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Sewing is the most widely used and preferred method for manufacturing clothing products for extreme weather conditions and other industrial insulation systems. Multiple layers of functional fabrics in combination with insulation materials are used to thermally insulate precious body heat from its surrounding cold environment. The sewing process fixes the insulation material between the fabric layers. During conventional sewing, the insulation material is compressed along the stitch line. With the compression of the insulation material, entrapped air is forced to leave the insulation material internal structure, and heat loss occurs along the entire length of the stitch line. It results in the deterioration of thermal properties of the end product along the stitch line.

The amount of air, which is a decisive factor for thermal properties of any insulation system, was investigated at the level of a unit stitch length of a lockstitch. Conventional microscopy methods are not suitable to study the compression along the stitch line. With the help of X-ray tomography, the three-dimensional data of a stitch was taken and studied to measure the volume of air. The samples were prepared with conventional lockstitch sewing and a newly developed innovative sewing method “Spacer Stitching.” The results are compared with each other in terms of the amount of air present in a unit stitch length.

Calculations based on X-ray tomography images of lockstitch and spacer stitch revealed that, in the case of lockstitch, a unit stitch has a 15% of its volume made up of material and 85% of its volume by air. In comparison, the spacer stitch with the same sewing and fabric parameters has a material volume of 4.6 % and an air volume of 95.4% in a single stitch.

The research can positively improve the thermal properties of sewn material made for insulating purposes of conventional clothing as well as of industrial insulations.

There is no literature available which investigates and calculates the amount of air and material present along with a stitch line.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel approach for mining scientific trends using topics from Call for Papers (CFP). The work contributes a valuable input for researchers, academics, funding institutes and research administration departments by sharing the trends to set directions of research path.

The authors procure an innovative CFP data set to analyse scientific evolution and prestige of conferences that set scientific trends using scientific publications indexed in DBLP. Using the Field of Research code 804 from Australian Research Council, the authors identify 146 conferences (from 2006 to 2015) into different thematic areas by matching the terms extracted from publication titles with the Association for Computing Machinery Computing Classification System. Furthermore, the authors enrich the vocabulary of terms from the WordNet dictionary and Growbag data set. To measure the significance of terms, the authors adopt the following weighting schemas: probabilistic, gram, relative, accumulative and hierarchal.

The results indicate the rise of “big data analytics” from CFP topics in the last few years. Whereas the topics related to “privacy and security” show an exponential increase, the topics related to “semantic web” show a downfall in recent years. While analysing publication output in DBLP that matches CFP indexed in ERA Core A* to C rank conference, the authors identified that A* and A tier conferences not merely set publication trends, since B or C tier conferences target similar CFP.

Overall, the analyses presented in this research are prolific for the scientific community and research administrators to study research trends and better data management of digital libraries pertaining to the scientific literature.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the scientific collaboration of institutions and its impact on institutional research performance in terms of productivity and quality. The researchers examined the local and international collaborations that have a great impact on institutional performance.

Collaboration dependence measure was used to investigate the impact of an institution on external information. Based on this information, the authors used “index of gain in impact through collaboration” to find the impact of collaborated publications in institutional research performance. Bibliographic data between 1996 and 2010 retrieved from Scopus were used to conduct current study. The authors carried out the case study of top institutes of Pakistan in terms of publication count to elaborate the difference between high performing institutions and those who gain disproportionally in terms of perceived quality of their output because of local or international collaboration.

The results showed that the collaboration of developing countries institutes on international level had a great impact on institutional performance and they gain more benefit than local collaboration. Altogether, the scientific collaboration has a positive impact on institutional performance as measured by the cumulative source normalized impact per paper of their publications. The findings could also help researchers to find out appropriate collaboration partners.

This study has revealed some salient characteristics of collaboration in academic research. It becomes apparent that collaboration intensity is not uniform, but in general, the average quality of scientific production is the variable that most often correlates positively with the collaboration intensity of universities.

The latest developments in Data Science and in advanced Scientometrics set a very challenging context for the analysis and the understanding of human behavior toward the design of value adding library services and sophisticated information systems. The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative research that integrates the creation and the consumption of scientific knowledge across regions. From a human behavior point of view, this is significant since it provides an advanced decision-making layer for bringing together researchers from all over the world.

More specific in this paper, the authors analyze the production and consumption of scientific knowledge across the regions in an important field of sustainable and renewable energy – using publications and citations data indexed in Scopus. As a case study, the authors select the USA a major producer of scientific publications in the field. At first, the authors identify the topics produced by the USA. Further topics produced by the scientific communities outside the USA that consume the knowledge produced by the USA are identified. The authors generate topics by employing the proposed topic model with distance matrix – an extension of classic latent Dirichlet allocation model.

The results show that research topics produced by the USA are consumed in different international contexts, interestingly. Consuming the knowledge produced by the USA, Chinese scientific community heavily produces topics related to biomass – to produce renewable energy. In contrast, Japanese scientific community produces topics related to fuel cell – used for the production of hybrid and electronic vehicles. Whereas the Taiwanese scientific community shows remarkable competency in solar cells. Among the European nations, while the German scientific community produces topics related to photovoltaic, the French scientific community covers topics related to Energy Storage and Green Chemistry. The authors believe that such analyses may be helpful in establishing more effective multi-national research collaborations by understating the actual consumption of produced knowledge.

Overall, the study provides a new dimension to comprehensively understand production and consumption of knowledge using scientific literature. From a human behavior analysis view in the context of sophisticated library systems, this is a significant contribution.

The use of advanced Data Mining and computing methods for deriving critical insights for the use of scientific knowledge is a bold action toward the global knowledge society vision.

This study aims to provide guidelines for exploring the research landscape in developing countries by gauging the prospects of growth, research impact and innovation. This study interrogates, analyses and visualizes the impact, nuances and evolution of stated research themes. For this purpose, this study presents an in-depth analysis of publications and citations indexed in Pakistani journals as a case study.

A bibliometric analysis of 46,034 publications published in Pakistan-based journals uncovers the research landscape of Scopus-indexed scientific literature – using various statistical and network-based approaches. Using VOSviewer and SPSS tools, the publication data has been analysed in relation to the open access status of papers, the number of authors, discipline, research theme and international co-authorship.

This study’s analyses reveal that while Pakistani journals are attracting international contributions from several countries, including India, Malaysia and Indonesia, no journal falls into the Scopus-defined top Quartile, i.e. the Q1 category. The analyses also highlight that only half (47%) of the publications received citations, whereas the other half remained uncited. Furthermore, open access publications received significantly higher citations than subscribed/traditional publications (print/online subject to toll access).

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first impact study of its kind that critically analyses the research landscape of Pakistani journals, especially in the context of the efforts of the higher education commission of Pakistan to promote research culture in the country. This study also provides analytical insights and policy guidelines for improving the quality of research published in Pakistani journals. This study can be replicated for other developing nations to provide guidelines and sustainable pathways for scientific growth in pursuit of uplifting nations by allocating resources for developing science and technology.

Despite the increasing utilization of webpages for the purposes of information seeking, customers’ concerns have become a crucial impediment for online shopping. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the effectiveness of web assurance seals services (WASS) and customers’ concerns on customer’s willingness to book hotels through perceived website trust and perceived value.

A questionnaire was administrated to measure the study variables. Using partial least squares–structural equation modeling approach to analyze the data collected from 860 users of online hotel websites.

The results indicate that WASS influence positively on perceived website trust and negatively on consumers’ concerns. As well as, perceived value and trust play a mediating role in the link between WASS and consumers’ concerns and their intentions. Finally, perceived website trust and perceived value have greater effect on intention to book hotel for low-habit consumers.

This study ignored the cross-culture issue as it concentrates on the customers from developing countries, so further research may need to compare between two or more than two samples from different societies that could give a significant insights. Second, this study stresses on the WASS to predict customers booking intentions that indicates significant results, so further research may need to examine the role of online reviews as a predictor of customers purchase decision as well.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first empirical research that investigates and examines the influence of the effectiveness of WASS and consumers’ concerns on consumers’ intentions through perceived value and trust. This research also investigates the moderating role of habit in the link between perceived website, perceived value and consumers’ intentions.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate autocorrelation structure of stock and portfolio returns in a unique market setting of Saudi Arabia, where nearly all active traders are the retail individuals and the market operates under severe limits to arbitrage. Specifically, the authors examine how return autocorrelation of Saudi Arabian stock market is related to factors such as the day of the week, stock trading, performance on the preceding day and volatility.

The sample consists of the daily stock price and index data of 159 firms listed in Tadawul (Saudi Arabian Stock Exchange) for the period from January 2004 through December 2015. The methodology of Safvenblad (2000) is primarily used to investigate the autocorrelation structure of individual stock and index returns. The authors also use the Sentana and Wadhwani (1992) methodology to test for the presence of feedback traders in the Saudi stock market.

Results show that there is significantly positive autocorrelation in individual stock, size portfolio and market returns and that the last two are almost always larger than the first. Return autocorrelation is negatively related to firm size. Interestingly, return autocorrelation is positively related to trading frequency. For portfolios, autocorrelation of returns following a high absolute return day is significantly higher than that following a low absolute return day. Similarly, return autocorrelation during volatile periods is generally larger than that during tranquil periods. Return correlation between weekdays is usually larger than that between the first and last days of the week. Overall, the results suggest that the possible reason for positive autocorrelation in stock returns could be the presence of negative feedback traders who are engaged in frequent profit-taking activities.

This is the first paper that thoroughly investigates the autocorrelation structure of the returns of the Saudi stock market using both index and individual stock returns. As this US$583bn (as of August 21, 2014) market opened to foreign institutional investors in June 2015, the results of this paper should be of significant value for the potential uninformed foreign investors in this relatively lesser known and previously closed yet highly prospective market.

This study aims to examine the hijab purchase intention of Muslim women by applying the theory of reasoned action: religious commitment, satisfaction (attitude), dressing style and knowledge source (subjective norms).

Data were collected from 603 Malay Muslim women in four universities through a self-administered questionnaire using a multi-stage cluster probability sampling technique. Smart PLS was used for data analysis.

The findings demonstrate that customers’ hijab purchase intention is significantly influenced by religious commitment, satisfaction, dressing style and knowledge source.

This study is for hijab designers because it is important for them to explore and examine the hijab purchase intention of Muslim women and then design the hijab accordingly, not only to capture a big segment in Kuala Lumpur but to obtain a competitive edge as well.

This is the first paper of its kind to examine the hijab purchase intention of Malay Muslim women.

The desire to find a new look of expressing the Muslim identity in society has led to a renewal of Muslim women’s interest in fashion. This allows fashion players to make trendy clothing and expand their business to meet the rising needs of Muslim women. Thus, this study aims to explore the concept of hijab fashion from the perspective of Islamic clothing retailers in Malaysia.

Data for this study were collected qualitatively using semi-structured interviews and analysed using a deductive thematic analysis.

This exploratory study describes hijab fashion as a representation of clothing for ideal contemporary Muslim women that enhances the beauty in Islamic outfits from the perspective of Islamic clothing retailers. Hijab fashion has emerged as a modern form of the modest dress code in accordance with Islamic guidelines representing the hijaber identity. It is not just a veil to cover the awrah but also represents the impression of fashionableness and modernity, reflecting the self-image, trendy style and personality representing the true ideal Muslim women, who are known as Muslimah.

The sample and findings are based exclusively on the perception of retailers directly involved in Malaysia’s Islamic fashion business.

The findings from this study benefit the fashion retailers, Islamic fashion industry players and policymakers by highlighting the importance of providing appropriate products and services concerning the growth of Muslim consumer market and their spending behaviour.

The findings offer a new perspective on the nature of the phenomenon of hijaber fashion as a symbol of the modern Muslim woman from the viewpoint of Islamic fashion practitioners.