Analyses the “dumbing down” syndrome highlighting main quotes from BBC online, Kirkus Reviews and an interview between Roan Hoag of Amazon.xom and Pete Hamill whose book “News is a Verb” which attempts to unmask US journalism’s dumbing down. Looks at various tabloid‐style choices of...

Anonymous peer review is an important part of the process by which academic information is evaluated. Some of the problems associated with the process are discussed below. Although the history of peer review is well documented, there appears to be no record of when it became anonymous. Since...

Excited by what has now become possible, paricipants in the creation of the new digital library often overlook fundamental (often implicit) aspects of the paper paradigm that still need to be maintained in the digital universe. In the realm of scholarly and sxientific communication, ths issues...

This paper introduces a new bibliometric tool, the journal diffusion factor. An argument is presented that the bibliometric indicators commonly used to measure the quality of research (journal impact factor, immediacy index and cited half‐life) offer little insight into the transdisciplinary...

The fundamental asymmetries of the journal system are reviewed and an examination is made of the differences between author and reader behaviour at both a quantitative and a qualitative level. Author productivity and so‐called “salami‐style” publishing practices are examined. An estimate...

Newsworthy stories have several common criteria that help news‐gatherers define them. One of these is that the story should be interesting for or of interest to the audience. This means that there are elements of a newsworthy story that are common to gossip, rumours, urban legends and hoaxes...

The study found a significant correlation between the number of external links and the journal impact factor for LIS journals. Journals with higher journal impact factor scores tend to attract more links to their Web sites. The study also investigated issues pertaining to data collection methods...

Evaluates, through deep log analysis, the impact of “Big Deal” agreements on the online searching behaviour of users of the Emerald digital library Web site, which provides access to more than 150 journals in the fields of business and information science. The purpose of the evaluation was...