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Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
(JASIST) -- Table of Contents
Contributed by
Richard Hill
American Society for Information Science and Technology
Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
Fax: (301) 495-0810
Phone: (301) 495-0900
rhill@asis.org
VOLUME 52, NUMBER 2
[Note: Effective in January, JASIS changed to JASIST (I am abbreviating the titles).
When you go to the Wiley web site, JASIST is listed as a different journal from
JASIS. You will have to add JASIST to your list of "Hot Journals" as well as
JASIS. Below the Table of Contents are URLs for viewing contents of JASIS from
past issues. Below the contents of Bert Boyce's "In This Issue" has been cut
into the Table of Contents.]
CONTENTS
In this issue
Bert R. Boyce
Page 85
Research
- Authors as Citers over Time
Howard D. White
Page 87, Published online 30 November 2000
We begin with White's look at recitations (citations to a person more than
once in an author's career) in order to gather a profile of the author's interests,
a citation identity in the form of the set of authors cited. This is in contrast
to the set of all authors with whom a given author has been co?cited, the author's
citation image. The image is determined by others citing habits; the identity
by one's own. By forming an author's oeuvre on DIALOG and then ranking her cited
authors continuously, one forms the author's identity. By selecting all papers
that contain the author as a cited author and then ranking the cited authors
in this set, one produces the author's image.
Citation identities were created for eight information scientists using only
first or sole author papers. Documents with no references were eliminated from
consideration. The limited set of ISI journals and their time of coverage limits
accuracy as does the lack of credit for other than first author pieces. Homonymic
names and multiple names for the same person are common problems. The eight author
sets are Bradfordian and individualized with 3% to 8% self citation. Three citing
styles are apparent: scientific, with heavy recitation; bibliographic essay,
with little recitation; and literature review, with many authors and much recitation.
- The Moral Rights of Authors in the Age of Digital Information
J. Carlos Fernandez?Molina and Eduardo Peis
Page 109. Published online 29 November 2000
- Children's Use of the Yahooligans! Web Search Engine:
II. Cognitive and Physical Behaviors on Research Tasks
Dania Bilal
Page 118. Published online 6 October 2000
Bilal studies the work of seventeen middle school students who searched an
assigned non?factual question requiring discussion in Yahooligans! as part of
their Science class. The teacher provided ratings of the children's topic knowledge,
general science knowledge, and reading ability. A questionnaire administered
to the students indicated knowledge of the Internet, and a quiz prior knowledge
of Yahooligans! in particular. An exit interview collected data on the experience,
and Lotus ScreenCam was used to record the student system interactions. Thirteen
of the student's transcribed moves were collected, analyzed and coded. The proper
page was found by 69% but most went no further. Of the 69% who initially used
keyword search, only one child used natural language phrasing, the rest using
single terms or multiple word phrases. Of the 31% who initially browsed subject
categories displayed, 23% activated the right category, 8% choosing an inappropriate
one. In follow up search browsing exceeded keyword search as the method of choice
though all used both. Use of the back command was much lees frequent than on
a previous fact search study and the average number of web moves was less frequent.
Online help was not used and 69% exhibited a style of shifting back and forth
among links before deciding on what was a relevant page. Prior experience, domain
knowledge, topic knowledge and reading ability did not influence success.
- Usage Patterns of a Web?Based Library Catalog
Michael D. Cooper
Page 137. Published online 5 December 2000
Cooper reports the descriptive statistics gathered on the patterns of use of
a web?based version of the University of California's system wide library catalog
which was monitored and recorded for 479 days. A transaction log of time stamped
records of each user interaction was maintained. In real sessions searches are
conducted, in tourist sessions a connection is maintained for over a ten second
period and no searches are conducted, and in spider sessions an under ten second
connection is maintained. True search sessions include pre?search actions, searches,
displays, help, and error actions, and all remaining actions classed as other.
The log kept by the Melvyl http daemon were edited, and tabulated using SAS.
In the 2.5 million sessions, there were 3.6 million pre?search activities, 7.4
million searches, 13 million displays, 11 million other activities and 60,000
help requests. Spiders accounted for 27% of the sessions, tourists 11%, and the
remaining 62% were real sessions. While tourist and spider sessions are distributed
relatively uniformly, real sessions display date and time sensitivity, peaking
on Tuesday between two and three PM, and bottoming on Saturday. The average session
length is 10.3 minutes, with the length of real sessions gradually increasing
over time, and a standard deviation of nearly 18 minutes. Users spend about 25
seconds on pre?search, and 36 seconds on each of the other classed activities,
although each of these is preformed with different frequencies within a session.
The catalog and Medlars databases together account for 54% of use, the Magazine
database for another 10%: others all less than 10% each. The time spent viewing
the results is relatively constant over databases. Help actions are evenly distributed
as to time and when normalized by number of uses as to database.
- The Role of User Profiles for News Filtering
Michael Shepherd, John F. (Jack) Duffy, Carolyn Watters, and Nitin Gugle
Page 149. Published online 29 November 2000
Shepherd et al., after reviewing the research in the area of personalized
electronic news filters, attempt to determine if readers will prefer a blend
of personal and community filtering, and whether such filtering will exclude
articles of interest. Sixty nine subjects were asked to read a personalized edition
of a local paper based upon a personal interest survey, and then a normal community
edition. Items were selected if their cosine similarity with a community profile
plus their cosine similarity with a user profile exceeded a threshold. Weights
were assigned to each factor so that treatments of 100% user, 50/50, and 75/25
user and community in each direction, were tested.
Words were extracted from 219 news items, and after the application of a stop
list and stemming algorithm, 8508 stems with inverse document term frequency
weights were produced. The centroid of the regular edition was the community
profile. Each user marked a printed classification of terms in a tri?part scale
of 2 for interest, 1 some interest, and 0 no interest, and added five keywords
for terms of some or more interest. The stems of these terms with weights of
1 or 2 were then processed for user profiles averaging 181 words in length. The
threshold was set at .33 by trial. Participants were distributed randomly over
the four treatments and completed a Likert?type questionnaire on their reading
experience. Then the whole community edition was read and a new questionnaire
applied. Seventy eight percent of subjects prefer community only filtering. Comments
indicate that personal filtering leaves out articles users would like to see.
An analysis of variance shows no difference in user preference among the four
treatments so that level of blend does not change the overall preference result
for community filtering.
- Regions and Levels: Measuring and Mapping Users' Relevance Judgments
Amanda Spink and Howard Greisdorf
Page 161. Published online 1 December 2000
Looking at distributions of documents judged for relevance Spink and Greisdorf
examine the areas between clearly relevant and clearly non?relevant documents.
Twenty one users conducted 43 searches and made judgements on 1059 retrieved
items. A point on a 77 mm line indicating a range from low to high relevance
was marked for each item for an interval measure. Boxes for relevant partially
relevant, partially not relevant and not relevant were provided for a categorical
measure. Judgements were also characterized in a binary fashion on systematic,
topical, pertinence, utility and motivational levels, and additionally users
provided a brief written description of why they made the judgements they did.
The previously apparent bi?modal distribution of relevance judgements is confirmed.
There is some evidence that topicality is more useful for de?selecting than selecting
items, and it appears that including partially relevant and retrieved items with
retrieved relevant items can skew precision measures in a positive direction.
The median of the bimodal distribution of judgements is inversely correlated
with the number of items judged since the larger group of non?relevant will pull
it down. Since the median correlates with the distribution percentages of relevant
items, if normalized by the number of points in the interval scale, the median
becomes a possible measure of precision.
- Multidimensional Scaling of Video Surrogates
Abby A. Goodrum
Page 174. Published online 6 December 2000
To study the representativeness of both image based and text based surrogates
of video works Goodrum collected 12 ten second unedited clips containing images
of water and spliced them randomly into a single tape with five seconds of blue
screen between each pair. Five key frames per clip were selected as surrogates
and their images analyzed for grey scale properties, color, line length, edge
intensities, and angle declinations. Then each of the 78 possible unique pairs
of clips were added in random order. Judges picked from the clips and the videos
and were asked choose the frame with the highest agreement. Text description
came from catalog records acquired along with the clips. Participants numbering
150 were then asked to provide similarity judgements for all pairs of surrogates
and the similarity matrix used for multidimensional scaling creating maps for
the videos and various forms of surrogates to allow comparisons of similarity
to be made.
The largest number of congruent points occurs with keyframe choices, followed
by salient stills and keywords. Image based surrogates are closer to videos than
text based surrogates over all, but the value of text increases with specific
task constraints.
Book Review
- Digital Libraries, edited by William Y. Arms
Birger Hjorland
Page 183. Published online 6 December 2000
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