Vol. 10 No. 2, January, 2005
| Vol. 10 No. 2, January, 2005 | ||||
I'm very happy to welcome Dr. Mark Hepworth to the Editorial Board. Mark will be Associate Editor for 'the Rest of the World', that is, those countries outside Europe, and North and South America, so his remit takes in Australasia, the Far East, Africa, the Middle East and any authors from the Arctic and Antarctic who may be thinking of submitting papers to the journal. Mark is a Lecturer at the Department of Information Science, Loughborough University, and I would also like to thank Professor John Feather, Head of Department, for supporting Mark's appointment to this role.
This issue is devoted entirely to the second set of papers delivered at the fifth Information Seeking in Context conference held in Dublin in September. Again, all of the papers (except the Keynote Paper, which is an invited paper) have been through a double-blind review process for acceptance for the conference, and those accepted have also been subject to thorough review by the Editor.
The issue is led off by the Keynote Paper by Carol Kuhlthau on the connection between information behaviour research and information retrieval research - a theme of the Conference. As usual, Carol makes a strong case. The remaining papers are a little more difficult to group than in the previous issue. The first four are, broadly speaking, 'theoretical' in character: Foster's, A non-linear model of information seeking behaviour; McKechnie et al.'s How human information behaviour researchers use each other's work: a basic citation analysis study; Olsson's Meaning and authority: the social construction of an 'author' among information behaviour researchers, and Hedemark, Hedman and Sundin's Speaking of users: on user discourses in the field of public libraries. Certainly a disparate collection but they all have, to my mind, a concern for theory in one way or another.
The next six all deal with the information behaviour of particular groups of people: Fisher et al.'s Something old, something new: preliminary findings from an exploratory study about people's information habits and information grounds; Courtright's, Health information-seeking among Latino newcomers: an exploratory study; Meyer's The nature of information and its effective use in rural development; Mackenzie's, Managers look to the social network to seek information.; Zhang et al.'s, Domain knowledge, search behaviour, and search effectiveness of engineering and science students: an exploratory study; and Eskola's, Information literacy of medical students studying in the problem-based and traditional curriculum.
Finally, we have three papers that have nothing in common, but don't fit anywhere else - they deal with information overload (Allen), the concept of relevance (Anderson) and Website quality (McInerney and Bird).
A small milestone has been passed with this issue - with the addition of "Zhang" we now have an author for every letter of the alphabet 
There are two changes to the format of the journal with this issue, one of which may not be noticed: it is the removal of institutional affiliation from the list of contents. I decided that this was an unnecessary duplication. The other change is more substantial: from this issue, we shall be using 'structured' abstracts. Information on this is provided on the Instructions to Authors page, where you will find a link to a couple of papers by Professor James Hartley of Keele University, who has carried out a good deal of research on this point. The aim is to give the reader a better overview of what the paper is about than is generally true of the 'narrative' abstract: for example, authors are required to be specific about the methods employed and to indicate the general nature of the results. The move has been welcomed by a number of the authors in this issue: this is to be expected, since the new form of abstract, when used by the various database services, will present the author's ideas more effectively.
My thanks, again, to Rae Ann Hughes, volunteer proof reader, for an excellent job, and to Jose Vicente Rodriquez and Pedro Diaz for coping with more translation into Spanish than an issue usually warrants, as well as to all those who have acted as referees for this and other issues.
How to cite this editorial:
Wilson, T.D. (2004) "Editorial." Information Research, 10(2), editorial E102 [Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/10-2/editor102.html]
© the author, 2005. Last updated: 8 December, 2004 |
|