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Purpose – As researchers need partners to collaborate with, this study aims to provide author recommendation for academic researchers for potential collaboration, conference planning, and compilation of scientific working groups with the help of social information. Hereby the chapter analyzes and compares different similarity metrics in information and computer science.

Methodology/approach – The study uses data from the multidiscipline information services Web of Science and Scopus as well as the social bookmarking service CiteULike to measure author similarity and recommend researchers to unique target researchers. The similarity approach is based on author co-citation, bibliographic coupling of authors and collaborative filtering methods. The developed clusters and graphs are then evaluated by these target researchers.

Findings – The analysis shows, for example, that different methods for social recommendation complement each other and that the researchers evaluated user- and tag-based data from a social bookmarking system positively.

Research limitations/implications – The present study, providing author recommendation for six target physicists, is supposed to be a starting point for further approaches on social academic author recommendation.

Practical implications – The chapter investigates in recommendation methods and similarity algorithm models as basis for an implementation of a social recommendation system for researchers in academics and knowledge-intensive organizations.

Originality/value of chapter – The comparison of different similarity measurements and the user evaluation provide new insights into the construction of social data mining and the investigation of personalized recommendation.

Marit Kristine Ådland is a Ph.D. student at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science. Her research interests and activity is within knowledge organization, information behavior, information retrieval, and information architecture. Her current research explores users’ tags and tagging behavior in the field of cancer information. She teaches classification and indexing to students training in librarianship.

The purpose of this book is to collect current research representing different aspects of social information with emphasis on the new innovations supporting contemporary information behavior. To begin with, we need to define what we mean by social information in general and in the area of information science in particular. It is interesting to notice that social information is a concept used and researched in many different disciplines. Besides information science, the concept of social information has been studied in biology, psychology, and sociology among other disciplines.

This paper is second of seven in this volume elaborating different approaches to quality improvement in education. It delineates a methodology called design-based implementation research (DBIR). The approach used in this paper is aimed at iteratively improving the quality of classroom teaching and learning practices in defined problem areas through collaborations among researchers, practitioners and other education stakeholders.

The paper describes the origins of the approach in US education, along with its foundations, core principles and a case application of DBIR in practice. The case focuses on the specific problem of teaching science and genetics in primary and secondary schools in a district.

The guiding principles of DBIR are: a focus on persistent problems of classroom educational practice; iterative and collaborative design and testing of innovations through partnerships between researchers and practitioners, involving multiple stakeholders’ perspectives; a concern with developing theory related to both implementation processes and classroom learning outcomes, using systematic inquiry; and development of the capacity of both researchers and practitioners to sustain changes in educational systems.

Few theoretical treatments and demonstration cases are currently available in US education that examine common models of quality improvement, particularly DBIR. By engaging practitioners with researchers in designing, testing and implementing reforms meaningfully, DBIR shows promise in offering significant on-the-ground benefits. This paper adds value by allowing readers to compare the DBIR method with the other improvement approaches explicated in this volume.

The relevance of institution leaders’ personal qualities for providing quality education is widely recognized. The purpose of this paper is to explore vocational education and training (VET) institution leaders’ character features. The research question was twofold: What are the features of the character of the pedagogical leaders of three Latvian VET institutions according to students, teachers and institution board members? What are the differences between respondents’ groups regarding their perceptions of leaders’ virtues?

Six members of the institution board, five teachers and six students participated in structured qualitative interviews collected in 2013 in three high-quality VET institutions from different fields (tourism, sports and maritime education). Secondary analysis of latent content was used to explore respondents’ perceptions of leaders’ virtues, using software AQUAD 7 for qualitative data analysis.

The results revealed significant differences between students’ and staff (teachers’ and institution board members’) perceptions: the staff members appreciated particularly leaders’ performance virtues (“teamwork orientation”) and intellectual virtues (“critical thinking”), whereas, for students, heads’ moral virtues were more relevant, especially “magnanimity”. Respondents also showed concern about VET institution leaders’ civic virtues (“neighborliness,” “community awareness,” and “communicability”).

The results suggest that different perspectives, and in particular students’ voices, should be integrated in VET leaders’ assessment process and that their continuing professional development should also address their intellectual, moral and civic virtues.

This study represents an innovative methodological trial for investigating educational institution heads’ leadership from the lens of virtue ethics.

The inherit complexity of an educational system further complicates the challenge of introducing technology-based educational initiatives into a school environment. Once introduced, the initiative has the potential to become self-sustaining or to cease once the term is over. Such uncertainty makes the use of expensive information technology (IT) in schools “risky business,” which requires school leaders go above and beyond their current routine to extend the system's capacity to sustain the innovation. A discretionary behavior of school leaders and teachers is one of key factors that contribute to or prevent the sustainability of an innovation. A lack of understanding of what encourages an individual's discretionary behavior and how discretion is fostered in school practices contribute to the challenge of innovation's sustainability. If the individuals’ discretion is required to sustain a technology-based educational program within a school, do their actions dwell outside or inside of the school environment? More importantly, how does a discretionary chain of command operate and can it be aligned? In this chapter we use an “ecological model” approach to describe the influential factors, which affect project's sustainability by transforming effective discretionary approaches of school leaders and teachers from policy to practice. We draw our description of the model on the results of the empirical study of Hong Kong schools involved in the design and strategic IT implementation of the e-Leadership Enhancement Project (eLEP).

The purpose of this study was to explore long-term residential care provided by people other than the facilities’ employees. Privately hired paid “companions” are effectively invisible in health services research and policy. This research was designed to address this significant gap. There is growing recognition that nursing staff in long-term care (LTC) residential facilities experience moral distress, a phenomenon in which one knows the ethically right action to take, but is systemically constrained from taking it. To date, there has been no discussion of the distressing experiences of companions in LTC facilities. The purpose of this paper is to explore companions’ moral distress.

Data were collected using week-long rapid ethnographies in seven LTC facilities in Southern Ontario, Canada. A feminist political economy analytic framework was used in the research design and in the analysis of findings.

Despite the differences in their work tasks and employment conditions, structural barriers can cause moral distress for companions. This mirrors the impacts experienced by nurses that are highlighted in the literature. Though companions are hired in order to fill care gaps in the LTC system, they too struggle with the current system’s limitations. The hiring of private companions is not a sustainable or equitable solution to under-staffing and under-funding in Canada’s LTC facilities.

Recognizing moral distress and its impact on those providing LTC is critical in relation to supporting and protecting vulnerable and precarious care workers and ensuring high-quality care for Canadians in LTC.