy tools, combining stakeholder and lifecycle theories. And the content of policy texts was coded and quantitatively analyzed according to this framework.

China's scientific data management policies can be divided into four stages according to the time sequence: infancy, preliminary exploration, comprehensive promotion and key implementation. The policies use a combination of three types of policy tools: supply-side, environmental-side and demand-side, involving multiple stakeholders and covering all stages of the lifecycle. But policy tools and their application to stakeholders and lifecycle stages are imbalanced. The development of future scientific data management policy should strengthen the balance of policy tools, promote the participation of multiple subjects and focus on the supervision of the whole lifecycle.

This paper constructs a three-dimensional analytical framework and uses content analysis to quantitatively analyze scientific data management policy texts, extending the research perspective and research content in the field of scientific data management. The study identifies policy focuses and proposes several strategies that will help optimize the scientific data management policy.

This paper aims to investigate the fretting wear mechanism of an Al-Li alloy at room temperature, the tangential fretting wear tests were carried out.

The effects of displacement amplitude and fretting frequency on the tangential fretting wear characteristics were mainly investigated. The experimental data obtained are analyzed and compared.

The results indicated that the fretting friction coefficient increased with the increase of displacement amplitude. As the displacement amplitude increased, the wear scar morphology changed significantly, mainly in terms of delamination debris and furrow scratches. The wear mechanism changed from initial mild wear to more severe oxidative wear, adhesive wear and abrasive wear.

This paper extends the knowledge into mechanical tight connections. The conclusions can provide theoretical guidance for the fretting of mechanical tight connections in the field of automotive lightweight and aerospace.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-11-2019-0490/