With apologies for duplicate messages members of various lists may
receive...
The April issue of Information Research: an international electronic journal
is newly published. Find it at:

http://InformationR.net/

If you are a regular reader, remember to clear your cache by hitting the
re-load button :-)

Here is the Editorial:

From January's bumper issue, we come back to normality and an issue of more
'normal' proportions. One of the advantages of the electronic journal is
that you don't need to stockpile papers because of the number of pages in an
issue - just one of the many advantages.

One of the other advantages, as some may have noticed from the January
contents pages, is that you can update. So, Ian Johnston's letter and
Charles Oppenheim's response did not have to wait three months before they
could be published. Perhaps that will prompt some of our readers to send
letters to the Editor - it seems that scholarly work in our field seldom
moves people to comment. Even print journals that have been established for
much longer publish few letters, presumably because they don't get many to
publish.

I mentioned in the January Editorial that I was collecting data from the
counters. Perhaps I should have kept quiet, since almost immediately, both
of the counter services I used changed either their policies or their
practice. One decided to drop its free counter service (because of the
reduction in on-line advertising spend) and this involved me in finding
another service and changing all the counters. The other has re-organized
its service so that one of the reports I was using to collect the data so
longer appears. So, if anyone is thinking of starting a journal, remember
that there are maintenance issues.

Although this issue is smaller in the number of words, it is, once again,
highly international in character. We have three refereed papers from South
Africa, the USA and Finland/UK and two working papers, from Lithuania and
Estonia.

The first paper, by Daisy Jacobs, was accidentally omitted from the January
issue, partly because of problems we had in reading files sent by e-mail.
Apologies for that, Daisy, but at least it is published, if a little later
than planned. Daisy has looked at the publication patterns of South African
scientists in the period 1992-1996. The study reveals significant
differences between different areas of science, with relatively high
productivity of published outputs in the life sciences, compared with
chemistry and physics. This difference is not related to differences in
levels of funding in the different fields.

In the second paper, Dawson and Chatman provide an overview of reference
group theory and its application to library/information research, concluding
that research into reference groups (i.e., the groups of 'significant
others' from whom we take our standards and values) can play a significant
part in LIS research, particularly in areas such as information-seeking
behaviour and information use.

The third refereed paper is by Huotari and Wilson, reviewing their work on
the use of the Critical Success Factors concept in information-seeking
research. The results demonstrate that the idea has wide applicability and
can cast valuable light on organizational (as distinct from personal)
information needs.

The two Working Papers cover two very diverse areas: on-line periodicals on
the Web in Lithuania, and the role of courses on book history and publishing
in LIS education in Estonia. Sarlauskiene's paper shows that the Web is
making an impact on publishing even in a small, linguistically-distinct
country like Lithuania. Clearly, Web-based publishing offers an economic
advantage over print, when the target audience is small. Möldre's paper
stands back from the current enthusiasm for technology and looks at the role
that courses on book history have played in the education of librarians in
Estonia. Möldre makes the point that these courses played a significant role
in the Soviet era, when they served to help preserve the national culture,
when all the communication media of the Soviet state were devoted to burying
that culture.

We also have some reviews.

In sum, a varied and interesting issue. It was intended that this issue
should be devoted to copyright in the digital age, but the papers have been
slow to arrive and I hope that issue will be published in July.



Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD
Publisher/Editor-in-Chief
Information Research: an international electronic journal
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S10 2TN
Tel: +44-114-222-2642
Fax: +44-114-278-0300
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Home-page: http://InformationR.net/