International Journal of Information Science and Management
Volume:11 Issue: 1, Jan-Jun 2013

The purpose of this study was to map the structure of scientific outputs of petroleum field in Science Citation Index (SCI) accessible via Web of Science (WOS) during 1990 to 2011 and determine the position of Iran. The used research methods were citation analysis and historiography. The results showed that there were totally 26859 records indexed in the petroleum discipline during 1990-2011 in SCI. USA, 7237 documents (27.28%), was the most collaborative country in this research. Iran with 321 documents ranked 21th country among all countries. The American author, Marshall A.G., with 85 documents ranked top among the most productive authors. In Iran, Kharrat from Petroleum University of Technology with 8 documents was the most productive Iranian author in petroleum field. Among the institutes and universities, Chinese Academy of Science was the most productive with 530 documents. Among the institutes and universities at national level, Tehran University has the first place with 53 documents. Energy & Fuels, Organic Geochemistry, and Abstracts of Papers of the American Chemical Society were the most important journals in terms of production and citation (both LCS and GCS) in petroleum field. The scientific map of petroleum field was drawn using HistCiteTM software. The analysis of the map revealed six thematic clusters including “Analysis and evaluation of compounds and elements of molecular structure of petroleum”, “Analysis and evaluation of compounds and elements of molecular structure of petroleum using mass spectrometry”, “reviewing and modeling of conditions of production and formation of source rock”, “survey of petroleum and its compounds biodegradation by bacteria and algae”, “survey of characteristics and history of petroleum reservoir”, and “survey of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)”.

This study mainly aims to compare the quantity of Iranian publications and their citation impact in the two popular citation databases, Scopus and Web of Science. The documents which specified Iran as their affiliated country published during 1998-2007 were selected as Iran’s publications in the two databases. During the examined years, Iran has published 49198 documents in Scopus and 35061 documents in WOS. Based on the results, the number of Iranian publications was higher in Scopus than WOS and also the number of citations per publication in Scopus was rather doubled in comparison with WOS. Although the number of cited publications was increasing in both databases, the percentage of cited publications in Scopus was more than WOS. In contrast, WOS embodies more number of non-cited Iranian publications than Scopus. Engineering was the most productive field as reflected by Iranian publications in Scopus while in WOS the most number of Iranian publications were published in Chemistry. Additionally, the growth rate of publications was calculated in different fields. Molecular Biology and Genetics as well as Biology and Biochemistry areas had the highest growth rate in WOS and Scopus, respectively.

To discover the current situation and characteristics of web citations accessibility, the present study examined the accessibility of 4,253 web citations in six key Iranian LIS journals published from 2006 to 2010. The proportion percentage of web citations increased from 11% in 2006 to 30% in 2010. The most widely cited top level domains in URLs include the. edu and. org with respectively 37% and 23%. This study provides further evidence that organizations websites have become increasingly vulnerable to URL decay. The results show that only 3467 web citations remain accessible in 2011, of which 71% allowed easy and long-term access to the authors’ information intended in URLs. Long time inaccessibility to the authors’ intended information was shown to be mostly from URLs that returned the 404 error and also the URLs that had gone through information update. An about 4 year half-life was estimated for Iran’s LIS Publications. Ultimately, the results suggest that the decay of URLs is a grave problem in the publication of Iran’s LIS researchers and cannot be overlooked. These authors need to gain the necessary knowledge about using web citations as major sources of information for their publications.

Frbrizing OPACs is viewed from two different angles: the system approach and the user approach. The first deals with different requirements of a system to be Frbrized automatically. The second regards the user as the integral element which any system attempts to serve. Due to the very huge number of MARC records stored in our OPAC databases, data mining MARC records to find different FRBR entities or user functions has been a dominant approach in Frbrizing systems. An in-depth study in this regard has been conducted on MARC 21 but there is no evident attempt performing the same job on Unimarc or its different national derivations/adaptations. This study aims at mapping Unimarc fields and subfields to FRBR entities (1st group: Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item) and also user functions (Find, Identify, Select, Obtain). For this purpose, Unimarc fields (0XX – 7XX) were mapped to FRBR and those fields relevant for identifying entities or supporting different user tasks were identified. After pointing out some major gaps and also strengths of Unimarc for Frbrization, some concluding remarks have been made.

The main purpose of this paper is identifying the current situation of Iranian digital libraries in terms of interoperability abilities and proposing an interoperability solution for Iranian digital libraries. Analytical survey is used in this research. In fact, questionnaire and observation were used for collecting data about the current situation of Iranian digital library applications. The gathered data were analyzed by system analytical method in order to propose some practical suggestions to use in Iranian digital library applications. Iranian digital libraries mostly collect text files. They store data in SQL server and in relational database systems. The majority of Iranian digital libraries do not respect interoperability. They mostly use just Z39.50 clients so as to gather bibliographic data to use in cataloguing center. In fact, most of studied digital libraries do not offer extracting standard formats. Also, they do not make use of structural and administrative metadata format in their bibliographic data. The proposed model is based on harvesting model, OAI protocol and METS/MODS metadata standard. Findings indicated that Iranian digital libraries should be alert about the essence of interoperability. Using the proposed model would help them to be able to exchange their data in a more cost-efficient and cost-effective manner.

The present research endeavors to discover similarities and differences among digital libraries in Iran and to clarify the extent of their consistency in terms of main library requisites. Using a qualitative -quantitative method, i.e. a survey research method using content analysis, it identifies Iranian Digital Libraries (IDLs) and explores their characteristics. Reviewing the literature, we identified the main requisites for libraries including search and browsing facilities, search mode, collection development policies, content, document types, feedback, access models and services and then composed them into a checklist. Searching Google, we verified the top 500 of the records returned to identify IDLs and study them regarding the criteria. The results showed that the IDLs vary strongly in their main traits and library requirements, signifying a general variation in their developer's interpretations of digital library concept. The strong points of the IDLs are their variety in contents, materials and subjects covered as well as in devising browsing facilities, multilingual collections and feedback mechanisms. However, they showed to be deficient in providing a variety of services, search and management mechanisms. The significance of the research relies on the importance of commonly agreed perceptions of digital libraries on their future success. It affects the nature of the relationships between information users, providers and intermediaries as well as their designing, implementation and resource, access and legalmanagement and the services types and extents.

This article elaborates on the role of the periodical fund of the national library named after M. F. Akhundov in the development of the Azerbaijani culture and science through a short survey of the funding history. The main goal of this article is to create a comprehensive historical scene of the periodical fund of this library which was established in the first half of the twentieth century and to determine its function vis-à-vis the scientific idea of ​​ national librarianship.