By tomorrow morning (or this evening on the west coast of the USA :-) you can
get access to the latest issue of Information Research -
Volume 13 No. 2 at http://InformationR.net/ir/
Here's the Editorial:
Introduction
As a truly open access journal on the 'Platinum' model (that is, free to access
without charging author fees), we have no subscription list to tell us what our
penetration of the market might be—indeed, we have no market, since the journal
is freely distributed. All we can rely upon, then, are the hits received by the
journals papers and the readers who register to receive the quarterly e-mail
message that alerts them to its publication.
At this moment, as I write, we have 2,718 registered readers, the latest of whom
signed up at 14:31 today (15th June, 2008), from the USA. I haven't checked the
geographical distribution for some time now, but other sources tell me that
those readers are spread throughout the world in a way that is unmatched by
print on paper publishing.
The hit counters tell us a little more, and from time to time I've drawn up
lists of the 'top 20' papers on the basis of those hits. Google Analytics has
helped, more recently, to give me a view of what is used and what is not—and
there is very little of the latter. It tells me, for example, that the top page
of the journal has received 35,701 unique page views in the past twelve months
from visitors from 156 countries, the top ten being: United States, United
Kingdom, India, Australia, Canada, Spain, Sweden, Malaysia, Finland and
Denmark. The map you can find by scrolling down to the bottom of the top page
of the journal gives a nice graphic representation of the geographical
distribution:
The top ten papers over the past year, on the basis of hits from these eager
information seekers around the world, are (in rank order):
* The nonsense of 'knowledge management'
* Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning
* An action research approach to curriculum development
* Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour
* Understanding knowledge management and information management: the need
for an empirical perspective
* The duality of knowledge
* Scanning the business external environment for information: evidence from
Greece
* Scanning the business environment for information: a grounded theory
approach
* Information as a tool for management decision making: a case study of
Singapore
* Information literacy in Europe: a literature review
In this issue
We have a very diverse set of papers in this issue, from the usual wide
geographic range. We have papers whose authors come from Brazil, Lithuania,
Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the UK as well as the usual "Watch this" column from
Terry Brooks in the USA.
The diversity of subjects represented is obvious from the title page: we have
papers on activity theory and information requirements for Web applications;
records use in organizations; citation counts and the UK's dreaded Research
Assessment Exercise; agricultural information systems in Turkey; information
needs and their associated information competencies in the Brazilian banking
system; and decision support systems in Lithuania. The journal's scope is
advertised as covering information research in all its variety, rather than
limiting it to one established discipline or field, and an issue like this
demonstrates the validity of that approach.
One of the benefits of diversity is that readers are drawn to work that,
otherwise, they would never come across in what they think of as the 'key'
journals they read. Indeed, messages from readers tell me that this, together
with the international scope of the journal, is one of the things that
stimulates them—and keeps them coming back.
Book reviews
Compared with the March issue, which had a substantial backlog of books to
present, we have relatively few in this issue. However, some 'regular readers'
tell me that the reviews are one of the most useful features of the journal, so
no doubt even a small number is better than none!
Thank you!
My thanks to all the usual suspects for copy-editing, link-checking,
translations, etc., as well as a continuing thanks to my Associate Editors for
their work in managing papers through the review and editing process.
Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD, Hon.PhD
Publisher/Editor in Chief
Information Research
InformationR.net
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Web site: http://InformationR.net/
___________________________________________________
|