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Describes a methodological study to evaluate the quality of care for an elderly population in the treatment of hypertension from a fairly simple analysis of medical records in primary care, with or without the use of additional information from patients, and shows how this type of data can be used to point out shortcomings in primary care. The data derive from a community survey of elderly people in one area of Jerusalem and relied on personal interviews, blood pressure measurements and an analysis of medical records over a period of four years. The measures used are: the percentage of persons without blood pressure (BP) measurement in a given year; the maximum “gap” between consecutive BP measurements in a given year; the rate of BP measurement per clinic visit; the percentage of hypertensives treated; and the percentage of hypertensives under control. The prevalence rates for hypertension in this elderly population vary between 40 per cent and 59 per cent according to the definition used. Using a simple and straightforward analysis of sick‐fund records several shortcomings in the surveillance and control of hypertension were detected. Calculation of the percentage of untreated hypertensives required a separate information source ‐ the screening. A BP survey is an important complement to an analysis of records. An ongoing evaluation of the quality of care of hypertensives in an elderly population should be based on screening, interviews with patients and analysis of the physician′s records. These provide an overall picture of the care in each medical practice enabling the physician to improve the quality of care provided to his or her patients.

This paper aims to explore research methods used in Library and Information Science (LIS) during the past four decades. The goal is to compile a annotated bibliography of seminal works of the discipline used in different countries and social contexts.

When comparing areas and types of research, different publication patterns are taken into account. As we can see, data indicators and types of studies carried out on scientific activity contribute very little when evaluating the real response potential to identified problems. Therefore, among other things, LIS needs new methodological developments, which should combine qualitative and quantitative approaches and allow a better understanding of the nature and characteristics of science in different countries.

The conclusion is that LIS emerges strictly linked to descriptive methodologies, channeled to meet the challenges of professional practice through empirical strategies of a professional nature, which manifests itself the preponderance of a professional paradigm that turns out to be an indicator of poor scientific discipline development.

This, undoubtedly, reflects the reality of Anglo-Saxon countries, reproduced in most of the recognized journals of the field; this issue plus the chosen instruments for data collection certainly slant the results.

The development of taxonomies in the discipline cannot be left aside from the accepted by the rest of the scientific community, at least if LIS desires to be integrated and recognized as a scientific discipline.

The focus of the citation analysis reported is the information exchange between the Danish library‐information profession and LIS communities in other countries. Consideration is given to the diffusion of ideas and innovations from foreign countries into the Danish LIS world. Citation evidence is also used to shed light on structural characteristics of the LIS periodical literature and other communication media and some of the communication patterns characterising the LIS field in Denmark. The raw material for the citation analysis was gathered by the manual citation counting method and not drawn from computerised citation databases. The fact that a surprisingly large proportion of the references cited by Danish LIS authors belong to the so‐called ‘hidden’ category — denoting cited references embedded in the text of journal papers — is noted as a key finding. The observation on the considerable number of ‘hidden’ citations is developed further. Journals and books (monographs) are the publication formats most frequently relied on by LIS authors. It was found that the majority of the citations are to relatively recent materials. Next to Danish material, publications in English and produced in the United States and in Great Britain are those most heavily relied on by the Danish LIS community. Ranking of journals by number of citations shows that a very small number of journals accounts for the majority of journal citations. On the whole, the works cited point to a definite interest in public libraries and issues relating to the planning, structure and legislation of public libraries. Works on research and academic libraries and on theoretical aspects of LIS did not attract the same amount of citations.

This paper sets out to report on a study of 12 postgraduate research students' development of information search expertise. It focuses on students' perceived importance and growth of knowledge of different databases as they progress through their studies.

Taking an in‐depth longitudinal approach, this study makes use of surveys, direct observations of students' searching of various databases, students' verbalization of their thoughts while searching databases and interviews during a one‐year period. The paper focuses on analyzing the data from surveying and interviewing the students with regard to their use of databases.

It was found that many students were initially unfamiliar with many of the databases important to them and that the familiarity developed during the year contributed importantly to their development of information search expertise. This suggests that much work has to be done to inform and instruct students about these “treasures”.

This study adopted an in‐depth longitudinal approach to study 12 students. Although it reveals various interesting observations and findings, it lacks the power of generalization due to its small sample size. Based on the results of this study, it would be meaningful to carry out further studies with a bigger sample to see whether the findings identified in this study will still hold true.

Based on the findings, this paper further identifies features that may increase the usefulness of a journal database and makes suggestions on ways to improve library support for the effective use of databases.

The purpose of this paper is to look at measures of e‐mail use and e‐mail management among academic faculty in relation to research productivity. The aim is to report only on e‐mail use and management.

For this quantitative study, productivity data were gathered from information management systems of Bar‐Ilan University in Israel and a survey questionnaire was distributed in order to measure e‐mail use. The scholarly community of Bar‐Ilan University was surveyed via a web‐form – of the 781 survey copies disseminated, 412 (52.8 per cent of the total) were received and the final usable number was 390 (49.9 per cent of the total).

With younger biological and/or professional age, there are correspondingly higher levels of e‐mail usage. It is clear that the younger a user is, the higher the perceived skill level and quantitative measures of e‐mail use, as well as a higher perception of one's capacity to use e‐mail. It would also seem that with older professional age, there is less perceived benefit to using e‐mail. With increased levels of perception as to the benefit of e‐mail to productivity, there is increased use of e‐mail.

This paper provides a depth of study (in its range of disciplines covered, in a single location, with a broad population) with a range of e‐mail measures not previously seen in this decade. While Israel is small in size, it accounts for 1 per cent of global scientific journal articles, emanating mainly from the universities and its achievements are such that the global community can indeed learn from the behaviour patterns of Israel's scholars, represented by the findings at one of the largest research universities.

Previous research has shown that there are major differences in the search methods used in different disciplines, and that the use of electronic journals and databases likewise varies according to domain. Previous studies have not, however, explored whether, or how, this variation is possibly related to factors such as domain size, the degree of scatter in a domain or domain‐specific relevance criteria. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a domain analytic approach for explaining the use and non‐use of e‐journals and databases. We identify and define factors to account for disciplinary differences in e‐journal use, outline hypotheses to be tested more rigorously in future research, and test them initially on a limited data set. The empirical data was gathered as a part of a wider qualitative study exploring scholars’ use of networked resources in four different disciplines: nursing science, literature/cultural studies, history and ecological environmental science. The findings suggest that e‐journals and databases are likely to be used most heavily in fields in which directed searching is the dominant search method and topical relevance the primary relevance type, and less in fields in which browsing and chaining are the dominant search methods and paradigmatic relevance the primary relevance type. The findings also support the Bates hypothesis that domain size has an important impact on the search methods used.