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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 to map the online information seeking behaviour of the digi...
Citations
... A s a first and frequently read part of a research article (Nicholas et al., 2003;Jin et al., 2021), the abstract plays a pivotal role in knowledge construction and dissemination. For one thing, an abstract should explicitly reflect the full article by foregrounding the main points and packaging the core information . ...
... The increase could be attributed to the increasing importance of the informative trait of abstracts. The abstracts, as the first and frequently read part of a research article (Nicholas et al., 2003;Jin et al., 2021), bear the task of attracting readers. They should epitomize the full text and present the core information in a limited textual space that is often as short as hundreds of words. ...
Text difficulty refers to the ease with which a text can be read and understood, and the difficulty of research article abstracts has long been a hot topic. Previous studies have found that research article abstracts are difficult to read in general and that abstracts have gradually become more and more difficult. However, the widely used measurements, such as FRE and SMOG, have long been criticized in that they use only simplistic and surface-level indicators as proxies for complex cognitive processes of reading, and the sophisticated cognitive theory and Natural Language Processing/machine learning-based methods seem not that easy to use and interpret. A theoretically sound and methodologically neat measurement of text difficulty should be called for. Besides, the diachronic changes of abstract difficulty across disciplines have been under-researched. To address these issues, this study adopted a cognitive information-theoretic approach to investigate the diachronic change of text difficulty of research article abstracts across the areas of natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. 1890 abstracts were sampled over a period of 21 years, and two indexes, i.e. entropy from information theory and mean dependency distance from cognitive science, were employed for the calculation of cognitive encoding/decoding difficulty. The results show that in general, the cognitive encoding difficulty of abstracts has been increasing in the past two decades, while the cognitive decoding difficulty of abstracts has been decreasing. Regarding the disciplinary variations, the humanities show no significant diachronic change in encoding difficulty, and the social sciences show no significant diachronic change in decoding difficulty. These phenomena can be attributed to the traits of abstracts, the nature of academic knowledge, the cognitive mechanism in human languages and the features of different disciplines. This study has implications for the innovations in theories and methods of measurement of text difficulty, as well as an in-depth understanding of the disciplinary variations in academic writing and the essence of research article abstracts for research article writers, readers, the scientific community, and academic publishers.
... In addition to the title, the abstract is the first part of the article that readers know about, and with subscription-based journals, this is the only part that readers can access. As a result, according to Nicholas et al. (2003), the abstracts tend to be read frequently among sections of research papers. Therefore, it would be more than safe to say that the abstracts play an important role in capturing the attention of editors and readers. ...
The abstract is an integral part of a scientific paper. Despite the importance of abstracts, very little research has investigated the vocabulary size needed to read abstracts in scientific papers. This present study analyzed the lexical profile of 26 million words from approximately 100,000 scholarly abstracts across 10 major subjects of science. The results showed that the vocabulary size of the most frequent 7,000 and 15,000 word families in the British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) word list plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds, acronyms were needed to gain 95% and 98% coverage of the abstract corpus, respectively. However, data from cross-disciplinary analyses demonstrated significant differences in the lexical demands between abstracts of different fields of study. The 570 word families in the Academic Word List were found to make up for 13.77% of the words in the corpus. Implications for the use of abstracts in language classrooms were discussed.
... Widely recognized as "an abbreviated, accurate representation of a document" (Weil, 1970, p. 352), the abstract of a research article (RA) provides a synopsis of the main ideas, research design, and findings of the research that can help accelerate the readers' grasp of the essential information about the RA and facilitate their judgement of whether it is sufficiently relevant or interesting to warrant access to and reading of the full text (Gazni, 2011). As such, it is not surprising that abstracts tend to be read more frequently than other RA parts (Nicholas et al., 2003). ...
... The differences in disciplinary knowledge expertise and reading motives between researchers and non-expert readers will result in differences in their comprehension of and interest in research outputs (Coiro, 2021). As the part of research outputs read most frequently by online readers (Nicholas et al., 2003), abstracts play an especially important role in expanding the reach of RAs among online readers, given the vast information available online that competes for their attention and their usually short attention span for any particular information source. Our results highlight the importance to make RA abstracts more readable and accessible to non-expert readers in order to increase the impact of research outputs among the general public and facilitate knowledge dissemination in the digital era. ...
The value of scientific research is manifested in its impact in the scientific community as well as among the general public. Given the importance of abstracts in determining whether research articles (RAs) may be retrieved and read, recent research is paying attention to the effect of abstract readability on the scientific impact of RAs. However, to date little research has looked into the effect of abstract readability on the impact of RAs among the general public. To address this gap, this study reports on an investigation into the relationship between abstract readability and online attention received by RAs. Our dataset consisted of the abstracts of 550 RAs from 11 disciplines published in Science in 2012 and 2018. Thirty-nine lexical and syntactic complexity indices were employed to measure the readability of the abstracts, and the Altmetric attention scores of the RAs were used to measure the online attention they received. Results showed that abstract readability is significantly related to the online attention RAs receive, and that this relationship is significantly affected by discipline and publication time. Our findings have useful implications for making RA abstracts accessible to the general public.
... As a result, the immersive reading characterized with deep-attention is on the wane and gives way to scanning, characterized with hyper-attention [2]. Hyper-attention features rapid shifts of user's focus among different tasks, preference for multiple information streams, a high level of stimulation and low tolerance for monotony [3].In addition, mobile reading devices can record in large amounts user's actual reading behavior data, which indicates the features and preferences of user's reading behavior, thus providing a new possibility for the study of mobile reading behavior. With analysis of a large-scale eBook flipping records, this study Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. ...
The widespread use of portable devices is reshaping the reading behaviors, and thus a shift towards hyper-attention is taking place. How to use data on fine reading behavior to identify the current style of mobile reading emerges as a novel research topic. With a large-scale flipping data, this paper finds that mobile reading is a leisure-oriented and fragmented activity with obvious tidal characteristics and long tail effects, and that the book genres and user types have influence on reading behavior.
... Ces premières études, fondées sur une analyse des statistiques de téléchargements, confirment l'intérêt des chercheurs pour les revues numériques. Cet intérêt ne se démentira pas, quel que soit le terrain (Nicholas, 2003) (CBZ, 9, 2008 (CBZ, 43, 2014 (Nicholas, 2003) (Nicholas, 2004) (Nicholas, 2006), (Nicholas, 2008) (Nicholas, 2010b L'analyse de fichiers journaux (communément appelés Logs), une autre méthode quantitative, permet à un établissement d'enregistrer les traces d'activités laissées par l'usager. L'avantage de cette méthode consiste à consigner toutes les informations relatives à l'évènement de consultation, en toute indépendance de l'éditeur qui par ailleurs ne fournit qu'une partie des données (Nicholas, 1999 (CBZ, 9, 2008). ...
... Ces premières études, fondées sur une analyse des statistiques de téléchargements, confirment l'intérêt des chercheurs pour les revues numériques. Cet intérêt ne se démentira pas, quel que soit le terrain (Nicholas, 2003) (CBZ, 9, 2008 (CBZ, 43, 2014 (Nicholas, 2003) (Nicholas, 2004) (Nicholas, 2006), (Nicholas, 2008) (Nicholas, 2010b L'analyse de fichiers journaux (communément appelés Logs), une autre méthode quantitative, permet à un établissement d'enregistrer les traces d'activités laissées par l'usager. L'avantage de cette méthode consiste à consigner toutes les informations relatives à l'évènement de consultation, en toute indépendance de l'éditeur qui par ailleurs ne fournit qu'une partie des données (Nicholas, 1999 (CBZ, 9, 2008). ...
La revue scientifique, sous-filière du livre, a connu ces vingt dernières années des évolutions à la fois d’ordre technologique, social, économique et politique. Ces évolutions ont construit - dans le domaine des sciences dures et des sciences de la vie (STM) – chez les acteurs dominants des positionnements et des stratégies qui ont exacerbé le processus d’industrialisation de la sous-filière.
Pour analyser, caractériser et comprendre les formes d’industrialisation de la revue scientifique dans les domaines STM, nous avons revisité nos travaux de recherche en faisant appel au cadre théorique des industries culturelles (Miège, 1978) (Bouquillion, 2013). Au sein de ce cadre, nous avons souligné la cohérence de l’évolution de nos thématiques de recherches qui portèrent aussi bien sur les modalités de la production de la revue scientifique, que sur celles de la diffusion et de l’appropriation. Nous avons également mieux identifié les contributions de nos recherches au sein de chaque thématique. Notamment, nous avons pu formaliser à partir de nos contributions que la dimension sociale des usages des plateformes de revues scientifiques ne peut être envisagée de manière disjointe de l’offre de contenus par les acteurs dominants et de leurs stratégies. Ce faisant, à l’aide d’un ensemble de concepts, nous avons réexaminé et discuté nos travaux et leurs conclusions pour donner une lecture des mécanismes d’industrialisation qui ont prévalu dans l’univers papier et qui se prolongent dans l’univers numérique.
Nous avons ainsi montré que le glissement de la revue scientifique papier à la revue scientifique numérique est rythmée par deux transitions socio-techniques majeures qui ont ouvert la porte à de nouveaux intermédiaires, issus du Web. Les deux transitions ont été identifiées à l’aide d’une grille d’analyse permettant d’identifier les traits pertinents de l’industrialisation de la filière. Nous avons ainsi pu tenir compte des acteurs impliqués, du modèle socio-économique associé, de la notion de risque, de la nature des produits et de leur valeur associée, de leur internationalisation, des crises identifiées au sein de la sous-filière, mais aussi des paradigmes industriels dominants (convergence, collaboration et production).
Ces deux transitions prennent le contrepied des discours « révolutionnaires » autour de la publication scientifique qui ont prévalu à la fin des années 1990 et qui sont encore vivaces. Elles montrent que l’émancipation de la revue scientifique vis-à-vis du modèle éditorial papier vient seulement de s’amorcer. Chacune de ces transitions ouvre la voie à de nouvelles modalités de publication qui côtoient les modalités antérieures, sans les anéantir. L’évolution de la filière semble donc se diriger vers la coexistence de deux modèles socio-économiques, le modèle éditorial et le modèle du flot.
La première transition, développée dans le chapitre 1 du mémoire est qualifiée de « Numérisation ». Elle souligne les liens maintenus ou distendus entre le modèle éditorial de la revue papier et celui de la revue électronique. Elle représente une phase d’édition de documents numériques, encore ancrée dans les repères de l’autorité éditoriale de la revue papier. Durant cette phase, la stabilité des formes structurelle et matérielle de l’article a été préservée. La phase de numérisation a conduit à un accès et à une circulation sans précédent des articles de la revue scientifique. Cette phase exacerbe le processus d’autonomisation de l’article scientifique - amorcé dans les années 1980 autour des bases de données bibliographiques - avec le modèle de la plateforme, introduit par l’offre des grands groupes de l’édition scientifique.
La seconde phase, qualifiée de « Fragmentation », rend compte de la manière avec laquelle les pratiques d’accès à l’article scientifique – autonomisé – se sont développées à l’aide du moteur de recherche Google, proposant un accès simplifié et direct à la publication scientifique. Cette phase donne à voir des mouvements stratégiques entre éditeurs scientifiques et Google, devenu le nouvel intermédiaire de la sous-filière de la revue scientifique. La phase de fragmentation conduit les grands groupes de l’édition scientifique à prendre en compte un nouveau modèle économique, associé au « Libre Accès » destiné à consolider leur place dans la sous-filière.
La troisième partie de la note d’HdR s’appuie sur nos travaux les plus récents - dont certains sont en cours - autour des nouvelles formes de publication de l’article et de la revue scientifique. Cette dernière partie fait appel au paradigme industriel de la création pour mettre en lumière les mécanismes d’intensification de la production scientifique. Elle est traversée par la question du statut et de la nature en redéfinition de l’article et de l’information scientifiques, au sein d’une sous-filière qui émarge à deux modèles socio-économiques, le modèle éditorial et le modèle du flot. La question du périmètre des communautés ciblées, des nouveaux régimes d’autorité de l’article scientifique en regard des nouvelles formes collaboratives de production de la connaissance scientifique est également soulevée.
Les évolutions touchant à la publication scientifique ont été traitées par différentes disciplines (histoire des sciences, sociologie des sciences). Cette note de mémoire en vue de l’obtention de l’HdR propose une contribution des sciences de l’information et de la communication, par ses propres cadres d’analyse, à la compréhension des évolutions d’une sous-filière du livre, la revue scientifique.
Selon le principe de réflexivité, les constats portés par nos travaux empiriques, viennent interroger et alimenter le cadre théorique que nous avons emprunté pour l’exercice de ce mémoire d’HdR. Nos contributions se situent essentiellement autour des stratégies d’accès, de diffusion et de valorisation développées par les acteurs dominants de la sous-filière, les grands groupes de l’édition scientifique, fragilisés
... MESURE , the national portal that collects usage data (the equivalent of the British JUSP ) also relies on COUNTER statistics. As of yet, libraries have not performed deep logs analysis -used in other studies for instance (Nicholas et al. 2003;Jung et al. 2013) -which would have allowed us to conduct a more precise and reliable count of HTML and PDF downloads. As shown by previous studies (Davis and Price 2006;Bucknell 2012), the PDF HTML ratio varies substantially in the COUNTER statistics, depending on the publisher's platform. ...
... Library & Information Science Research, 24(2), 265-291. Nicholas, D., Huntington, P., & Watkinson, A. (2003). Digital journals, big deals and online searching behaviour: a pilot study. ...
... MESURE 9 , the national portal that collects usage data (the equivalent of the British JUSP 10 ) also relies on COUNTER statistics. As of yet, libraries have not performed deep logs analysis -used in other studies for instance (Nicholas et al. 2003;Jung et al. 2013)which would have allowed us to conduct a more precise and reliable count of HTML and PDF downloads. As shown by previous studies (Davis and Price 2006;Bucknell 2012), the PDF HTML ratio varies substantially in the COUNTER statistics, depending on the publisher's platform. ...
The study aims to investigate the relationships between consumption of e-journals distributed by Elsevier ScienceDirect platform, publication (articles) and impact (citations) in a sample of 13 French universities, from 2003 to 2009. It adopts a value perspective as it questions whether or not publication activity and impact are some kind of return led by consumption. A bibliometric approach was used to explore the relations between these three variables. The analysis developed indicators inspired by the mathematical h-Index technique. Results show that the relation between consumption, publication and citations depends on the discipline’s profile, the intensity of research and the size of each institution. Moreover, although relations have been observed between the three variables, it is not possible to determine which variable comes first to explain the phenomena. The study concludes by showing strong correlations, which nevertheless do not lead to clear causal relations. The article provide practical implication for academic library managers who want to show the added value of their electronic e-journals collections can replicate the study approach. Also for policy makers who want to take into account e-journals usage as an informative tool to predict the importance of publication activity.
... Computer transaction log studies by David Nicholas and colleagues have shown that usage patterns of search engines demonstrate shallow, 'promiscuous' and dynamic forms of behaviour indicating limited site penetration, with users visiting many sites without returning to them and without spending enough time on them to glean any meaningful information (see, e.g. Nicholas, Huntington, Jamali et al., 2006;Nicholas, Huntington and Watkinson, 2003;. ...
This paper contributes to an incremental base of research exploring usability issues related to information and communication experiences and needs of individuals with learning difficulties. A web portal designed specifically with the intended users in mind (i.e. individuals with learning difficulties) has been developed and piloted through a Rix Centre (UEL (University of East London) ) initiative in collaboration with a number of schools and adult service organisations. Seven individuals aged 14–16 years and identified with mild learning difficulties participated in the study. Assessment of findings includes evidence of participant self-directed interest and initiated use of web technologies, recognition and competent utilisation of basic navigation tools, and simple task completion within the web portal itself. Areas of noted interest warranting further exploration include participant behaviour in regard to limited length, depth, and frequency of individual web site browsing; participant difficulty with advanced navigation skills and eye–hand coordination connected to directed cursor movement and mouse manipulation; and web content readability levels. Additionally, further consideration exploring a user's degree of real information acquisition is necessary better to ensure meaningful and relevant web experiences for individuals with learning difficulties.
... In an extensive study Nicholas et al. (2003) analysed user statistics, including downloads of full articles in order to study the impact of so-called Big Deal agreements on user online searching behaviour. Recall that the term Big Deal agreement, coined by Kenneth Frazier (2001), refers to an agreement between a publisher and a library (or group of libraries) where access is provided to a large collection of online journals for an established price, often at the cost of existing print subscriptions plus an increment. ...
Relationships between the journal download immediacy index (DII) and some citation indicators are studied. The Chinese full-text
database CNKI is used for data collection. Results suggest that the DII can be considered as an independent indicator, but
that it also has predictive value for other indicators, such as a journal’s h-index. In case a journal cannot yet have an impact factor—because its citation history within the database is too short—the
DII can be used for a preliminary evaluation. The article provides results related to the CNKI database as a whole and additionally,
some detailed information about agricultural and forestry journals.
... However, loyalty or repeat behaviour generally is not a trait of the digital information consumer. Thus, for example, a study of the SurgeryDoor website (Nicholas et al., 2003a) found that over a relatively long period of 12 months, two-thirds of visitors never returned and the remaining 33% visited the site only two-to-five times. By the same token, in the 'Google Generation' project (CIBER, 2008), the data on the return visits to ScienceDirect, a scholarly journal database, show that over a five-month period 40% of users just visited once, 24% visited two-to-five times, 15% visited six-to-fifteen times and 21% visited over fifteen times. ...
This book constitutes a small step towards avoiding the disaster looming on our horizons in result of this behaviour. It does this in two ways. Firstly, by providing information professionals and information service providers with a framework for information needs analysis, which, based as it is on the insights gained from research projects involving hundreds of thousands of people, is firmly grounded in theory, but, nevertheless, highly practical. Thus, the framework, enabling as it does the ongoing assessment of people’s information needs, should help information mediators to provide better services and greater support to their customers. Secondly, by spreading professional thinking and practices to today’s new librarians, the digital consumers, which should ensure that they (and their families and communities) are better placed to meet their information needs on their own
... Deep Log Analysis (DLA) overcomes pitfalls of TLA. Nicholas [30, 31, 32] and his colleagues in CIBER conducted a series of studies on Emerald and Blackwell e-journals in order to evaluate the impact of the Big Deal on users' behaviour and generally to find out digital journal's users' information seeking behaviour. Based on the experience gained from investigating consumer health logs, they developed a more sophisticated methodology called Deep Log Analysis (DLA). ...
... The effect of log analysis limitations, particularly the problems with caching and proxy servers, on this asymmetric pattern of use is yet to be investigated. Log studies also indicate a relative preference for PDF versions of articles to HTML versions among users [36, 34, 30]. Questionnaire studies confirm this preference and highlight the fact that most users do not like reading on the screen [37, 38, 39]. ...
... We discuss a ‗new methodology' [9] that has emerged for studying journal usage and scholarly information seeking behaviour, popularly called the ―transaction log analysis‖. Other methodologies including ‗Deep Log Analysis Method' [30, 31, 32] (b) Chi-Square test was applied to test whether there is independence between the years and the publishers. The calculated value of Chi-Square was found to be 845, which is highly significant. ...
Most scientists today have access to full-text e-journals. In most cases, this facility is provided right at the desktop. In this paper, we present a case study of full-text e-journal patterns amongst the scientists and engineers at the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), a constituent of the Council of Scientific amd Industrial Research (CSIR). The facility at NAL is provided right to the desktop through the NAL-CSIR-NISCAIR e-conglomerate. Today, National Institute of Science Communication and Information Research (NISCAIR) provides e-access to more than 4042 world-class e-journals to all Samp;T personnel of the CSIR fraternity. This CSIR-NISCAIR initiative allows any scientist in any CSIR Laboratory to access this electronic information to keep abreast of the latest technologial developments in his area of specilization.
