Measuring serendipity with altmetrics and randomness

Many discussions on serendipitous research discovery stress its unfortunate immeasurability. This unobservability may be due to paradoxes that arise out of the usual conceptualizations of serendipity, such as “accidental” versus “goal-oriented” discovery, or “useful” versus “useless” finds. Departing from a different distinction drawn from information theory—bibliometric redundancy and bibliometric variety—this paper argues otherwise: Serendipity is measurable, namely with the help of altmetrics, but only if the condition of highest bibliometric variety, or randomness, obtains. Randomness means that the publication is recommended without any biases of citation counts, journal impact, publication year, author reputation, semantic proximity, etc. Thus, serendipity must be at play in a measurable way if a paper is recommended randomly, and if users react to that recommendation (observable via altmetrics). A possible design for a serendipity-measuring device would be a Twitter bot that regularly recommends a random scientific publication from a huge corpus to capture the user interactions via altmetrics. Other than its implications for the concept of serendipity, this paper also contributes to a better understanding of altmetrics’ use cases: not only do altmetrics serve the measurement of impact, the facilitation of impact, and the facilitation of serendipity, but also the measurement of serendipity.

Information disruptions and disruptive information sources in the practice of law: Obstacles in gathering information, through an Israeli lens

Lawyers must provide their clients with competent legal services and professional representation. However, in many cases, lawyers find it difficult to attain the necessary information to resolve legal concerns under their inquiry. Disruptive sources of information and faulty information are understudied features of professional information behavior, especially in the information-rich legal profession. The current research aims to explore these complexities and promote a fuller and more realistic understanding of the information-gathering practices of legal practitioners. Israel was chosen as a case since it upholds a thriving and active legal sector. Data was collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a purposive nationwide sampling of 25 practising lawyers in Israel, covering together over thirty different fields of legal practice with a fair diversity of other personal and professional attributes. The findings portray accessibility, content, and usability disruptions in lawyers’ information practices, as well as accentuate seven troublesome information sources in their use during legal work and their distinctive aspects of disruption. This study provides important insights regarding legal professionals’ erroneous information engagement and experience and reveals some of its inherent drawbacks; hence, supporting a more rounded understanding of the role of information in professional work behavior. Hopefully, the presented concepts and insights could also benefit other service-oriented information workers.

Information literacy in the legal workplace: Current state of lawyers’ skills in Pakistan

This study investigated the current state of information literacy (IL) skills among lawyers practicing at the District Bar Association of Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan. A cross-sectional survey using a questionnaire was conducted to collect data from 297 lawyers. The questionnaire comprised 20 statements related to information literacy along with certain demographic variables. Each lawyer was personally visited in the assigned chamber by one of the researchers to record responses. Both descriptive (frequencies, percentages, mean scores, standard deviations) and inferential statistics (Pearson correlation coefficient, t-test, and one-way analysis of variance) were applied for data analysis in SPSS. The results showed that a large majority of lawyers participating in the survey never received any formal training concerning information literacy. However, most of these lawyers perceived IL skills as important in the context of their workplace especially in conducting legal research. These lawyers were more competent in the basic IL skills and less competent in advanced IL skills. In addition, the lawyers’ age, practical experience, practicing levels, computer proficiency, and English Language proficiency predicted their levels of IL skills. There was a critical need for the development of IL instruction programs for not only practicing lawyers but also for law students to improve their skills since these lawyers felt less competent with advanced levels of IL skills. It is hoped that the present study contributes to the existing body of WIL literature focusing especially on the role of IL in the context of legal work and outlining the current state of lawyers’ IL skills in Pakistan as no such study has appeared so far.