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Ulrich's Serials Analysis System (USAS) is based on Ulrich's Periodical Directory which has been an essential resource about periodical publications for 80 years, first in print, then later in CD‐ROM and online versions. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the content and software features of USAS, based on tests made between July 2011 and January 2012.

In addition to depicting the overall profile of USAS, special emphasis was given to marketing‐focused and marketing‐related journals, and their coverage in academic multidisciplinary and business databases.

In light of the apparently everlasting library budget crises, the incessant increases in the subscription costs of journals and database licensing, and – on the positive side – the impressive growth of full text digital availability of journals through various sources, it was found that USAS can be a great asset in discovering alternatives, negotiating prices, and making educated decisions in collection development, as well as in reference services.

The paper presents an analysis of the Ulrich's Serials Analysis System from the perspective of journal coverage by academic databases.

This paper aims to selects 59 journals that focus on data science research in 14 disciplines from the Ulrichsweb online repository. This paper analyzes the aim and scope statement using both quantitative and qualitative methods to identify the research types and the scope of research promoted by these journals.

Multiple disciplines are involved in data science research and publishing, but there lacks an overview of what those disciplines are and how they relate to data science. In this study, this paper aims to understand the disciplinary characteristics of data science research. Two research questions are answered: What is the population of journals that focus on data science? What disciplinary landscape of data science is revealed in the aim and scope statements of these journals?

Theoretical research is mainly included in journals that belong to statistics, engineering and sciences. Almost all data science journals include applied research papers. Keywords analysis shows that data science research in computers, statistics, engineering and sciences appear to share characteristics. While in other disciplines such as biology, business and education, the keywords are indicative of the types of data to be used and the special problems in these disciplines.

This is the first study to use journals as the unit of analysis to identify the disciplines involved in data science research. The results provide an overview of how researchers and educators from different disciplinary backgrounds understand data science research.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the Bournemouth University Library's approach to enhance students' employability and encourage their career management.

The library reviewed its trade publications collection and created a set of web pages to exploit these and newly discovered resources.

Piloting the project using a few subject areas helped to uncover any inefficiencies, discovered tools that could be used (e.g. Ulrichsweb and Intute) to gain the best information and enabled the creation of a set of guidelines to distribute across the team. There are four phases to this project: review, information gathering, decisions and promotion.

Sifting out good quality authoritative information takes time, although this process is aided by using tools such as Intute for example. It is important to keep the web pages up to date.

This paper discusses how a higher education library service can engage with students' career management.

Chemistry book reviews serve as an aid to collection development, as well as an educational function for bibliographers and subject specialists. This study aims to outline a methodology for locating book reviews for a subject literature and characterizing the books reviewed.

This study utilized UlrichsWeb Global Serials Directory to identify chemistry periodicals containing book reviews. Criteria were applied to limit the periodicals identified to those publishing ten or more book reviews in 2009 and held by 25 or more libraries. The books reviewed by the periodicals were characterized in terms of the quantity, subject coverage, overlap, lag time, and compared to chemistry books published in 2009. Books reviewed by the chemistry periodicals were also compared to general science and other periodicals known to contain chemistry book reviews.

A total of 11 chemistry periodicals met the criteria and collectively they published 445 book reviews in 2009. Three chemistry periodicals accounted for 72.1 percent of the chemistry books reviewed, thus following Bradford's Law of Scatter. The LC Classification of the books reviewed ranged widely and QDs only comprised 41.1 percent of the 380 unique titles reviewed. The overlap was low with only 17.5 percent of the chemistry titles reviewed more than once. Books reviewed were generally representative of the chemistry books published based on publisher. Few, if any, chemistry books were reviewed by general science periodicals.

This paper provides a methodology that is applicable to other disciplines, as well as updating and expanding previous research by characterizing the subject coverage of books reviewed.

Ongoing deliberation about how research productivity should be measured is exacerbated by extensive disparity between the number of citations for scholarly works reported by commercial academic search engines and Google Scholar (GS), the premier web crawling service for discovering research citations. Disparities identified in citation comparison studies have also led to disagreement about the value of the higher number of citations for social sciences and business scholarly articles consistently reported by GS. The purpose of this paper is to extend previous database citation comparison studies by manually analyzing a sample of unique GS citations to a leading operations management journal (i.e. citations found only in GS and not the commercial search engines) to reveal just where these additional citations are coming from.

In addition to comparing citation counts for the three databases, unique GS citation data for the sample of journal articles was manually captured and reviewed. The authors’ approach provides a much more in-depth examination of the provenance of GS citations than is found in previous studies.

The findings suggest that concerns about the value of unique GS citations may not be warranted since the document types for the unique GS citing documents identified in the analysis are dominated by familiar scholarly formats. Predominantly authentic and validated journal publications, dissertations, conference papers, and book and book chapters accounted for the large majority of the unique GS citations analyzed.

The study lends further credence to contentions that the use of citations reported in GS is appropriate for evaluating research impact in disciplines where other formats beyond the English-language journal article are valued.

Developing a more informed understanding of the provenance of unique GS citations in the authors’ field is important because many scholars not only aspire to publish in elite journals with high impact factors based on citation counts provided by commercial databases to demonstrate quality, but also report the larger number of citations for their publications that are reported by GS to demonstrate impact. The in-depth manual analysis suggests that GS provides a more nuanced and comprehensive representation of research impact and international scope than the commercial databases.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether open accessibility of medical journals published in Africa may influence journals’ citation impact.

An evaluative informetric research approach was used to compare 134 health and medical (H&M) journals hosted in the African Journals Online (AJOL) database. Harzing’s Publish or Perish (PoP) software was used to extract the following publication and citation data from Google Scholar: citation counts, number of papers and the h-index of the journals. Three null hypotheses were formulated to guide the study.

A total of 65 open access (OA) and 69 non-OA H&M journals of African origin were found in AJOL. Only 20 African countries have journals hosted in AJOL, with more than 53% of them from Nigeria and 13.4% from South Africa. Findings reveal that non-OA H&M journals performed poorly in terms of citations compared with their OA counterparts. The t-test analysis revealed high significant difference in the citations and research impacts of OA and non-OA H&M journals published in Africa.

The study will assist in collection development in medical and health libraries globally and in Africa particularly. The study will also be a useful guide to journal publishers, health researchers and health workers providing information on where to publish and the journals to subscribe.

Apart from adding to the body of knowledge in scholarly communication in Africa, this study will go a long way in influencing policies in H&M research in Africa.

AJOL is the only online database hosting journals from all countries in Africa. Unfortunately, the quality and research impact of the journals in the database have not been adequately investigated. The paper adopted an informetric approach to evaluate H&M journals in Africa so as to provide wider insight on the contents and quality of the journals hosted in it.

The “New Paradigm” of disability and the International Classification of Function Disability and Health both describe an ecological model of disability that has significantly influenced policy and law, and this model is frequently cited as a background in published research. Given the central role of “the environment” in this ecological model, we asked, what is the status of research on the environment and disability? Specifically, is a scoping review warranted in this area of research?

We conducted a “rapid scan” of the National Rehabilitation Information Center (NARIC) database for articles reporting studies of the environment – defined as the arranged or built environment. We also scanned Google Scholar to ascertain the frequency of articles that might report research into the environment.

NARIC archived 12,486 items published from January 2007 to June 2012; 530 (4.2%) of which contained the search term “environment.” Of the 530 items, 78 (14.7%) also included the terms architecture space, accessibility, and ICF. Over the same time period, Google Scholar returned 109,000 entries to search terms “disability and environment,” 349 (0.3%) of which also included the terms architecture space, accessibility, and ICF.

This application of a method for rapidly assessing the status of the literature suggests that research into some aspects of the environment and disability may be under-represented. A more complete review, requiring more resources, is warranted.

How to obtain a list of the 100 largest scientific publishers sorted by journal count? Existing databases are unhelpful as each of them inhere biased omissions and data quality flaws. This paper tries to fill this gap with an alternative approach.

The content coverages of Scopus, Publons, DOAJ and SherpaRomeo were first used to extract a preliminary list of publishers that supposedly possess at least 15 journals. Second, the publishers' websites were scraped to fetch their portfolios and, thus, their “true” journal counts.

The outcome is a list of the 100 largest publishers comprising 28.060 scholarly journals, with the largest publishing 3.763 journals, and the smallest carrying 76 titles. The usual “oligopoly” of major publishing companies leads the list, but it also contains 17 university presses from the Global South, and, surprisingly, 30 predatory publishers that together publish 4.517 journals.

Additional data sources could be used to mitigate remaining biases; it is difficult to disambiguate publisher names and their imprints; and the dataset carries a non-uniform distribution, thus risking the omission of data points in the lower range.

The dataset can serve as a useful basis for comprehensive meta-scientific surveys on the publisher-level.

The catalogue can be deemed more inclusive and diverse than other ones because many of the publishers would have been overlooked if one had drawn from merely one or two sources. The list is freely accessible and invites regular updates. The approach used here (webscraping) has seldomly been used in meta-scientific surveys.

The authors aim to examine the literature on enterprise resource planning (ERP) to establish whether the critical success factors (CSFs) for achieving stages of an ERP project have been empirically shown to be “critical”.

The authors used a systematic approach to review 627 refereed papers published between 1998 and 2010 on ERP, from which 236 papers related to CSFs on ERP were selected for analysis. The authors employed procedures from qualitative and interpretive research methods, to analyse and interpret the material using five-step procedure of gathering, categorising, coding, analysing and comparing the data.

Prior studies have identified a large number of CSFs for ERP implementation success or improved performance outcomes. The authors have shown that a limited number of CSFs have been empirically investigated for their role in, and effect on, implementation success or post-implementation performance outcomes. While reporting the factors that have some evidence to support them, the authors question the utility of the general concept of CSFs.

The authors' findings question the validity of many of the claimed CSFs and the utility of the general body of literature on CSFs. The authors caution researchers who may plan to use claimed CSFs for ERP in their research to carefully examine the veracity of the claim before proceeding.

The findings can help managers to focus their attention, priorities, resources and leadership on managing the CSFs that have been established to be critical for achieving ERP project implementation and/or performance outcomes.

The results provide new insights into the usefulness of CSFs and indicate that merely identifying possible CSFs is not sufficient to help with ERP success. Further investigation is required to establish the criticalness of the proposed CSFs before managerial time is devoted to them.

The purpose of this paper is to perform a content analysis of information literacy specific journals to determine what contributing countries and predominant themes are represented in the field leading to a global understanding of information literacy.

The data for this study were collected through a content analysis of journal article publication information, titles, abstracts and keywords in three journals: Communications in Information Literacy (the USA), Journal of Information Literacy (the UK) and Nordic Journal of Information Literacy in Higher Education (Norway) from 2012 to 2017.

The USA contributed the most to the literature, though the top information literacy themes were addressed by each of the 18 countries that contributed articles to the journals under study. Some themes emerged that suggest the existence of a common global discourse around shared information literacy concepts, including themes related to information literacy theory and practice.

The shared information literacy themes can be used to help solidify a global understanding of information literacy.

This study fills a gap in the content analysis of information literacy journals by identifying themes that demonstrate a shared global understanding of information literacy.