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The purpose of this paper is to present a detailed depiction of the text reference environment and its affordance, and suggest strategies to help librarians adhere to the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) behavioral guidelines in text reference service.

The author reviews the current text reference literature as well as conducts qualitative and quantitative analysis of reference services provided by My Info Quest, the USA's first collaborative text reference service.

Two models of text reference service are uncovered: mobile device based and computer application based. The considerations for developing a service are primarily defined as relating to budget, staffing, and usability. Text reference is characterized as somewhere between synchronous and asynchronous, increasing in volume, and mostly concerned with short, straightforward questions and answers. These factors all influence adherence to RUSA guidelines for behavioral performance of reference librarians, but are not insurmountable.

More research is needed to better understand user experience with text reference service.

This paper provides ideas to help libraries effectively establish text reference service.

The paper presents a detailed set of considerations for libraries that are considering launching text reference service. It also outlines behavioral expectations for librarians providing that service.

This paper aims to describe management and operational considerations for collaborative text reference services.

The authors conducted in‐depth interviews with members of the My Info Quest (MIQ) management team. The paper reports on the interviews in the context of MIQ's operations as the first US nationwide, collaborative text reference service.

MIQ is a non‐hierarchal organization that relies on frequent communication, enthusiastic and dedicated member librarians, and a collective sense of commitment. Challenges and lessons from MIQ's operations are discussed in the following areas: policies and procedures, staffing, service software, training, marketing, communicating and problem solving, and overall project operation.

This paper examines collaborative text reference service only from the management perspective. Future research should investigate other aspects of collaboratively providing text reference service.

This paper will help libraries implement and manage collaborative text reference services. Ultimately it will contribute to the development of best practices for text reference service.

Text reference is the most recent reference development and it does not have a large body of literature. Current reports are primarily of a single library's experience. This paper reports on collaborative service provision. It is the only article to date that examines collaborative text reference service from the management perspective.

This paper aims to analyze data from a pilot study at one academic library using Google Voice for text message (SMS) reference. It also aims to analyze SMS reference question typology, compare question typology to other reference services, and analyze communication in the context of SMS reference.

Analysis of all reference service models was conducted, including question typology. SMS transcripts were analyzed in the following areas: presence of a reference interview, evidence of a referral, number of librarian and patron texts, response time, and transaction duration.

The number of SMS queries was lower than expected. Questions were primarily non‐research‐based or ready reference. The average number of texts per transaction was 7.5. With outliers removed, average response time was 9.5 minutes, and average transaction time was 53.2 minutes. Users appear to be regulating question difficulty.

Data collection occurred during a state furlough period, which likely impacted the number of reference transactions. Conversation analysis and user feedback were not incorporated into this study, but could aid in understanding communication patterns in SMS reference.

Google Voice offers a viable option for implementing SMS reference, and this paper offers direction to interested parties. Challenges in answering complex questions via SMS should not be a concern, since patrons generally are not asking difficult questions.

This pilot study expands the growing body of literature on SMS reference in academic libraries, comparing it to other reference service models at the same institution. It also highlights Google Voice as a free alternative to subscription or fee‐based models of SMS reference service.

Full text of a document is a rich source of information that can be used to provide meaningful topics. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to use citation context (CC) in the full text to identify the cited topics and citing topics efficiently and effectively by employing automatic text analysis algorithms.

The authors present two novel topic models, Citation-Context-LDA (CC-LDA) and Citation-Context-Reference-LDA (CCRef-LDA). CC is leveraged to extract the citing text from the full text, which makes it possible to discover topics with accuracy. CC-LDA incorporates CC, citing text, and their latent relationship, while CCRef-LDA incorporates CC, citing text, their latent relationship and reference information in CC. Collapsed Gibbs sampling is used to achieve an approximate estimation. The capacity of CC-LDA to simultaneously learn cited topics and citing topics together with their links is investigated. Moreover, a topic influence measure method based on CC-LDA is proposed and applied to create links between the two-level topics. In addition, the capacity of CCRef-LDA to discover topic influential references is also investigated.

The results indicate CC-LDA and CCRef-LDA achieve improved or comparable performance in terms of both perplexity and symmetric Kullback–Leibler (sKL) divergence. Moreover, CC-LDA is effective in discovering the cited topics and citing topics with topic influence, and CCRef-LDA is able to find the cited topic influential references.

The automatic method provides novel knowledge for cited topics and citing topics discovery. Topic influence learnt by our model can link two-level topics and create a semantic topic network. The method can also use topic specificity as a feature to rank references.

The aim of this paper is to provide an in-depth examination of the use and non-use of text reference service among library users, seeking to evaluate the service from library users' perspective and hence enhance the professional understanding of the best practices of text reference service.

A survey study was conducted among library users, examining user demographics, user's texting behavior, user awareness of text reference service, and users' use or non-use of the service.

Findings suggest that the majority of library users have not used the service and their non-use is primarily attributed to their lack of awareness. Users who have used the service report a high degree of satisfaction and appreciate the convenience, ease of use and speediness of the service.

The paper helps interested libraries develop an enriched view of texting's affordance as a reference service venue and thus make more informed decisions in successfully implementing the service.

Text reference is the most recent reference development and it does not have a large body of literature. Current reports are primarily of a single library's experience and rarely investigate users' experience with text reference service. This paper fills the void in the literature by presenting a thorough study of text reference service from the user's point-of-view.

This study seeks to identify the benefits, challenges and effective methods of implementing and managing a collaborative text reference service.

The study employs the case study approach to examine the practice of the first nation‐wide collaborative text reference service My Info Quest and evaluate the effectiveness of the organization and operation of this collaboration.

Findings of the study indicate that librarians participating in My Info Quest are generally satisfied with the service organization and operation. However, more work is needed in the area of schedule accountability, communication and sustainability.

My Info Quest is the first collaborative text reference service in the nation. Through the detailed depiction and evaluation of My Info Quest's experience, the paper can help interested libraries to gain a better understanding of how to establish a collaborative text reference service and what challenges they will be facing.

This article explores citing and referencing systems in social sciences and medicine articles from different theoretical and practical perspectives, considering bibliographic references as a facet of descriptive representation.

The analysis of citing and referencing elements (i.e. bibliographic references, mentions, quotations and respective in-text reference pointers) identified citing and referencing habits within disciplines under consideration and errors occurring over the long term as stated by previous studies now expanded. Future expected trends of information retrieval from bibliographic metadata was gathered by approaching these referencing elements from the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) entities concepts.

Reference styles do not fully accomplish with their role of guiding authors and publishers on providing concise and well-structured bibliographic metadata within bibliographic references. Trends on representative description revision suggest a predicted distancing on the ways information is approached by bibliographic references and bibliographic catalogs adopting FRBR concepts, including the description levels adopted by each of them under the perspective of the FRBR entities concept.

This study was based on a subset of medicine and social sciences articles published in 2019 and, therefore, it may not be taken as a final and broad coverage. Future studies expanding these approaches to other disciplines and chronological periods are encouraged.

By approaching citing and referencing issues as descriptive representation's facets, findings on this study may encourage further studies that will support information science and computer science on providing tools to become bibliographic metadata description simpler, better structured and more efficient facing the revision of descriptive representation actually in progress.

The purpose of this paper is to explore roles of electronic texts (e‐texts) in research enquiry in literary and historical studies, and to deepen the understanding of the nature of scholars' engagement with e‐texts as primary materials. The study includes an investigation of references to e‐texts and discussions about researchers' citation practices in interviews.

Qualitative methodology was used to explore scholars' interactions with e‐texts in 30 research projects. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was used to examine citations and any other acknowledgments of e‐texts in participants' prepublications and published works. In‐depth semi‐structured interviews provided data for findings about researchers' citation practices.

Formal acknowledgments of e‐texts do not represent the depth and breadth of researchers' interactions with e‐texts. Assessments of the relevance and trustworthiness of e‐texts, as well as considerations of disciplinary cultures, had some impact on researchers' citation practices.

The study was based on in‐depth data‐gathering from a small group of participants. It does not have any statistical significance and the findings cannot be generalized, but comparisons with other scholars in literary and historical studies are possible. The study indicated a need for further investigation of changing academic practices in general and citation practices in particular.

The findings have implications for the development of standards and institutional support for research in the humanities.

The study provides new insights into the phenomenon of a very small number of citations of electronic sources in publications in the humanities, and considers issues related to citations from the perspective of changing academic cultures.

Several bibliographical citation systems are in regular use in scholarly literature, associated with various intellectual disciplines. The aim of this paper is to document an analysis of their designs in the biosciences in order to construct a classification and to assess their comparative effectiveness for information transfer.

A historical survey of communications between scholars, including the reasons why authors cite others' works, was completed. The development of citation systems, specifically the Harvard system and various numeric systems, was traced, following which a universal classification with a new descriptive terminology was constructed.

Citation systems are defined herein as direct (with citation and reference together in the text) or indirect (with citation within the text, and reference outside the text). Direct systems may be described as implicit (the Linnaean style with abbreviated, undated, conceptual reference) or explicit (with full, dated, bibliographical reference). All indirect systems are explicit: the text citation (the referens) may be alphabetic, symbolic, numeric or alphanumeric and the reference (the referendum) may be a marginal note, footnote or end reference. A survey of citation systems in 101 bioscience journals is presented. Within indirect systems, most biomedical journals use a numeric system, but most veterinary, zoological and general biological journals use the Harvard system, which is considered herein to be the most effective for information transfer.

No philosophical analysis of citation systems appears to have been carried out before. Based upon historical, conceptual and logical aspects, a robust universal classification with a new descriptive terminology is presented to facilitate the unambiguous discussion of the principles and designs of citation systems. The classification and terminology are applicable to citation systems in any discipline.

In this study, the authors want to identify current possible causes for citing and referencing errors in scholarly literature to compare if something changed from the snapshot provided by Sweetland in his 1989 paper.

The authors analysed reference elements, i.e. bibliographic references, mentions, quotations and respective in-text reference pointers, from 729 articles published in 147 journals across the 27 subject areas.

The outcomes of the analysis pointed out that bibliographic errors have been perpetuated for decades and that their possible causes have increased, despite the encouraged use of technological facilities, i.e. the reference managers.

As far as the authors know, the study is the best recent available analysis of errors in referencing and citing practices in the literature since Sweetland (1989).