دراسة ببليومترية في العلوم الطبية

Ante la explosión de información en la Internet y la automatización en las bibliotecas es necesario educar al usuario en las destrezas de información. La referencia presencial y virtual se han centrado en la solución inmediata de las necesidades de información en los usuarios. Este servicio satisface sus necesidades de información inmediatas, pero no lo dota de las destrezas de información necesarias para resolver los problemas de información de forma independiente. Mucho se ha discutido sobre los temas de referencia virtual y destrezas de información, pero se tratan, en la mayoría de los casos, de forma separada. Con esta problemática en mente, se elaboró y distribuyó un cuestionario para auscultar la opinión de los bibliotecarios de la Universidad de Puerto Rico sobre las destrezas de información integradas al servicio de referencia virtual. Se concluyó que la mayoría de los encuestados tienen más conocimiento acerca de las destrezas de información que de la referencia virtual. La mayoría opinó sobre la importancia de la integración de las destrezas de información a la referencia virtual. El producto final de esta investigación fue la elaboración de una página Web que incluye recursos de referencia virtual, módulos instruccionales y/o tutoriales seleccionados que apoyan el modelo Big 6, herramientas de acceso a los módulos y/o tutoriales a través de buscadores personalizados, entre otros. La página Web fue evaluada y validada por bibliotecarios expertos en referencia virtual y en destrezas de información y por estudiantes de bachillerato, quienes en su mayoría describieron el producto como excelente.

Databases provide the foundation of most software systems. This means that system developers will inevitably need to write code to query these databases. The de facto language for querying is SQL and this, consequently, is the language primarily taught by higher education institutions. There is some evidence that learners find it hard to master SQL. These issues and concerns were confirmed by reviewing the literature and establishing the scope and context. The literature review allowed extraction of the common issues in impacting SQL acquisition. The identified issues were confirmed and justified by empirical evidence as reported here. A model of SQL learning was derived. This framework or model involves SQL learning taxonomy, a model of SQL problem solving and incorporates cross-cutting factors. The framework is used as map to the design of a proposed instructional design. The design employed pattern concepts and the related research to structure SQL knowledge as SQL patterns. Also presented are details on how SQL patterns could be organized and presented. A strong theoretical background (checklist, component-level design) was employed to organize, present and facilitated SQL pattern collection. The evaluation of the SQL patterns yielded new insight such as novice problem solving strategies and the types of errors students made in attempting to solve SQL problems. SQL patterns, as proposed as a result of this research, yielded statistically significant important in novice performance in writing SQL queries. A longitudinal field study with a large number of learners in a flexible environment should be conducted to confirm the findings of this research.

This thesis proposes an innovative model for citation analysis and applies it to 1186 citations derived from twenty papers from one interdisciplinary journal: Global Environmental Change. The main aim of this thesis is to build, not to quantify, a model which facilitates understanding of how citations act, and are acted upon, in citing texts. The model builds on, extends and modifies certain aspects of some existing models on citation form, stance and function. This thesis argues that stance and function are different but related concepts in the analysis of citation. They operate in different directions and, when combined, can reflect the role of citation in the citing text. In order to achieve a fine-grained understanding of the role of citation, citations are analysed within and beyond the level of the statements in which they occur. To achieve this, a new level is proposed for the analysis of citation function: the ‘citation block’. In this thesis, it is argued that citations operate in different directions within and beyond the proposition-level. The current thesis aligns and compares analyses at the clause- and block-levels for every citation. This alignment results in the identification of conventional and unconventional patterns of citing. The model is applied to four sub-corpora of texts from two time periods and representing the more ‘science-like’ and ‘social science-like’ papers in the journal. The text-based analysis demonstrates the complexity of citation practices in interdisciplinary discourse. Overall it is suggested that in this journal the ‘social science’ papers over time have become more similar to the ‘science’ papers. The results also show variation in citation practices between the individual selected papers in each sub-corpus. This variation is attributed to the interdisciplinary nature of GEC. The proposed model has the potential to be used to investigate variation in citation practices beyond interdisciplinary discourse, within and between disciplines or genres.

The methodology of intermediary XML schemas is introduced and its application to complex metadata environments is explored. Intermediary schemas are designed to mediate to other ‘referent’ schemas: instances conforming to these are not generally intended for dissemination but must usually be realized by XSLT transformations for delivery. In some cases, these schemas may also generate instances conforming to themselves. Three subsidiary methods of this methodology are introduced. The first is application-specific schemas that act as intermediaries to established schemas which are problematic by virtue of their over-complexity or flexibility. The second employs the METS packaging standard as a template for navigating instances of a complex schema by defining an abstract map of its instances. The third employs the METS structural map to define templates or conceptual models from which instances of metadata for complex applications may be realized by XSLT transformations. The first method is placed in the context of earlier approaches to semantic interoperability such as crosswalks, switching across, derivation and application profiles. The second is discussed in the context of such methods for mapping complex objects as OAI-ORE and the Fedora Content Model Architecture. The third is examined in relation to earlier approaches to templating within XML architectures. The relevance of these methods to contemporary research is discussed in three areas: digital ecosystems, archival description and Linked Open Data in digital asset management and preservation. Their relevance to future research is discussed in the form of suggested enhancements to each, a possible synthesis of the second and third to overcome possible problems of interoperability presented by the first, and their potential role in future developments in digital preservation. This methodology offers an original approach to resolving issues of interoperability and the management of complex metadata environments; it significantly extends earlier techniques and does so entirely within XML architectures.

In Saudi Arabia the need is recognised significantly to move towards the concept of an Information Society, particularly for the benefit of the healthcare community. There have been some individual efforts, in this direction but they do not address the problem and related root issues. The problem is that the body and soul are not joined as one to formulate a single entity. The health professional is the body and the soul is the health information professional (health librarians). Health professionals spend a great deal of time in information searching, while the health information professional's role is underestimated. This research is conducted to explore the state of health sciences libraries, and to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the Information Services and Information, Communication Technology (ICT) in health sciences libraries in the capital city of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh. To accomplish this, a mixed method is used (qualitative and quantitative approaches) to collect related data. A framework is designed particularly for this research and a visionary organisational model is designed initially and developed throughout the research. This proposed model is to introduce a potentially possible successful paradigm for changing the health sciences libraries environment to encounter future challenges. In addition, for this research will contribute to the better understanding of how to provide fast, efficient and easy-to-use service to increase user satisfaction. Changing the paradigm of health sciences libraries in Riyadh will facilitate better access, sharing and use of information resources from distant geographical locations, and increase participation opportunities. In addition, the proposed model considers the human and social needs of communication, and the exchange of feelings and reactions. Importantly, successful change will help healthcare environments to move towards the establishment of a flourishing health information society by popularising the use of electronic resources and demonstrating the benefits and advantages of continuous learning and development programmes. It is clear that access to fast. accurate and reliable health information and resources, may be, the difference between life and death.

A challenging problem in the user profiling domain is to create profiles of users of retrieval systems. This problem even exacerbates in the multimedia domain. Due to the Semantic Gap, the difference between low-level data representation of videos and the higher concepts users associate with videos, it is not trivial to understand the content of multimedia documents and to find other documents that the users might be interested in. A promising approach to ease this problem is to set multimedia documents into their semantic contexts. The semantic context can lead to a better understanding of the personal interests. Knowing the context of a video is useful for recommending users videos that match their information need. By exploiting these contexts, videos can also be linked to other, contextually related videos. From a user profiling point of view, these links can be of high value to recommend semantically related videos, hence creating a semantic-based user profile. This thesis introduces a semantic user profiling approach for news video retrieval, which exploits a generic ontology to put news stories into its context. Major challenges which inhibit the creation of such semantic user profiles are the identification of user's long-term interests and the adaptation of retrieval results based on these personal interests. Most personalisation services rely on users explicitly specifying preferences, a common approach in the text retrieval domain. By giving explicit feedback, users are forced to update their need, which can be problematic when their information need is vague. Furthermore, users tend not to provide enough feedback on which to base an adaptive retrieval algorithm. Deviating from the method of explicitly asking the user to rate the relevance of retrieval results, the use of implicit feedback techniques helps by learning user interests unobtrusively. The main advantage is that users are relieved from providing feedback. A disadvantage is that information gathered using implicit techniques is less accurate than information based on explicit feedback. In this thesis, we focus on three main research questions. First of all, we study whether implicit relevance feedback, which is provided while interacting with a video retrieval system, can be employed to bridge the Semantic Gap. We therefore first identify implicit indicators of relevance by analysing representative video retrieval interfaces. Studying whether these indicators can be exploited as implicit feedback within short retrieval sessions, we recommend video documents based on implicit actions performed by a community of users. Secondly, implicit relevance feedback is studied as potential source to build user profiles and hence to identify users' long-term interests in specific topics. This includes studying the identification of different aspects of interests and storing these interests in dynamic user profiles. Finally, we study how this feedback can be exploited to adapt retrieval results or to recommend related videos that match the users' interests. We analyse our research questions by performing both simulation-based and user-centred evaluation studies. The results suggest that implicit relevance feedback can be employed in the video domain and that semantic-based user profiles have the potential to improve video exploration.

Over many years much academic research has been carried out in the field of library and information science (US) into the information-seeking behaviour of individuals, and many models and theories of such behaviour have been put forward. Similarly, over an even longer period, there has been much research in the field of communication stud ies, particularly mass communications, and a large number of models of communication behaviour have been described. The research described in this thesis sets out to build on this work, learning from both fields, in order to develop a more comprehensive representation of information behaviour. Existing models were analysed to identify important elements of information behaviour and from these the new Information Seeking and Communication Model (ISCM) was formulated. This is the first time that a model of information behaviour has been constructed in this way from a range of different models from both LIS and communication studies. The ISCM is more comprehensive in scope than previous models. Those developed in library and information science are usually concerned with the information user and information seeking, while those from communication studies typically focus on the communicator and the effectiveness of the communication process. The ISCM takes into account both information users and information providers, their separate contexts, the activities of information seeking, information use and communication, and factors that affect them. The ISCM has been designed as a generic framework capable of application in different environments. Its validity has been tested in health care, where it has been shown to apply to the information behaviour of physicians as information users and to that of pharmaceutical companies and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as information providers. Its practical value has been demonstrated in evidence-based medicine (EBM), where it offers in sights into the reasons why clinical practice does not necessarily follow EBM guidelines. It has also been found to be of use in identifying areas in which users (physicians) and providers (pharmaceutical companies and NICE) can improve their information behaviour in order to achieve their goals. This thesis contributes to knowledge by building on previous research and models to develop a more comprehensive model which provides practical insights into information behaviour and which has the potential for wide application.

No description available.

Information is a valuable commodity and its effective use is a vital part of everyday life. With the advancements of the internet and the increasing accessibility to it, the location of information is no longer the primary concern of information seekers. Digitisation techniques have made a wide variety of documents available on-line, and more and more publications are being published in electronic form simultaneously to their physical counterpart. The largest challenge currently facing information seekers is that of locating the correct information from the abundance available to them. Whenever a search query is made, the user is inundated with multiple options of documents to choose from. These documents are all deemed to have some relevance to the query produced by using an information retrieval algorithm. Thus far, automatic support has only been provided until the document retrieval level. The user is then left to search through the result set, mostly unaided, by the system he is using. In order to facilitate support for the users, a solid understanding of the information seeker's behaviours during this triage process is vital. Thus far, research into the behaviour of information seekers during the specific triage behaviour is limited. Even more limited however, is the evidence reporting the visual attention of the users. Since the triage process is highly visual, this important element needs to be thoroughly evidenced before accurately conceptualising the entire process. For this reason, this thesis aims to investigate the visual attention of information seekers during the document triage process. This will inform the modelling and conceptualisation of information seekers' behaviour during triage. In turn, this can be used to inform the design of supportive software. The thesis contains a review of related research and identifies the gaps that needs further investigation. From these, a series of user studies are then conducted on document triage. These in turn, facilitate the formulation and discussion of 2 document triage models and measurements to record the effectiveness of document triage. We study the visual attention of information seekers in four lab based studies, eliciting their exact gaze and focus details. We expand current research in the information seeking domain by reporting on findings from users' triage activities on small screen devices and when under time constraints. Furthermore, a high level diary study, gives us richer data on participants' triage activities over a larger period of time in their natural surroundings. All the studies are brought together to elicit requirements and measurements to understand system and user efficiency during each stage of the triage process.