A temporally dynamic examination of research method usage in the Chinese library and information science community

Approaches for the Clustering of Geographic Metadata and the Automatic Detection of Quasi-Spatial Dataset Series

The discrete representation of resources in geospatial catalogues affects their information retrieval performance. The performance could be improved by using automatically generated clusters of related resources, which we name quasi-spatial dataset series. This work evaluates whether a clustering process can create quasi-spatial dataset series using only textual information from metadata elements. We assess the combination of different kinds of text cleaning approaches, word and sentence-embeddings representations (Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText, ELMo, Sentence BERT, and Universal Sentence Encoder), and clustering techniques (K-Means, DBSCAN, OPTICS, and agglomerative clustering) for the task. The results demonstrate that combining word-embeddings representations with an agglomerative-based clustering creates better quasi-spatial dataset series than the other approaches. In addition, we have found that the ELMo representation with agglomerative clustering produces good results without any preprocessing step for text cleaning.

A comparison of information behavior studies in United States and India: Number of publications, authorship, journals, theories, research populations, and methods

This study compares attributes (authors, journals, populations, theories, methods) of information seeking behavior studies based in the United States and India, based on a search of published articles from 2011 to 2020 in relevant information science databases. The findings indicate major differences in information behavior research among the two countries. Information behavior research in the United States tends to focus more on health and medicine-related research populations, employ greater use of information behavior theories, and use a variety of quantitative and qualitative research methods (as well as mixed methods). Information behavior research in India tends to focus more on general populations, use less theory, and rely heavily on quantitative research methods—particularly questionnaires (88% of studies). These findings suggest a healthy and intellectually-diverse information behavior research area in the United States and ample room for growth of the research area within India.