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This study aims to investigate the characteristics, as well as the purpose and posts of the COVID-19 Facebook groups.

A systematic search for COVID-19 Facebook groups was conducted on June 1, 2020. Characteristics of the groups were examined using descriptive statistics. Mann-Whitney test was used to study the differences between groups. The study of the most popular groups’ posts was also carried out using the content analysis method.

The groups had a combined membership of 2,729,061 users. A total of 147,885 posts were received. There were about approximately 60% public groups. A high percentage of the groups (86.5%) had descriptions. The results showed a significant relationship between the groups’ description status and the number of members (p-value = 0.016). The majority of COVID-19 Facebook groups (56%) were created to meet their members’ information needs. The highest number of studied posts were related to vaccination (35.2%), followed by curfew rules (19.6%) and symptoms (10.6%).

Translating these insights into policies and practices will put policymakers and health-care providers in a stronger position to make better use of Facebook groups to support and enhance public knowledge about COVID-19.

Many researchers in ResearchGate (RG) engage in scholarly activity and share research findings. The researchers' activities in this social network may increase the probability of their works being cited. Thus, this study aims to examine the status of RG indices and the Scopus citation indicators of the allied medical sciences lecturers and their association with their academic rankings.

A cross-sectional, descriptive analytical study was performed. As a first step, the names of all 50 lecturers at the School of Allied Medical Sciences were searched through RG to find all the lecturers with profiles. Then, the h-index as well as the number of citations by them were extracted from Scopus. Spearman's correlation coefficient test was performed to explore the association of the RG score with the Scopus citation indicators and the academic rankings of the lecturers.

The findings demonstrated that there is a statistically significant relationship between the RG indices (except the question and answer indices) and the Scopus citation indicators with the academic rankings of the lecturers (p-value < 0.01).

Knowledge of the significant relationship between the RG indices and the Scopus citation indicators may encourage the lecturers to make more efforts to be active on RG. Furthermore, policymakers can encourage their researchers and lecturers to be more active in this scientific social network, which could lead to promoting the university rankings in the global and national rankings systems.

The purpose of this study is to assess the e-readiness status of libraries in the Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in terms of four dimensions – human resources, electronical infrastructure, network services and programs and enhancers of the networked world.

The study population consists of 11 libraries of the Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, including the central library and 10 faculty libraries. The data collection instrument is a questionnaire prepared by the researchers that has been designed on the basis of the “e-readiness assessment of Iranian academic libraries model”. Depending on the respondents there are three parts to the questionnaire: questionnaire for managers, staff and information and communication technology (ICT) officials. Their reliability and validity have been proved.

The libraries of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences had an average to high status in terms of “human resources” with a score of 2.32, “electronic infrastructure” with a score of 2.48, “network services and programs” with a score of 2.09 and “networked world enhancers” with a score of 2.37 out of 4. In total, these libraries had an average to high status in terms of e-readiness, with a score of 2.29.

The findings of this study can help the library administrators and officials of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences to plan improvements to the situation of ICT.

There are different opinions about the quality and reputation of publications. Given that one of the ways to analyze the quality of journals and articles is citation indicators, the purpose of this paper is to compare the citation indicators of open access (OA), full subscription and hybrid journals and articles based on the Scopus in the field of library and information science (LIS) for a period of ten years (2004-2013).

The research population is all LIS journals and articles in LIS hybrid journals in Scopus. The data related to citation indicators (number of received citations, two years’ impact, Citescore [IPP] and H-index) were extracted from Scopus, Journal Metrics and SCImago and analyzed using descriptive and analytical statistics with SPSS and Excel.

The findings indicate that number of OA journals and articles were less than that of full subscription and hybrid journals. The average rate of all citation indicators in hybrid journals were more than that of OA and full subscription journals. However, in the level of articles, the average number of citations received by OA articles (15.6) was more than that of non-OA articles (2.25).

Unlike journals, OA seems to be an advantage for articles in LIS. LIS hybrid journals receive more citations than OA and subscription journals. Thus, the authors’ approach to publishing in OA, hybrid or subscription journals and the publishers approach to the publication type may also be influenced by the findings of the present study.

The aim of this paper is to look at the relationship between research in Iranian medical universities, together with their Web Impact Factor (WIF).

The Altavista search engine was chosen because of its advanced search facilities for counting links and having a wider scope of academic web sites than other search engines. It was searched for determining the number of pages, in‐links and self‐links of 42 web sites of Iranian medical universities. The Web Impact Factor (WIF) was calculated by two formulas and the relationship between the two grades of universities (WIF and ISI) was calculated by using the Spearman's correlation coefficient.

Tehran, Iran and Gilan medical universities had the first to third grade in the number of web sites' pages. The number of in‐links to Tehran, Isfahan and Tabriz medical universities was more than the others. The WIF of universities' web sites was counted in four groups with regard to their number of web pages and Kerman, Kermanshah, Fasa and Qom had the highest grades of WIF in each group, but there was no meaningful relationship between WIF grades and ISI grades. Also, the WIF of university web sites was counted with regard to the number of their members in the four groups and the result shows that Hormozgan, Shiraz, Isfahan and Tehran had the highest grade in each group. Again, there was no meaningful relation between WIF grades and ISI grades.

It seems that counting the number of in‐links is a better scale for ranking university web sites than WIF. WIF is proposed only in situations where the number of web pages is about equal.

The paper provides rankings, for the first time, of Iranian medical university web sites with regard to WIF based on the number of the web pages as well as on the number of the academic staff. The research shows a methodology that others can follow.