Search results

This article details the implementation of a live online chat service which was suddenly necessitated by the worldwide coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The approaches used to train chat operators during this time inform both current and future training initiatives toward continuous improvement in this academic library setting.

Chat transcripts from the period of March 2020–April 2021 serve as the dataset for this study.

In bringing a live chat service online during a global pandemic, chat transcripts from this period reveal 19.3% of all chat interactions related directly to COVID-19. The transcripts also reveal the types of questions, whether reference or directional, and these, combined with staffing patterns, indicate that staff were addressing reference questions more often than librarians. In addition, 25.2% of all transactions, whether by staff or librarians, resulted in tickets or referrals to hand off the question to a subject or functional specialist. These findings help to inform targeted face-to-face refresher training for chat operators.

While bringing a live chat service online is certainly not novel, the impetus behind the quick setup was. This unusual circumstance allowed for an in-depth look at the nature of chat and its training requirements and limitations due to campus stay-at-home orders. It also provided a new understanding that influenced subsequent face-to-face trainings.

Ongoing deliberation about how research productivity should be measured is exacerbated by extensive disparity between the number of citations for scholarly works reported by commercial academic search engines and Google Scholar (GS), the premier web crawling service for discovering research citations. Disparities identified in citation comparison studies have also led to disagreement about the value of the higher number of citations for social sciences and business scholarly articles consistently reported by GS. The purpose of this paper is to extend previous database citation comparison studies by manually analyzing a sample of unique GS citations to a leading operations management journal (i.e. citations found only in GS and not the commercial search engines) to reveal just where these additional citations are coming from.

In addition to comparing citation counts for the three databases, unique GS citation data for the sample of journal articles was manually captured and reviewed. The authors’ approach provides a much more in-depth examination of the provenance of GS citations than is found in previous studies.

The findings suggest that concerns about the value of unique GS citations may not be warranted since the document types for the unique GS citing documents identified in the analysis are dominated by familiar scholarly formats. Predominantly authentic and validated journal publications, dissertations, conference papers, and book and book chapters accounted for the large majority of the unique GS citations analyzed.

The study lends further credence to contentions that the use of citations reported in GS is appropriate for evaluating research impact in disciplines where other formats beyond the English-language journal article are valued.

Developing a more informed understanding of the provenance of unique GS citations in the authors’ field is important because many scholars not only aspire to publish in elite journals with high impact factors based on citation counts provided by commercial databases to demonstrate quality, but also report the larger number of citations for their publications that are reported by GS to demonstrate impact. The in-depth manual analysis suggests that GS provides a more nuanced and comprehensive representation of research impact and international scope than the commercial databases.

While most Americans have heard of the consumer price index, many people are not knowledgeable about its meaning or history. In this article, Karen Chapman explains how the index reflects and affects the nation's economy, and lists sources of related information.

Optical discs are having a significant impact on information retrieval in libraries. They provide access to bibliographic and numeric data in an efficient manner, retrieving information in seconds that would take a patron using a printed source much longer to find. InfoTrac, a periodical database produced by Information Access Company, is an example of an application of this technology. The forerunner of the company's General Periodicals Index, InfoTrac consists of a database stored on a laser‐optical videodisc and a microcomputer work‐station for accessing, displaying, and printing the contents of the database.

After 40 years, IJPDLM received its first impact factor from Web of Science in 2010. This anniversary editorial provides a retrospective bibliometric assessment of IJPDLM over its initial five years as a Web of Science journal (2011-2015). First, IJPDLM’s citation metrics are compared to those for the Web of Science journal subject category of Management. Next, IJPDLM’s most cited articles, best papers and special issues together with the international diversity of the journal’s author base from 2011 to 2015 are reviewed. The analysis also presents the journals that cite IJPDLM most frequently, as well as the journals most frequently cited in IJPDLM. Finally, IJPDLM is compared to peer journals in the logistics and SCM field on various scholarly metrics including impact factor, five-year impact factor, h5-index, number of citations received and self-citation rate. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Retrospective bibliometric analysis of IJPDLM from 2011 to 2015.

Boosted by the journal’s admission to Web of Science in 2010, IJPDLM has made steady progress toward fulfilling the mission of providing its constituents with timeliness, inclusiveness and impact.

The comparison of IJPDLM’s scholarly metrics with those of peer journals and journals in the Web of Science Management category will be of interest and value to logistics and SCM researchers.

The retrospective overview and celebration of IJPDLM’s progress over the last five years and future directions will be of interest to the journal’s stakeholders and prospective authors.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the performance of the supply chain management and logistics (SCML) strategy journals recently added to the Web of Science database to the performance of journals from other business disciplines also recently admitted to the Web of Science database on the Thomson Reuters selection process criteria.

A benchmarking approach is used to examine the relative performance of SCML journals over a two‐year period.

The two sets of journals' publishing standards and the number of citations for authors from the two groups are quite similar. Journals in the benchmark group had greater international diversity and balance among their authors, editors and editorial boards, while the SCML journals were cited more often in Web of Science and had lower self‐citation rates.

This study required a great deal of counting, and some of the data were collected multiple times to check for accuracy. Still, it is possible that mistakes were made. Data from different years and different authors may have yielded different results.

The recent addition of six journals to the Web of Science database allows leading SCML journals to compete on a level playing field with other top‐tier business journals and can therefore be regarded as a major step forward in the maturation of the discipline, as well as recognition of the quality of the journals.

The authors' benchmarking study extends previous examinations of SCML journals relative to leading journals in other business fields, and offers direction for how SCML researchers and journal editors can continue to contribute to the maturation of the discipline.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

This index accompanies the index that appeared in Reference Services Review 16:4 (1988). As noted in the introduction to that index, the articles in RSR that deal with specific reference titles can be grouped into two categories: those that review specific titles (to a maximum of three) and those that review titles pertinent to a specific subject or discipline. The index in RSR 16:4 covered the first category; it indexed, by title, all titles that had been reviewed in the “Reference Serials” and the “Landmarks of Reference” columns, as well as selected titles from the “Indexes and Indexers,” “Government Publications,” and “Special Feature” columns of the journal.

This article celebrates the 50th anniversary of IJPDLM, reflects on the contribution of IJPDLM to the field of logistics and supply chain management (LSCM) and discusses future directions for the journal.

Descriptive analysis of manuscripts received and accepted by IJPDLM during 2015–2019 is used to provide an overview of the journal. Content analysis of selected articles is used to highlight important contributions of the journal. Changes made since 2020 are highlighted to inform future directions of IJPDLM. Invited articles are discussed and used to clarify future directions.

IJPDLM has made tremendous progress in informing and shaping the field of LSCM. Key issues addressed include sustainability and reverse logistics, omni-channel, e-commerce, retail logistics, risk, resilience, volatility, and complexity and digital technology innovation. The journal has expanded the use of methods beyond the typical qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the use of design science, experiment, conjoint analysis, qualitative comparative analysis, narrative analysis. The invited articles provide (1) a historical reflection of the purpose of the journal when it was launched, (2) new guidance on how to develop theories using literature review and grounded theories and (3) understanding of startups and supply chain ecosystems.

Some exemplar articles are highlighted to explain how IJPDLM informs LSCM managers, companies and policy makers.

This article explains the recent development and sets future directions for the LSCM field.