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This study aims to apply some concepts of actuarial statistics to the authorship of Iranian ISI papers in the field of chemistry based on Price’s model. The study determines scientific birth rate, death rate, infant mortality rate, natural increase rate and life expectancy.

Price maintained that authors in each given period in any field fall into four categories including newcomers, transients, continuants and terminators. He suggested that actuarial statistics could be applied to authorship to calculate death rate and birth rate in scientific fields. A total 25,573 papers written by 59,661 Iranian chemistry authors between 1973 and 2012 were downloaded from Web of Science (WoS) and were subjected to statistical analysis.

The average birth rate was 66.7 per cent, the average death rate was 19.4 per cent, infant mortality rate was 51.2 per cent, average natural increase was 47.3 per cent, the average life expectancy was 1.98 years and the longest scientific age was 22 years. The results show that although a large number of people start their scientific activity, the number of those who terminate their activity in the same year as they start (infant mortality rate) is also large and little continuity exists in the publishing activities of Iranian chemists.

The findings have implications for the planning of human resources in science. They could help maintain a stable scientific labor force and decide for instance whether a larger number of scientists should be trained and hired, or the barriers should be removed so the existing scientists can work for more years. The limitation is that the study is restricted to ISI articles, although they are not the only kind of scientific output.

This is the first study of its kind on Iranian scientific output. It shows that the overall labor force in the field of chemistry in Iran was not satisfactory, as the majority of authors in each period are transients. There is a need for better planning for the labor force.

The purpose of this study is to develop a domain independent, cost-effective, time-saving and semi-automated ontology generation framework that could extract taxonomic concepts from unstructured text corpus. In the human disease domain, ontologies are found to be extremely useful for managing the diversity of technical expressions in favour of information retrieval objectives. The boundaries of these domains are expanding so fast that it is essential to continuously develop new ontologies or upgrade available ones.

This paper proposes a semi-automated approach that extracts entities/relations via text mining of scientific publications. Text mining-based ontology (TmbOnt)-named code is generated to assist a user in capturing, processing and establishing ontology elements. This code takes a pile of unstructured text files as input and projects them into high-valued entities or relations as output. As a semi-automated approach, a user supervises the process, filters meaningful predecessor/successor phrases and finalizes the demanded ontology-taxonomy. To verify the practical capabilities of the scheme, a case study was performed to drive glaucoma ontology-taxonomy. For this purpose, text files containing 10,000 records were collected from PubMed.

The proposed approach processed over 3.8 million tokenized terms of those records and yielded the resultant glaucoma ontology-taxonomy. Compared with two famous disease ontologies, TmbOnt-driven taxonomy demonstrated a 60%–100% coverage ratio against famous medical thesauruses and ontology taxonomies, such as Human Disease Ontology, Medical Subject Headings and National Cancer Institute Thesaurus, with an average of 70% additional terms recommended for ontology development.

According to the literature, the proposed scheme demonstrated novel capability in expanding the ontology-taxonomy structure with a semi-automated text mining approach, aiming for future fully-automated approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and design the axial coding pattern of the factors affecting the unplanned use behavior of users of the academic libraries and information centers.

The study as an applied research with a qualitative approach employed the grounded theory. The data collection tool was a deep and semi-structured interview. The interviews data were analyzed and coded during three stages of open, axial and selective coding using the MAXQDA 10 qualitative analysis software. The research population consisted of faculty members and experts in three areas of library and information science, management and psychology. Using the combined targeted sampling method (targeted and then the snowball), 12 subjects were selected as the sample size.

According to the research findings, the factors affecting the unplanned behavior of users in the use of academic libraries resources and services were identified as factors related to technology, environmental factors, information resources, information services, human resources, individual features, time position factor, cultural factors and social factors. Accordingly, the axial coding pattern of this type of behaviors was designed.

The research limitations include the lack of theoretical basis related to the unplanned behavior issue in the field of library and information science and the lack of full familiarity of most of the experts in the field of library and information science with this topic. These factors lead to the necessity of explaining the subject under discussion.

The unplanned behavior of clients can be utilized to persuade users to use the information resources and library services so that the costs spent on their preparation and collection will be justifiable. The current research addressed this aspect of the unplanned information-seeking behavior.

This study aimed to present a model for open-data management for developing innovative information flow in Iranian knowledge-based companies (businesses).

The method was mixed (qualitative-quantitative) and data collection tools were interview and questionnaire. The qualitative part was done to identify the influential components in open data management (ecosystem) using the grounded theory method. A questionnaire was developed based on the results of the qualitative section and the theoretical foundations, and the quantitative section was conducted by analytical survey method and the model was extracted using factor analysis and the integration of the qualitative section.

Seven categories of entrepreneurial incentives, sustainable value, innovative features, challenges and barriers, actors, business model and requirements are the main categories that should be considered in open data management (ecosystem) with all categories of research have a significant relationship with open data management.

The study focused on open data management from an innovation paradigm perspective and its role in developing innovative information flow. The study aimed to identify the key components of the open data ecosystem, open-data value creation, and the need to use the “open data” approach to develop data-driven and knowledge-based businesses in Iran–an emerging approach largely ignored.

The present paper aims to compare the awareness and ability of medical students in using the electronic resources of the Integrated Digital Library (IDL) portal of Iran.

The current research involves a comparative applied survey. The survey was conducted through a structured questionnaire circulated among 300 medical students sampled from three major Iranian universities. A stratified random sampling method was used. Descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, average and so on) have been used to analyze the data using the Microsoft Excel software.

The awareness and utilization level of students in the three universities were lower than the average and those who are not aware of the existence of the IDL portal used general search engines to meet their information needs. The respondents admitted that their lack of awareness about the IDL was their most significant problem. Among the investigated universities, students of Tehran University of Medical Science (TUMS) used the End Note, Elsevier, Thomson, Scopus and Proquest databases most. All the students expressed the effect of the IDL on the academic activities as much as 64 percent in Iran University of Medical Science (IUMS), 72 percent in Tehran University of Medical Science (TUMS) and 66 percent in Shahid Beheshti Medical University (SBMU). The mean scores for utilization of searching strategies were 2.43, 2.89 and 2.87, respectively, for IUMS, TUMS and SBMU.

A few attempts have been made to investigate the awareness, use and research ability of students in universities but this is the first of its kind to compare universities within the Integrated Digital Library. The paper will be useful for those in decision‐making roles and provides insight for the people responsible for IT application. It is hoped that this paper will assist administrators of the university libraries in developing a more complete understanding of students' electronic information needs and barriers.

This paper aims to identify the impressive factors on choosing the type of the libraries and information centers and determining their significance and prioritizing them and finally determining the priority of each type according to the identified factors to implement geographic information system (GIS) in the library researches.

A combination of documentary, Delphi and analytic methods was used in the current study. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the topic in mind, different dimensions of the issue were firstly identified through reviewing the research literature. Then, the Delphi panel was formed and the factors and indices for choosing and prioritizing the libraries were extracted and finally the analytic-hierarchy and Topsis method was used for analyzing and ranking the data which were collected through a questionnaire. In this way, the instrument was devised by the researcher and the population under the study consisted of the professors in two fields of LIS and the GIS. The criteria include the “access to the library”, “being active”, “the number of sources”, “the size and space of the place”, “the library equipment”, “compatibility” each one include eight, seven, five, five, two and five factors, respectively.

In the Delphi study, six factors including 32 indices were determined for prioritizing the libraries to implement the GIS in the library researches. The analytic-hierarchy method was applied to compare the factors correspondingly in terms of the degree of their significance. In this way, “access to the library sources”, “being active”, “the number of sources”, “the size and space of the place”, “the library equipment” and “compatibility” were identified as the factors on choosing the library type with the values of 0.39, 0.24, 0.16, 0.08, 0.07 and 0.06, respectively. Then, several types of the libraries were ranked and the findings show that academic libraries are prioritized as the first one for conducting the GIS projects.

Employing the factors resulted from the conducted researches is recommended for choosing the libraries to implement the GIS, so that the researches in this interdisciplinary field become more organized. To extend the current study, the extracted factors and indices can be sent to the professors of the LIS from the other countries to elicit their insights and thereby, designing a standard international checklist for choosing the libraries and information centers in the GIS projects.

The present paper's purpose is to review the literature related to quality assessment and performance evaluation in academic libraries, whether empirical or theoretical, and to extract key issues. It aims to explore which criteria exert a significant relationship with the academic libraries' performance quality; identify a set of criteria that appears to be useful for assessing the quality of academic libraries ITBS; and use these criteria to develop an instrument or evaluation checklist for evaluating the quality of academic libraries ITBS.

Related keywords such as “academic libraries research”, “academic libraries evaluation”, “academic libraries assessment” were searched on the web as well as some leading databases. In addition, available library resources as well as online book databases were consulted. Key issues were identified, categorized and discussed to develop the evaluation checklist suggested by the paper.

A number of indicators have been developed and tested in quality assessment studies debated in the paper. The literature reveals that evaluating ITBS in academic libraries should be considered to a greater extent and thus, more evaluation studies on the basis of validated tools are needed.

The review does not claim to be comprehensive.

The paper can serve as a research roadmap concerning quality assessment of ITBS in academic libraries for researchers, managers, academic authorities and users.