International Journal of Information Science and Management
Volume:8 Issue: 2, Jan-Jun 2010

This article deals with the establishment of the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC) as the first citation system in the Islamic countries. It attempts to describe the mapping of ISC the way it has been established. At the time being, ISC has begun to evaluate the research performance of the Islamic countries. The required research journals from the Islamic countries are being collected and processed in different subsystems of ISC. The languages used by ISC, at present, include Farsi (Persian), Arabic and English.

Using indicators and statistics of ISI, this paper comparatively evaluates Iran indexed scientific productions from 1993 through 2007. Considering the number of indexed scientific productions in WOS, Iran was in a satisfactory position in terms of the growth rate. According to the statistics of ESI, Iran was in the second place after Turkey among Islamic countries and the fortieth in the world, during the last ten years. Most of the scientific productions of Iran were published in English "article" formats. According to JCR statistics, three Iranian Journals in 2005 were indexed in SCI section of this database and three more journals were added to it in 2006. Shiraz University has had the most journals in JCR in 2006.

Based on citation analysis, this work describes the growth and interdisciplinary patterns of nanoscale research in Iran. It covers all the Iranian ISI papers on nanoscience and nanotechnology indexed in the ISI databases in 2008 and surveys the corresponding data from the beginning to 2007. Moreover, in an international context, a brief comparison is made between our data and those of other countries. A substantial annual growth rate is obtained for the number of publications and their corresponding citations. By the end of 2008, eighteen different subject fields including thirty-eight disciplines comprised the foundations of nanoscale research. The topmost subject field is chemical sciences and the topmost discipline appears to be physics. Hence, nanoscale research in Iran is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavor (through a convergence among basic sciences and engineering) that pervades among other subject fields and/or disciplines starting with materials and physics and later extending to chemistry and other areas. In an interdependent context, this is possibly due to the dynamic nature and potentials of nanoscience and nanotechnology. In general, nanoscale research in Iran resembles the overall worldwide nanopublication patterns excepting the rather greater concentration on the scientific over the technology orientations.

This article has attempted to present a clear image of science production by the member states of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) based on the Essential Science Indicators (ESI). ESI indexes the most effective science productions of the world. The World Bank, on the other hand, has classified the countries of the world according to their economic position. Using the information accessible in these two sources, we examined the science production of each economic class, and then made a comparison between the Islamic and non-Islamic countries. The economic classes comprise the low-income, the lower middle-income, the upper middle-income, and the high-income nations. Our primary objective was to compare and contrast Islamic Countries versus the other countries of the world to show the status of their current scientific publications. Four major features characterize the statistical analysis of our study: population, economic class, citations, and publications in 22 disciplines and all fields of study as indexed in ESI.

This article examines availability and half-life of URLs cited in articles published by Information Research journal. To do this, at first, we extracted all issues of Information Research from April 1995 to March 2008 and calculated number of all citations whether printed citations or Web ones. Afterwards, we checked availability of individual cited URLs. When we could not access directly URL inserted in any article by author(s), we tried to visit referred website. If this attempt seemed to be inadequate, search engine "Google" was employed to access the missing reference(s). Research findings indicated that 66% of articles have Web citations and rate of articles containing URL has increased from 17% in 1995 to 89% in 2008. Domains. net and. org have more stability and persistence compared to domains. edu,. gov,. uk and. com. Also, of 1761 cited URLs, 73% were accessible, and 27% were inaccessible. It is notable that using Google and searching missing URLs, accessible URLs increased from 73% to 86%. Finally, it was recommended that the best solution to prevent decay or disappearance of Web citations and diminish URLs decay is to make use of WebCite®-enhanced reference.

This study aimed to evaluate Persian Search Engines based on the criteria obtained from Alexa databank using correspondence analysis. Through searching the web, 23 search engines were found, which due to their cease and no coverage by Alexa, this number was reduced to 16. Data analysis revealed that Ghatreh Search Engine occupied a high rank in most of attributes like traffic rank, time spent on site and number of pages viewed per user. Iranmania Search Engine attained the largest number of links among other search engines. Jostejoogar Search Engine attracted the largest number of foreign users whilst Begardim Search Engine had no foreign users. Correspondence analysis classified the 16 search engines into three groupings which were related on the basis of certain attributes.

Much attention has recently been paid to natural language processing in information storage and retrieval. This paper describes how the application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques can enhance cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). Using a semi-experimental technique, we took Farsi queries to retrieve relevant documents in English. For translating Persian queries, we used a bilingual machinereadable dictionary. NLP techniques such as tokenization, morphological analysis and part of speech tagging were used in pre-and- post translation phases. Results showed that applying NLP techniques yields more effective CLIR performance.

This study intended to carry out a survey of engineering college libraries that have computerized their operations and services. It provides an implicit view of the professional experiences of the engineering college librarians in computerizing their house keeping operations. Information was collected using a structured questionnaire mailed to 128 engineering college librarians, of which 102 (79.69%) were received duly filled with all the relevant information requested in the questionnaire. It was observed that 13.73% of the libraries were not automated for reasons which varied from library to library such as lack of computer facility, financial problems, lack of trained manpower and inadequate library collection. The study was limited to the automated libraries of engineering college in Karnataka which gives a status view of the software packages used by different libraries and the opinion of the librarians and library staff about the performance of the software they use. No comprehensive survey has been conducted at national or local level to reveal the status of the software and related problems faced by engineering college libraries in India. The current study, although focusing only on libraries in the Karnataka state, results could perhaps be generalized to the country as a whole and should prove useful as an indication of issues and problems with library software.