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This paper aims to present the results of a study on success factors of resource sharing (RS) and cooperation in Iranian Academic Libraries (IAL), from the point‐of‐view of librarians who have direct experience of such activities. It investigates and compares the librarians' experiences of, and opinions on, the importance of the success factors in the current and desirable situations in the IALs.

Based on a comprehensive review of the relevant literature, 58 success factors of RS were identified from the previous studies. Using Likert scale technique, the importance of the factors in the current and desired situations of the RS programs were explored and ranked, based on the experiences and opinions of a sample of “key informants” who had direct experience of RS activities in the context of IALs. Then the consistency and/or inconsistency between the current and desired situations of the success factors were identified, using gap analysis method.

The findings revealed that almost all of the success factors mentioned in previous studies are considered important by the respondents. However, only eight factors received high rankings in the current and desired situations of the RS programs in the IALs.

The research focuses on factors identified in previous studies. This may ignore certain, especially cultural, factors, which are effective in the context of IALs.

The study highlights the importance of success factors in development or improvement of any RS activity. The factors would provide both researchers and practitioners with a rich framework to examine the current situation of their RS programs and develop informed strategic plans to improve that. In particular, the findings inform the RS planners and policy makers that particular attention needs to be given to the factors that are identified as very important by the study participants. These factors would alert them to the causes and impacts of such a deficiency in the RS and library cooperation systems.

There is no comprehensive study on the success factors of RS in libraries and, as such, no investigation of the factors in some real‐life contexts of RS activities. Both researchers and practitioners in the field of RS may value the novelty and results of this study.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the author self-citation behavior in the field of Library and Information Science. Various factors governing the author self-citation behavior have also been studied.

The 2012 edition of Social Science Citation Index was consulted for the selection of LIS journals. Under the subject heading “Information Science and Library Science” there were 84 journals and out of these 12 journals were selected for the study based on systematic sampling. The study was confined to original research and review articles that were published in select journals in the year 2009. The main reason to choose 2009 was to get at least five years (2009-2013) citation data from Web of Science Core Collection (excluding Book Citation Index) and SciELO Citation Index. A citation was treated as self-citation whenever one of the authors of citing and cited paper was common, i.e., the set of co-authors of the citing paper and that of the cited one are not disjoint. To minimize the risk of homonyms, spelling variances and misspelling in authors’ names, the authors compared full author names in citing and cited articles.

A positive correlation between number of authors and total number of citations exists with no correlation between number of authors and number/share of self-citations, i.e., self-citations are not affected by the number of co-authors in a paper. Articles which are produced in collaboration attract more self-citations than articles produced by only one author. There is no statistically significant variation in citations counts (total and self-citations) in works that are result of different types of collaboration. A strong and statistically significant positive correlation exists between total citation count and frequency of self-citations. No relation could be ascertained between total citation count and proportion of self-citations. Authors tend to cite more of their recent works than the work of other authors. Total citation count and number of self-citations are positively correlated with the impact factor of source publication and correlation coefficient for total citations is much higher than that for self-citations. A negative correlation exhibits between impact factor and the share of self-citations. Of particular note is that the correlation in all the cases is of weak nature.

The research provides an understanding of the author self-citations in the field of LIS. readers are encouraged to further the study by taking into account large sample, tracing citations also from Book Citation Index (WoS) and comparing results with other allied subjects so as to validate the robustness of the findings of this study.

Readers are encouraged to further the study by taking into account large sample, tracing citations also from Book Citation Index (WoS) and comparing results with other allied subjects so as to validate the robustness of the findings of this study.

The objective of this research paper is to evaluate websites freely available on the internet from one country – Iran and to provide information about the quality of their content.

General quality criteria were used for the evaluation. These included ownership and authorship, type of websites, purpose and scope of the sites, language, links, domain types, currency/updating of information, accessibility, services and facilities. Thus, in May and June 2004, 328 websites were selected using Yahoo, Google, Lycos, Iran Digest, and A Guide to Iranian Websites, to conduct searches. A check list was drawn up to review the information from the tools.

The research revealed that among Iranian websites providing information on the internet, private sites were much more likely to be of poorer quality compared to sites of governmental organizations.

Because there are no authoritative search engines which are specifically Iranian, the data were collected by using a selection of five search tools over a limited period of time. Using only these search tools, 3735 websites were found. While this paper has surveyed the content of the websites, more research is needed to highlight the nature of the internet infrastructure and its use in this country.

The websites of each country are regarded as a prime national gateway of information. The paper uses other work on evaluating national web presence and gives clear insight into Iran's websites and gives a model for evaluating the national web presence in any one country. Based on the results, national digital strategies can be devised to help make progress towards an effective and high quality national portfolio of websites.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the quality of Iranian university libraries.

This first systematic review and meta-analysis were based on the PRISMA guidelines by searching in national and international databases from 2003 to January 2017 with standard Persian and English keywords. Data searching, extracting and quality appraising were completed by two researchers, independently. Any unexpected documents were assessed by a third expert researcher. Data were extracted in accordance with the “Strength of the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology” checklist after the final selection of appraised documents. Random effects size based on Cochrane test and I² were used for combining the obtained results from different studies together by considering the heterogeneity of studies.

Based on the meta-analysis conducted in 25 (6.42 percent) included studies, the total sample size was estimated. According to three dimensions of LibQUAL, findings of current information control, affect of service and the library as a place were estimated as 5.37 [CI95%: 5.02, 5.73], 6.91 [CI95%: 5.56, 6.26], and 5.46 percent [CI95%: 5.2, 5.73], respectively. Also, mean of service adequacy and superiority gap are equal to 0.07 [CI95%: −0.22, 0.36] and −2.06 [CI95%: −2.89, −1.23], respectively. There was a significant correlation between three dimensions of service quality and service superiority gap of LibQUAL and geographical regions of Iran (p<0.01). Also, a significant correlation was found between the gaps of services and three aspects of LibQUAL model and published years through a meta-regression test (p<0.01).

The results obtained from the present study showed that users are relatively satisfied with the quality of services provided by Iranian university libraries. An improvement in the quality of library services can promote the scientific level of universities.

The results of the present systematic review and meta-analysis study demonstrate a vital connection between primary research studies and decision-making for policymakers in Iranian university libraries to increase quality services.

The purpose of this article is to present an aggregated methodology for construction of the stop word list in Farsi language and generate a generic Farsi stop word list.

The stop word list is extracted based on: syntactic classes, domain dependent, corpus statistic and expert judgments. Some of the main challenges that arise in the Farsi automatic text processing are outlined as well.

Results from the techniques are aggregated and a general Farsi stop word list containing 927 words is generated.

The created stop word list can affect the efficiency and effectiveness of retrieval and indexing process in Farsi information retrieval system, moreover, it can play an important role during Farsi text segmentation.

Our stop word extraction algorithm is a promising technique; it could be applied into other languages that they have ambiguities in automatic text segmentation.

The purpose of this study is to examine the research output on “library and information science” (LIS) research domain in South Africa. It also highlights the top LIS research organisations, authors, journals, collaboration types and commonly used keywords. This research will aid in the identification of emerging concepts, trends and advances in this subject.

The Web of Science (WoS), an indexing and abstracting database, served as a tool for bibliographical data. By applying advanced search features, the authors curated data from 1989 to 2021 through the WoS subject category WC = (Information Science & Library Science), limiting the scope to the region, CU = (South Africa), which resulted in 1,034 articles. Moreover, the research focuses on science mapping using the R package for reliable analysis.

The findings reveal that the publications have considerably grown over time, indicating significant attention among researchers in LIS. The findings indicate the critical operator’s performance, existing thematic choices and subsequent research opportunities. The primary topical fields of study that emerged from the bibliometric analysis are impact, information, science, model, management, technology, knowledge and education. Pouris and Fourie are the most productive citations, h-index and g-index. The influential institute was The University of Pretoria.

The use of the WoS database for data collecting limits this study. Because the WoS was the only citation and abstract database used in this study, bibliometric investigations using other citation and abstract databases like “Scopus”, “Google Scholar” and “Dimension” could be interesting. This study presented a bibliometric summary; nevertheless, a systematic and methodical examination of highly cited LIS research publications could throw more light on the subject.

This paper gives valuable information about recent scientific advancements in the LIS and emerging future academic subject prospects. Furthermore, this research work will serve as a reference for researchers in various areas to analyse the evolution of scholarly literature on a particular topic over time.

By identifying the standard channels of study in the LIS discipline, and the essential journals, publications, nations, institutions, authors, data sources and networks in this subject, this bibliometric mapping and visualisation provide new perspectives into academic performance. This paper also articulates future research directions in this realm of knowledge. This study is more rigorous and comprehensive in terms of the analytical procedures it uses.

This paper examines the contemporary university library system in Iran. The eight key factors studied are: library systems, resources and collection building, technical processing, services, information technology applications, co‐operation and exchange of information resources, administration and staffing, and financial administration. While examining these variables, the problems being faced by university libraries are also discussed and suggestions for dealing with them are offered.

The purpose of this study is to measure the quality of nuclear science and technology research using the scientometric indicators, like activity index, attractivity index and publication efficiency index.

The present scientometric study is based on the bibliographic data extracted from the core collection of the Web of Science database from 1989 to 2019. The data was collected using the advanced search feature, with a search string of 28 related terms. The bibliographic data for all the journal articles, excluding all other formats, was downloaded for statistical analysis.

The present study highlights the growth pattern and the research efforts devoted to the field of nuclear science and technology worldwide, as reflected through the Core Collection of the Web of Science database, for 31 years from 1989 to 2019. The USA has emerged as the topmost producer, with a total share of almost 29% with respect to the world literature followed by Japan, Germany, France and UK. However, the relative citation impact has been the highest for Netherlands followed by the USA, Germany, France and UK, respectively. The study depicted that the activity index, also called as the relative performance indicator, has been the highest for the USA, whereas the attractivity index has been the highest for China, indicating its dominance in attracting citations to its publications in the field of nuclear science and technology. The publication efficiency index, the value has been the maximum for Iran, for which the value has been greater than 1 (1.618). The measure suggests that Iran’s research effectiveness in the field of nuclear science and technology has been more than the research effort devoted to the field.

The paper was based on the data retrieved from a single database, and the results may vary across other databases. Hence, caution should be taken while generalizing the findings.

Several scientometric studies have taken place in the field of nuclear science and technology, particularly in its allied branches, but none of the studies has focused on evaluating the research efforts carried out by the countries in terms of activity index, attractivity index and publication efficiency index, and the present study is an attempt to fill the gap.

The purpose of this paper is to construct a model for measuring the strength and weakness of individual disciplines.

The model is developed based on the balanced approach. The model is tested on Iranian and Malaysian social sciences publications between 1991‐2008 as a case study.

The result indicates that the differences in rankings for measures of publication output, citation distribution, and mean observed citation rate are large, which justifies the use of the scientific power index which is introduced in this paper.

Scientific power index proposes an objective mode of measuring performance at an aggregate level that will allow a comparison of individual fields within different disciplinary areas like technological sciences, medicine, natural science, social sciences, and humanities at national or global levels. The disciplinary characterization of national research efforts identifies the mainstream and dominant scientific fields, thus the developed index can be important tool for science policy.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of selected factors in journal citations. Various factors can affect citations distribution of journals. Among them, skewness of citations distribution, author self-citation, journal self-citation and recitations (RCs) have been studied.

The present study based on 16 systematically selected journals indexed in Scopus under the subject category “Library and Information Science.” The study was confined to original research and review articles that were published in the selected journals in the year 2011. The temporal citation window from 2011 to 2014 was taken for analysis. Tools like, Scopus author ID, ORCID and author profiles from Google Scholar were used to minimize the error due to homonyms, spelling variances and misspelling in authors’ names.

It is found that citations distribution in majority of the journals under the study is highly skewed and more likely to follow log-normal distribution. The nature of authorship in papers was found to have positive effect on citation counts. Self-citing data show that higher ranked journals have rather less direct impact on total citation counts than their lower counterpart. RCs are also found to be more in top-tier journals. Though the influence of self-citations and RCs were relatively less at individual level on total citations of journals but combined, they can play a dominant role and can affect total citation counts of journals at significant level.

The present study is based on Scopus database only. Therefore, citation data can be affected by the inherent limitation of Scopus. Readers are encouraged to further the study by taking into account large sample and tracing citations from an array of citation indexes, such as Web of Science, Google citations, Indian Citation Index, etc.

This paper reinforces that the citations received by journals can be affected by the factors selected in this study. Therefore, the study provides better understanding of the role of these selected factors in journal citations.