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QuikScan is an innovative text format that employs three prominent signaling devices – summaries, headings, and access cues – to make the reading of medium‐to‐long texts more productive. The experiments reported in this paper aim to examine the claim that QuikScan contributes to text recall.

In two consecutive experiments a QuikScanned text (experimental condition) was compared to a non‐QuickScanned text (control condition). In Experiment one, 41 university students read the text and then answered ten open recall questions. In Experiment two, 58 university students read the text and then wrote a summary and answered four recall questions.

In Experiment one, a statistically significant overall effect on text recall favoring QuikScan was found. Detailed analyses revealed that QuikScan mainly affected the readers' responses to higher‐order questions (d = 1.24). Experiment two showed that QuikScan led to significantly higher recall scores for the summaries. Just as in the first experiment, a strong effect on the higher‐order questions was found (d = 1.27).

Further studies of QuikScan should include studies in naturalistic settings and should address selective reading and information navigation as well as text recall. SARA, a recent comprehensive theory of signaling, makes it possible to identify the individual functions of QuikScan's signaling devices and conduct revealing studies of QuikScan.

QuikScan and other innovations that improve the reading experience can potentially increase the willingness of readers to read longer documents.

QuikScan provides a unique combination of signaling devices. It can facilitate access and enhance text comprehension.

Product recall messages represent an essential communication tool in crisis situations. Their function is twofold: to provide information of a practical nature regarding the defective product, and the operational process of recalling it, and to defend the reputation of the affected firm. This paper attempts to analyse the structure and the function of product recall messages published in the UK national press, using as points of reference best practice guides published by professional or governmental organisations.

The choice of a suitable data base for providing an information service is governed by factors of coverage, performance, and cost. The cost of the data base to subscribers is a known quantity, and the coverage is decided by the data base producers. This paper describes an investigation into the relative performance of the four major Chemical Abstracts Service magnetic tape data‐bases, Chemical Titles (CT), which contains the titles of citations only, Chemical Abstracts Condensates (CAC), which contains titles enriched with keyword phrases, Chemical‐Biological Activities (CBAC), and Polymer Science and Technology (POST), both of which contain full digests in addition to titles. The performance was measured in terms of the relative currency of the four data‐bases, and the retrieval efficiency of profiles searched against them. Fifty questions from industrial and government research organizations were used in the experiment. Search profiles corresponding to these questions were constructed for searching against each data‐base, output was assessed for relevance by users, and profile performance figures (precision and recall ratios) were calculated for each profile. The overall retrieval efficiency of profiles searched against data‐bases containing titles only, titles‐plus‐keywords, and titles‐plus‐digests, was calculated, and these results are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the difference between experts and novices when reading with navigational table of contents (N-TOC). Experts refer to readers with high level of domain knowledge; novices refer to readers with low level of domain knowledge.

The authors performed a controlled experiment of three reading tasks (including fact finding task, partial understanding task, and full-text understanding task) on an N-TOC system for 35 post-graduates of Wuhan University who have rich experience in reading with N-TOC. Participants’ domain knowledge was measured by pre-experiment questionnaires; reading performance data including score, time, navigation use, and evaluation of N-TOC were collected.

The results showed that there was significant difference in neither navigation use nor participants’ evaluation, but domain experts performed significantly better in both score and time of all tasks than domain novices, which revealed an “illusion of control” phenomenon that rich experience in reading with N-TOC enabled domain novices to achieve the same performance as domain experts. In addition, this research found that N-TOC was not suitable for domain novices to solve full-text understanding task because of “cognitive overload” phenomenon.

This study makes a good contribution to the literature on the effect of domain knowledge on reading performance during N-TOC reading and how to provide better digital reading service in the field of library science and information science.

In the era of Big Data, network digital resources are growing rapidly, especially the short-text resources, such as tweets, comments, messages and so on, are showing a vigorous vitality. This study aims to compare the categories discriminative capacity (CDC) of Chinese language fragments with different granularities and to explore and verify feasibility, rationality and effectiveness of the low-granularity feature, such as Chinese characters in Chinese short-text classification (CSTC).

This study takes discipline classification of journal articles from CSSCI as a simulation environment. On the basis of sorting out the distribution rules of classification features with various granularities, including keywords, terms and characters, the classification effects accessed by the SVM algorithm are comprehensively compared and evaluated from three angles of using the same experiment samples, testing before and after feature optimization, and introducing external data.

The granularity of a classification feature has an important impact on CSTC. In general, the larger the granularity is, the better the classification result is, and vice versa. However, a low-granularity feature is also feasible, and its CDC could be improved by reasonable weight setting, even exceeding a high-granularity feature if synthetically considering classification precision, computational complexity and text coverage.

This is the first study to propose that Chinese characters are more suitable as descriptive features in CSTC than terms and keywords and to demonstrate that CDC of Chinese character features could be strengthened by mixing frequency and position as weight.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the causes and implications of potential negative consumer response to music in broadcast commercials. It aims to accomplish this by introducing a new consumer response variable, attitude toward the advertising music (A_am) and relating A_am's components to advertising goals. It also aims to propose that A_am is a significant component of attitude toward the ad (A_ad).

The paper takes the form of an integrative review of the relevant literatures in the psychology of music, consumer marketing, and advertising to formulate A_am.

Favorable A_am is a necessary but insufficient condition for favorable A_ad in ads employing music. Furthermore, a negative A_am might cause a negative A_ad. Given the numerous possible negative responses to music in a TV or radio commercial, achieving a favorable A_am among most target audience members is very challenging, especially when music‐message fit is lacking.

The paper offers cautionary advice for advertisers using music and directions for future research.

The paper provides a novel integration of literatures in psychology and marketing/advertising. Whereas most scholars and practitioners assume that music adds value to commercials, the authors demonstrate key ways in which music can cause adverse listener reactions.

This is a translation of a paper in the colloquium Automatisierung der Ausleihverbuchung: Erfahrungen und Perspektiven organised by the Arbeitsstelle für Bibliothekstechnik in Berlin on 26 and 27 January 1971. The compilation was made by analogy with the review of British computer‐based loans systems published in Program Vol. 3, p. 127–146. A review of the German language version of the colloquium is published on p. 000 of this issue.

The purpose of the present study was to predict reading comprehension, reading interest, and reading efficacy from teaching styles. Participants were 109 students with learning disabilities from seven elementary schools in Germany. By use of observational protocols and multilevel random coefficient modeling to account for the multilevel structure of the data, results indicated that: (a) reading comprehension was positively predicted from students’ attitudes and a structured classroom discourse, and negatively by a flexible teaching style, (b) reading interest was positively predicted by a structured and positive climate, and negatively by a discourse that was too guided, and (c) reading efficacy was predicted positively from students’ attitudes and teachers’ fostering, and negatively from teachers’ flexibility, guidance, and structure. Implications of the findings are discussed in the context of creating adaptive classroom climates for learners who have difficulties in learning.

The paper's aim is to point out trends in scholarly communication – both some of the main advantages and the yet unsolved problems that technology – swift communication lines, digitalization and the web – brought into one of the most important activities of academic life: the reading – writing – publishing cycle.

The different stages, which eventually give birth to a scientific paper, are described here as thinking – (experimenting) – reading – writing – publishing, and analyzed from handwritten to print to digital texts, with an emphasis on the revolutionary changes that scholarly publishing is experiencing.

Thanks to computerization, hypertext and the web, academic life enjoys swift and effortless communication, ease of writing, rapid publishing, almost unlimited access, but there are several uncalled for developments as well.

The new technologies lack a convenient way of writing‐while‐reading, enhance plagiarism, eliminate traditional archiving methods without offering a satisfactory new substitute (presently) and give rise to a call for a revised way of citation, together with new ways of archiving and storing.

The age of technology is here, bringing to our working lives new phrases such as “the automated office”, “the electronic office” or “the office of the future” in which we work systems that are “ergonomically designed” or “user friendly”—to name but a few examples of eighties' buzz words.