Volume 69, Issue 3 -

Nationwide surveys of researchers in Finland in 2007 and 2016 distributed with the assistance of FinELib, the Finnish national consortium, show that researchers use a growing range of sources to find and access scholarly articles and that some reading patterns are changing. The percentage of articles found by searching and browsing are decreasing, while researchers are using more social ways to locate articles. Research social networking sites are rated as important to their work. They read more on-screen, although still print some material out for final reading. Reading patterns for books are different, as researchers still rely more on printed books than e-books, in spite of an increase in e-book collections through their libraries. This study shows a continuous process of incremental change, enabled by changes in scholarly publishing, social networking, and library collection decisions. More changes can be expected, as researchers adopt systems and patterns that fit with their work patterns and make the finding, locating, and reading of scholarly materials easier. Libraries must both lead and adapt to these new reading patterns by providing links and access to a variety of journal services and by maintaining a balance of print and e-book collections.

The goal of ResearchGate (RG) is to help users exchange scholarly information around the world. This study drew on adaptive structuration theory (AST) to investigate the social structure of RG, which had been largely overlooked by prior research. Data were crawled from RG and results were presented based on content analysis. For the social structure embedded in RG, the most frequent updates of structural features and spirit occurred in the first two years. Six representative updates for information exchange were analyzed and the newly embedded social structures were presented. For the social structure emerging in using RG, users were more willing to answer questions than ask questions, which countered intuition. Three categories were elicited to present the purpose and expectation of questions. Users were more willing to publish publications than publish projects. Compared with reading publications and projects published by others, users seldom commented on them. For the comparison between the two social structures, this paper analyzed and compared the two social structures in terms of three types of information exchange, finding that the social structure emerging in using RG differed from that embedded in RG. We suggest that this paper could potentially help the two social structures of RG promote the optimization of each other.

We are living in a time where plagiarism is a highly critical issue in the publish-or-perish stage of academic life. There have been many efforts to address this issue by holistic socio-cognitive variables but they do not seem explanatory enough in context-specific areas. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the root causes of plagiarism in a specific context, i. e. Iranian universities, by offering a structural model to reveal the building blocks of this phenomenon. Setting the goal, we chose Corbin and Strauss’s (2008) Grounded Theory (GT) approach, avoiding its paradigmatic cliché that a theoretical model emerges only from data without any pre-assumption. The research population included faculty members, PhD candidates and master’s students selected from universities in Tehran, Iran. Open theoretical sampling and, then, discriminative sampling were used. Fifty-one interviews, two newspaper interviews, and three focus groups were conducted. The interviewees were accessed through universities’ library and information centers. Taken together, 56 interviews were transcribed and codified. Lincoln and Guba’s (2008) criteria were used to control the quality of the research process. “Indifference” to plagiarism is the central phenomenon and “cultural depositories” plus “governmental capitalism” were found to be the root factors. These two factors may lead to “Bureaucratic university” (Moodie 2006) as a context for the emergence of “research formalism”, “uncritical education” and “scholastic habitus”. All these factors, together with direct reflexive elements including bad exemplars, the irresponsibility of professors, immoral trade-off, unscientific evaluation, insignificant differentiation, and vindications, lead to “indifference”. One of the research’s implications is that plagiarism in Iran seems not to result from individual-psychological factors but from cultural, economic, legal and organizational factors. Another implication is that in the investigation of social or organizational problems we should take a look at the concept of normality. We explored the factors tending to make a problem a normal phenomenon. We also pinpointed the things making people indifferent to a problem, factors pushing abnormal phenomenon to the realm of normality, and elements constituting the origins of the current order of things which are mysteriously silenced and practically behaved.

International student enrollment in US colleges and universities benefits the US economy in many ways and increases diversity on campus While much research on international students exist, we know very little about the experiences of international doctoral students. In this study, we explored the information needs, seeking behaviors, feelings, and overall experiences of 33 international doctoral students during the process of applying for doctoral study in the US. We used in-depth interviews and a questionnaire to collect the data. Findings show that the students used Experiential Resources (EXR) and Authorized Resources (AUR) to meet their information needs. Students faced issues and challenges in using university and academic programs websites and had negative feelings about the application process. Students made several suggestions for enhancing their experiences, including making websites more usable. The findings have implications for improving the usability of websites and for providing better services to support the students’ information needs and information seeking behaviors.

With the development of information technology and the advent of the digital era, the digitization of cultural heritage and the internet-based equal access to the digitized heritage have received worldwide attention. Taking China as a case study, this paper reviews its efforts and challenges to promote equal access to public digital cultural services (PDCS). It starts by introducing the efforts, including PDCS-related legislations, policies and standards issued by the government, and major government-initiated PDCS projects. They are followed by an analysis of its challenges, including deficiencies in government funding, internet penetration, broadband access rates in the Central and Western regions and rural areas, and the limited digital literacy, cultural knowledge, and income levels of certain population groups. This study concludes with the suggestion that promoting equal access to PDCS in less developed regions, rural areas, and vulnerable groups is still an important task in China, and the government needs to work with private sector partners to overcome the challenges.