Search results

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the history and development of transaction log analysis (TLA) in library and information science research. Organizing a literature review of the first twenty‐five years of TLA poses some challenges and requires some decisions. The primary organizing principle could be a strict chronology of the published research, the research questions addressed, the automated information retrieval (IR) systems that generated the data, the results gained, or even the researchers themselves. The group of active transaction log analyzers remains fairly small in number, and researchers who use transaction logs tend to use this method more than once, so tracing the development and refinement of individuals' uses of the methodology could provide insight into the progress of the method as a whole. For example, if we examine how researchers like W. David Penniman, John Tolle, Christine Borgman, Ray Larson, and Micheline Hancock‐Beaulieu have modified their own understandings and applications of the method over time, we may get an accurate sense of the development of all applications.

The purpose of this paper is to further explore the co-citation and bibliographic-coupling relationship among the core authors in the field of Chinese information science (IS), to expose research activity and author impact, and to make induction analyses about Chinese IS research patterns and theme evolution.

The research data include 8,567 papers and 70,947 cited articles in the IS field indexed by Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index from 2000 to 2009. Author co-citation analysis, author bibliographic-coupling analysis, social network analysis, and factor analysis were combined to explore co-citation and bibliographic-coupling relationships and to identify research groups and subjects.

Scholars with greatest impact are different from the most active scholars of Chinese IS; there is no uniform impact pattern forming since authors’ impact subjects are scattered and not steady; while authors’ research activities present higher independence and concentration, there is still no steady research pattern due to no deep research existing. Furthermore, Chinese IS studies can be delineated by: foundation or extension. The research subjects of these two parts, as well as their corresponding/contributing authors, are different under different views. The general research status of core authors is concentrated, while their impact is broad.

The combined use of some related methods could enrich the development and methodology research of the discipline, and the results establish a reference point on the development of IS research.

The conditions that domain analysis becomes an academic school of information science (IS) are mature. Domain analysis is one of the most important foundations of IS. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss metatheoretical and theoretical issues in the domain analytic paradigm in IS.

This paper conducts a systematic review of representative publications of domain analysis. The analysis considered degree theses, journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and other materials.

Domain analysis maintains that community is the new focus of IS research. Although domain analysis centers on the domain and community, theoretical concerns on the social and individual dimensions of IS are inherent in it by its using sociology as its important approach and socio-cognitive viewpoint. For these reasons domain analysis can integrate social–community–individual levels of IS discipline as a whole. The role of subject knowledge in IS is discussed from the perspective of domain analysis. Realistic pragmatism that forms the philosophical foundation of domain analysis is argued and the implications of these theories to IS are presented.

The intellectual evolving landscape of domain analysis during a quarter century is comprehensively reviewed. Over the past twenty-five years, domain analysis has established its academic status in the international IS circle. Being an important metatheory, paradigm and methodology, domain analysis becomes the theoretical foundation of IS research. This paper assesses the current state of domain analysis and shows the contributions of domain analysis to IS. It also aims to inspire further exploration.

This article presents the early findings of an exploratory deep log analysis of journal usage on OhioLINK, conducted as part of the MaxData project funded by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services. OhioLINK, the original “big deal”, provides a single digital platform of nearly 6,000 full‐text journal for more than 600,000 people in the state of Ohio. The purpose of the paper is not only to present findings from the deep log analysis of journal usage on OhioLINK, but, arguably more importantly, to try test a new method of analysing online information user behaviour – deep log analysis.

The raw server logs were obtained for the period June 2004 to December 2004. For this exploratory study one month (October) of the on‐campus usage logs and seven months of the off‐campus transaction logs were analysed.

During this period approximately 1,215,000 items were viewed on campus in October 2004 and 1,894,000 items viewed off campus between June and December 2004. The paper presents a number of usage analyses including: number of journals used, titles of journals used, use over time, a returnee analysis and a special analysis of subject, date and method of access.

The research findings help libraries evaluate the efficiency of big deal and one‐stop shopping for scholarly journals and also investigate their users' information seeking behaviours.

The research is a part of efforts to test the applications of a new methodology, deep log analysis, for use and user studies. It also represents the most substantial independent analysis of, possibly, the most important and significant of the journal big deals ever conducted.

The purpose of this research is to examine the practical potentials of Bradford's law in relation to core‐journal identification.

Literature studies and empirical tests (Bradford analyses).

Literature studies reveal that the concept of “subject” has never been explicitly addressed in relation to Bradford's law. The results of two empirical tests (Bradford analyses) demonstrate that different operationalizations of the concept of “subject” produce quite different lists of core‐journals. Further, an empirical test reveals that Bradford analyses function discriminatorily against minority views.

Bradford analysis can no longer be regarded as an objective and neutral method. The received view on Bradford's law needs to be revised.

The paper questions one of the old dogmas of the field.

This article presents a theoretical investigation of the concept of ‘subject’ or ‘subject matter’ in library and information science. Most conceptions of ‘subject’ in the literature are not explicit but implicit. Various indexing and classification theories, including automatic indexing and citation indexing, have their own more or less implicit concepts of subject. This fact puts the emphasis on making the implicit theories of ‘subject matter’ explicit as the first step. A very close connection exists between what subjects are, and how we are to know them. Those researchers who place the subjects in the minds of the users have a conception of ‘subject’ different to that possessed by those who regard the subject as a fixed property of the documents. The key to the definition of the concept of ‘subject’ lies in the epistemological investigation of how we are going to know what we need to know about documents in order to describe them in a way which facilitates information retrieval. The second step therefore is an analysis of the implicit epistemological conceptions in the major existing conceptions of ‘subject’. The different conceptions of ‘subject’ can therefore be classified into epistemological positions, e.g. ‘subjective idealism’ (or the empiric/positivistic viewpoint), ‘objective idealism’ (the rationalistic viewpoint), ‘pragmatism’ and ‘materialism/ realism’. The third and final step is to propose a new theory of subject matter based on an explicit theory of knowledge. In this article this is done from the point of view of a realistic/materialistic epistemology. From this standpoint the subject of a document is defined as the epistemological potentials of that document.

After establishing the terminology, shows how the choice of the name of the subject of a document and the rendering of the name in the heading of the specific subject entry can be got by facet analysis based on postulates and principles. After showing that subject headings constitute an artificial language, points out that using facet analysis for subject heading does not amount to using class number. Marks out the area for an objective statistical survey of sought heading for subject entry. Calls on Council for Library Resources Incorporated to provide for this project.

The purpose of this study is to provide quantitative information about the development of Islamic financial management literature. For this purpose, it is aimed to draw attention to the development of this field by revealing the literature gap in the field of Islamic financial management.

In this study, the document analysis method is used and the Web of Science (WOS) site is used to obtain the desired data. The time range of the study covers the years 1980–2023/January. The results obtained from the scans were analyzed by the bibliometric analysis method. The data obtained within the scope of the study are classified and analyzed using the VOSviewer program, which is one of the many software developed for scientific mapping analysis. The obtained data are presented in a certain order with the visual mapping method.

In the analyses made, bibliometric analysis based on document review and including the subject of “Islamic financial management” in the WOS database between the relevant years has not been used in any study, which points to an important gap in the literature. However, 3,022 studies on “Financial management” and 1,830 studies on “Islamic finance” have been identified. Although there is no data on “Financial Management”, the subjects of “Islamic finance” and “Financial management” related to the subject have been evaluated in terms of countries, the most publishing organizations, authors, publications and word–word groups, using the bibliometric analysis method, as well as making numerical and visual evaluations. These studies show that an infrastructure to include the subject of “Islamic financial management” has not been formed in the literature.

This study points to an important gap in the literature. The subjects of “Islamic finance” and “Financial management” have been sufficiently covered in the literature separately. By combining this knowledge with new studies there appears an environment where original studies on the subject of “Islamic financial management” can be made and this study is aimed to shed light on this virgin area.

In the literature bibliometric analysis based on document review including the subject of “Islamic financial management” has not been used in any study. To the best of the author’s knowledge this study is the first in the literature to address the related issue and with it an important gap in the literature has been identified and an important case that will be a source for future studies has been revealed.

This paper explains at least some of the major problems related to the subject indexing process and proposes a new approach to understanding the process, which is ordinarily described as a process that takes a number of steps. The subject is first determined, then it is described in a few sentences and, lastly, the description of the subject is converted into the indexing language. It is argued that this typical approach characteristically lacks an understanding of what the central nature of the process is. Indexing is not a neutral and objective representation of a document’s subject matter but the representation of an interpretation of a document for future use. Semiotics is offered here as a framework for understanding the “interpretative” nature of the subject indexing process. By placing this process within Peirce’s semiotic framework of ideas and terminology, a more detailed description of the process is offered which shows that the uncertainty generally associated with this process is created by the fact that the indexer goes through a number of steps and creates the subject matter of the document during this process. The creation of the subject matter is based on the indexer’s social and cultural context. The paper offers an explanation of what occurs in the indexing process and suggests that there is only little certainty to its result.