javad abbaspour

 The present study aims to identify the features necessary for developing an e-book reading application designed specifically for children with dyslexia, enabling them to engage more effectively with storybooks.

A systematic review method was employed, following the model proposed by Kitchenham and Charters to ensure coherence in data collection. Relevant texts were gathered by searching for related keywords in both national and international databases, retrieving 216 studies (32 in Persian and 184 in English). In the initial review, unrelated, duplicate, and invalid studies were removed by examining the articles’ titles, abstracts, and results. In the next step, two experts in Library and Information Science validated and screened the studies. Ultimately, 74 studies in English and 10 studies in Persian (totaling 84 studies) were selected as the basis for analysis.

The systematic review identified four overarching categories of features: search, profile, book, and user interface. Additionally, 12 organizing features were extracted, including search techniques, features in the search results list, user's personal information, my library panel, my activities panel, personalization panel, descriptive information about the book, electronic display of the book, image features, tools to assist in better reading of the book, and specific user interface features for displaying books to children with reading difficulties. Furthermore, 180 foundational features for e-book reading applications were identified.

The features extracted in this research can be divided into general and specific features. General features include those related to search (such as search techniques and capabilities available in the results list), profiles of children with dyslexia (including user personal information, my library panel, my purchases panel, my activities panel, and personalization), and the user interface of the system. These features should be considered in all reading applications designed for children. On the other hand, specific features are tailored to reading applications for children with dyslexia and are implemented by taking into account the unique needs of this group. Features related to the electronic display of books, book images, and tools that assist in better reading of books fall into this category.

The current research compares the representative elements (title, abstract, and keywords) of the articles that existed in the proposal references' citation network with the proposals’ elements. The other goal of this research is to calculate representative elements’ weighted average (title, abstract, and keywords) from a textual similarity perspective.

This is an applied and quantitative research that uses citation analysis and content analysis. The research sample is 3019 articles extracted from the citation network of 31 graduated students’ proposals (M.Sc. and Ph.D.) in Chemistry at Shiraz University. All English articles' titles in the proposals' references were searched on the Web of Science database, and each article's file and all articles’ files in its citation network were saved in Excel format. All retrieved files were merged into one file and sorted based on citation count to have the unit citation network for each user's proposal. Because some of the proposals had an extended citation network with more than a thousand articles, 100 articles with the greatest citation count of each network were analyzed to create uniformity and balance among the proposals’ citation networks. Next, the scale of textual similarity of 100 articles' representative elements with the greatest citation count in the citation network, was calculated with the proposal’s title, the proposal’s text, and the titles of the proposal’s references. The scale of textual similarity was checked using designed software based on the Python programming language and measuring the cosine similarity. 

The results of the Kruskal-Wallis test showed that there was a significant difference between the articles’ representative elements and the title, text, and references’ titles of the proposals from a textual similarity viewpoint; and in all three cases articles’ abstracts had the most textual similarity with the proposal elements, then, the title and keywords of the articles' citation network were in the second and third ranks; In addition, the representative elements’ weighted average was calculated. The obtained value was 0.62 for the abstract, 0.5 for the title, and 0.22 for the keywords, respectively.

Despite the use of different platforms to measure the similarity between the documents searched and the documents desired by the user, there is still a distance to reach the ideal level. Until now, no research had used the representative elements of the articles that existed in the proposal references' citation network to measure the textual similarity with the proposal elements and had not evaluated their capability. The confirmation of textual similarity among the representative elements of the articles that existed in the proposal references' citation network with proposals’ elements, indicates that the student's proposal can be used as a platform for recommending related articles. Hence, the designers of scientific recommender systems, scientific information retrieval systems, digital libraries, and scientific social networks such as LinkedIn, Academia, and ResearchGate can use the elements of articles' citation networks to recommend related articles. In addition, considering the articles’ representative elements as independent units is important not only for similarity measurement but also for keyword expansion and suggesting the appropriate journal to the authors for publishing their articles. According to the determined weight of representative elements and to increase the efficiency of information systems, it is suggested that designers of such systems use the abstracts and the titles of the articles to measure the similarity and avoid calculating the similarity of the texts as a whole unit. This saves time, resources, and energy, presents better results, and users can reach their target and desired information more easily and faster than before. In addition, for indexing articles in databases and search engines, the articles' abstracts and titles can be prioritized to save financial resources and energy.

Methodological validity is one of the aspects of quality. Methodological elements are parts of the text of articles that deal with research methodology. The purpose of this study was to determine the contribution and role of methodological elements in explaining the relationship between evidence and questions.

This semi-experimental study employed a one-group pretest–posttest design. The research population consisted of clinical trial articles included in the meta-analysis of Cochrane systematic review articles. The sampling method employed was purposeful, whereby systematic review articles containing at least 50 related clinical trial articles retrieved by the retrieval system were selected as the research sample.

The results of the paired t-test showed that the difference in the average nDCG score across all four groups was negative at all points of accuracy. The highest average difference (−0.064) was observed for the basic and standard methodological elements in the abstract at accuracy point 10 (the tenth document in the retrieved results), while the lowest average difference (−0.021) was observed for the basic methodological elements in the abstract at the 50th and 70th accuracy points.

The findings of this research showed that methodological elements, whether independently or to expand the abstract, do not affect the ranking of relevance results or may even have a negative effect. In other words, the occurrence of methodological elements in the text or their weighting can reduce relevant results.

Aims to identify the role of document readability level and the objective complexity of the work task on students' relevance judgment and document ranking.

Quantitative content analysis was utilized to determine the readability level of texts. The statistical population of the research included 2825 graduate students of Shiraz University of Humanities. To determine the sample size, due to time-consuming process of relevance judgment, students’ time constraint, and sample size of similar studies, a non-probability sampling method of voluntary type was used. Two work tasks were designed based on Borland's (2000) Repository of Assigned Search Tasks and experts' opinions. After confirming the validity of the work tasks by the experts, searching through the Persian article databases, including SID, Magiran, and Noormags, four relevant, four partially relevant, and two irrelevant articles were selected by five experts The articles were divided into difficult and very difficult levels by determining their readability levels using Flash-Diani readability formula. In the next step, ten articles related to two work tasks were scored by users in a six-level spectrum (from entirely irrelevant to entirely relevant) then ranked based on the relevance degree (from 1 to 10). Data was analyzed using social science statistical software version 23 (SPSS), and T-tests and Mann-Whitney U tests were conducted.

The results showed significant difference between students' relevance judgment with different readability levels. Students rated documents with difficult readability levels more relevant than documents with very difficult readability levels. In addition, considering the role of readability level on the ranking, there was a significant difference between the rankings of relevance in the documents with different readability levels according to the students. Documents with difficult readability levels were ranked lower in terms of relevance. Therefore, students performed finer on rating documents with difficult readability levels.  Findings about the role of complexity level of work showed that objective complexity of the work task affected the students' relevance judgment. The retrieved documents related to the simple work task were found to be more relevant than the complex work task. Regarding the role of complexity level of work tasks on ranking, findings  revealed that the level of objective complexity of the work task affected the ranking of documents, and the simple work task ranked lower in terms of relevance ranking. Therefore, students performed finer on the simple work task than on the complex work task regarding relevance rating.

The role of level of readability of documents and objective complexity of the task affected relevance, judgment, and ranking. Further research on the effect of these indicators on relevance judgment  can improve the design of information retrieval systems and increase the quality of the relevance and ranking algorithms.

 Febrile seizures are one of the most common neurological disorders in children. The aim of this study was to investigate the extent of abnormal EEG reports and its association with other risk factors of febrile seizures.

 In this prospective observational study, all patients with febrile seizure admitted into Mousavi Hospital in Zanjan, Iran, from April 2015 to March 2016 were enrolled. EEG was carried out for all patients and the clinical data were recorded in the prepared questionnaire .The statistical analysis was performed by using spss.16 software.

 One hundred seventy patients, 92 (54.1%) male and 78 (45.9%) female with the mean age of 28.57 months were evaluated. The EEG reports were normal in140 (82.4%) cases and 30 (17.6%) cases had abnormal reports including 8 cases(26.6%) of spike & sharp electric discharge, 2 cases (6.6%)of slow activity and 20 cases(66.6%) of nonspecific changes. EEG abnormalities were significantly related with male sex (P = 0.020), history of previous febrile convulsion (p< 0.001), positive family history of epilepsy and febrile seizures (p< 0.001) and complex type of febrile convulsion (p< 0.001). Longer duration of seizure (p< 0.001) and older age of patients (p< 0.033) had significant relation with abnormal EEG.

 Although EEG is not routinely performed in all patients with febrile seizure, it is recommended for male gender, age over 3 years, complex febrile seizure, previous history of seizure and family history of epilepsy or febrile seizures.

At present, most of the daily shopping of people is done through systems and online stores; therefore, providing a model for evaluating systems and online stores in order to boost the business market and the competitive environment between systems and online stores will be very important. The main purpose of this study is to provide a model for evaluating these systems. Initially, resources related to the evaluation of online store websites and the models used for them were collected and reviewed; then, using qualitative content analysis, the concepts available in online store websites were extracted and categorized into thematic items; finally, the obtained themes were adapted to the main dimensions of Delon and McLean model. Lavshi content validity method was used to confirm the validity of the evaluation model and Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used for reliability. According to the five main dimensions of Delon and McLean model, the evaluation model of systems and online stores was presented in 44 appropriate items. In terms of system quality, 7 items, information quality, 11 items, service quality, 18 items, user use and satisfaction, 6 items, and personal effects, 2 items were approved. Given that the creation and use of online stores in Iran is still young and online shopping through the website of online stores is constantly expanding, the items obtained in this study in the form of Delon and McLain model are among the key indicators. Are considered necessary to improve service delivery and business prosperity and need to be considered by designers and their stakeholders; Therefore, it is very important to use all the appropriate and accepted items in the model of this research. In general, by reviewing the obtained items, it seems that in addition to ensuring the credibility of the online store to buy from it, it is very important to pay attention to the user interface and customer relationship management system; In addition, many items such as the existence of search tools, proper categorization of goods in order to facilitate customer interaction with the system and the online store indirectly indicate the importance of the user interface.

This research explores the experiences of senior faculty members of Shiraz University. In addition, it designs and illustrates the model of documentation research ideas among senior faculty members.

This is an applied research in terms of objective and To achieve the desired goal, a qualitative approach and a systematic design of Grounded Theory were used. The statistical population of the study includes all retired professors of Shiraz University and also professors who are in the last three years of retirement in this university. 25 faculty members of Shiraz University were interviewed through a semi-structured method. The sampling method of this research is the sequential method of snowball (chain reference). In an introductory interview, the researcher began an interview with a key sample of Shiraz University faculty members who had a wealth of information on the subject; Then, with reference to a series of referrals from the participant in question, request the introduction of other faculty members who were eligible for the interview. Then, the data was analyzed within three stages of coding: open، axial and selective. At last, the findings were drawn in the form of theorems and paradigm model.

Findings showed that the internal and external motivations of idea documentation, including fear of forgetfulness, idea permanence, facilitating the use of the idea and becoming famous, have provided the tendency to document research ideas for faculty members. To document the idea, they used manual and electronic documentation. Also, contextual and environmental conditions Include individual and organizational plans and considerations, and intervening and mediating conditions include respect for intellectual property rights and institutionalization and structuring affected the quality of manual and electronic documentation. There are also two approaches, individual (protection of ideas) and extra-individual (development and maturity of knowledge production, intellectual and information synergy), that are the results and consequences of the process of documenting ideas.

According to the findings, it can be said that achieving organizational goals requires a strong and fundamental organizational culture. Universities as scientific centers really need a rich culture. Therefore , One of the required cultures of universities is the culture of documenting research ideas; so, they should create the culture of documenting research ideas. Also, in order to increase the tendency of faculty members to document research ideas, it is important to provide the necessary context, including the establishment of a separate center for documenting research ideas, training and education of aware and expert manpower; Also, it is necessary to consider appropriate tools for documenting ideas.

The purpose of the present study is to identify the viewpoints of central libraries'' managers of governmental universities which are supervised by two ministries of Science, Research and Technology and Health and Medical Education regarding users'' access to dissertations.

As a descriptive survey, all Managers of the central libraries of governmental universities which are supervised by two ministries of Science, Research and Technology and Health and Medical Education were participated in the study. Considering limited number of population members, sampling was not used in this study. The data gathering tool was a researcher-made questionnaire.

The findings showed that central libraries'' managers of the universities have different viewpoints on access to dissertations. The managers'' points of view about the levels of access to the dissertation are different for users within or outside the university campus, so that they think that it''s better users have access to the full text within the university, and they have access to only bibliographic information outside the university. In addition, they agree with accessing to parts of the dissertations (not full text) in both printed and/or electronic version on charge. Managers were agreed with "PDF" format among different electronic versions.

Despite the importance of recognizing the attitude of library managers towards determining the policy of making dissertations available to library users, this issue has not been studied till now. This article addresses this important issue.

The purpose of this research is to identify the viewpoints of Bandar Abbas public libraries librarians and users about the challenges and strategies of users’ participation in public library activities and services.

The methodology used in this research is qualitative. The potential partners of this study include 20 librarians in five Bandar Abbas public libraries and users of these libraries. For data collection, semi-structured interviews were used. After interviewing with 11 librarians and 11 users, the interview ended since theoretical saturation was reached. In order to ensure the accuracy and validity of the questions prepared for the interview, assistance was sought from three faculty members of knowledge and information science. To ensure the reliability of interview data, the directive interview technique was used and the members of research committee evaluated and examined the interview data.

By analyzing the interviews, the basic themes for the concept of user participation in library, the challenges facing users and their solutions for participation were presented. Eight basic themes were elicited for the concept of user participation in library which was categorized into two components: affectionate and organizing, and negative organizing. Affectionate component included a functional interaction in both theoretical and practical fields. Theoretical interaction involves include the three basic themes of consultation and brainstorm, sharing ideas and solidarity. Interaction in the field of practice includes the three themes of voluntary cooperation in executive affairs, two-way relationship, constructive and beneficial and profitability through synergy of forces.  For clarifying the challenges of user participation on libraries, 26 themes were elicited and categorized into 4 organizing themes: financial challenges, structural challenges, challenges of interpersonal and organizational relationships, and the challenges resulting from lack of awareness. Furthermore, user participation strategies were elicited in the form of 21 basic themes and 3 themes which include: financial solutions, structural solutions, and interpersonal and organizational solutions. Most of the librarians and users participating in this research believe that user participation has a great impact on advancement of library, and consider it useful for library, librarians and users. However, there are limitations and obstacles in the way of users’ participation in libraries. One can conclude that the ultimate solution to the challenges associated with user participation in libraries is to institutionalize community-based librarianship.

 Among the most important contributions of this research are to understand the phenomenon of user participation in the activities and services of public libraries as well as to understand the challenges and strategies of user participation in these activities.

The objective of the present study was to explore the views and experiences of Shiraz University’s Humanities and Social Sciences faculty members who are associate or full professors and have membership in Shiraz University Promotion Committees; it focused on four dimensions of challenges and weaknesses, strengths, consequences of implementing the regulation and the proposed implications.

In this qualitative descriptive phenomenological study, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 14 professors in Humanities and Social Sciences faculties. After transcribing the audio files of the interviews, the data were coded through three stages of open coding, axial coding and selective coding. Finally, 114 open codes, 21 axial codes, and 4 selective codes concerning the Promotion Regulation were discovered.

Findings showed that the challenges of Promotion Regulation include the victimization of the humanities, great emphasis on research and exclusion of other aspects, especially education, emphasis on quantity and lack of attention to quality, taste of committees concerning the Promotion Regulation, and a uniform regulation for all fields.

Previous research on Promotion Regulation in Iran have been quantitative research and most of them addressed the viewpoints of faculty members generally; However, the present study was a qualitative one and, more importantly, the Promotion Regulation was inspected in terms of humanities and social sciences experts’ perspectives

The current study aims at determining the possibility of applying the citation network of the available references in postgraduate students’ research proposals for suggesting related articles.

As a quantitative and quasi-experimental research, 60 graduate students (30 MA and 30 Ph.D.) from Shiraz University, were purposefully selected and voluntarily participated in the study. The participants were students of different fields of study in the area of social science. The Web of Science Citation Indexing database, from which the source citation network was derived, was used in the study.

The findings showed that the frequency of the partially related articles was the highest among the three classes of articles (related, partially related, and unrelated). The results of the study also maintained the positive opinion of the users of the related articles suggested by reference citation network to be as effective. Comparing to the MA students, the Ph.D. candidates were also shown to consider the suggested articles to be more effective. That is, the PhD candidates regarded the suggested articles as more related. Moreover, participants with different levels of English language proficiency similarly assessed the relation of the suggested articles.

The findings of this study can provide information for researchers, research systems designers, scientific source and information retrieval system advisors and specialists in the related area about the way the proposals’ citation information can be used for finding relevant information and sources, and accordingly, enriching researches.

The objective of the present study was to compare the validation criteria of the Qom Hadith Schools with indicators of resources validation in Scientometrics from the viewpoints of Hadith and Scientometrics’ experts.

The research is basic in terms of purpose and survey-descriptive in terms of method. It has also used the method of qualitative content analysis. The population consisted of  all resources written in Qom Hadith school; and 60 experts in Scientometrics and. The data were collected using Derayat Al Noor software, Hadith works by Sheikh Saduq, and a researcher-made checklist based on the Lawshe technique.

The findings showed that the most important validation criteria for Hadith in Qom Hadith school included validation through comparing Hadith with other credits and documents, the authenticity of the document, citation to the prominent critics’ views on evaluating the narrators and their narrations, narrations in the famous books, trust in the famous writings of companions, the preference of some methods of collecting Hadith, the validation of Hadith implications, careful treatment of some narrators’ works due to their lack of explicit approval, verbal beliefs, the multiplicity of Hadith, attention to the narrator's citation and the content analysis of Hadith.

Conclustion: 

An agreement between Scientometrics and Hadith’ experts in terms of the conformity of the indicators of resource validation in Scientometrics and validation criteria for Hadith shows a close relationship between these two areas, Therefore, the root of the citation can be found in the Hadith sciences.

Keyword and phrase extraction is a prerequisite of many natural language processing tasks. However, a review on the related Persian and English literature showed that a few studies have already been done on how to extract keywords and phrases from Persian texts. Thus, Aiming to shed light on the research status of Keyword and phrase extraction from Persian texts, the present study reviews the Persian and English publications which have assessed their research ideas over Persian texts. We also focus on each of the studies to challenge their methodologies, implementations and evaluation methods and measures.To our knowledge, a total number of 14 Persian and 6 English papers exist which have worked on the extraction of Persian keywords and phrases. Investigating on the papers revealed that they were mostly based on statistical and linguistic information. A majority of the papers suffered from the lack of either appropriate methodologies or lucid explanation of their research ideas. They generally used non-standard datasets and vague or problematic metrics to evaluate the experimental systems. Generally speaking, except for 3 papers that appropriately reported their proposed methods, the other papers lacked reproducibility and generalizability. Hence, their results cannot be confidently used as a benchmark in evaluating future works, and their proposed ideas cannot be employed in developing applications for extraction of key words and phrases from Persian texts.

Meta-textuality can provide effective medium for facilitating information retrieval and machine learning. This study explored the strengths of two types of meta-texts (i.e., reviewers' comments and citation contexts) in correct classification and recognition of their related texts and main sections at abstract level.

Eight hundred and forty-six randomized controlled trials were selected and their reviewers' comments and citation contexts were extracted from Cochrane reviews and Colil databases. Thirty seed documents were randomly selected as queries and their abstract similarities to the test collection and the main sections (IMRaD: introduction, method, results, discussion) were calculated. Receiver Operating Characteristic was used to analyze the performance of Cochrane reviewers' comments and citation contexts individually and in combination.

The citation contexts’ area under the curve (0.807) was higher than the Cochrane comments' (0.638) and reaches its highest for their combination (0.936). The former had the highest performance in correct classification of the introduction section (0.661) and the latter in correct recognition of the methodology section (0.606).

Cochrane reviewers’ comments and the citation contexts have the potential of correct classification of the related texts. The former did well in identifying the methodology section, while the latter in identifying the introduction section. Combining the two systems can boost their power in identifying the discussion section. The results can have implications for natural language processing, machine learning systems, text categorization, retrieval and summarization.

The overall purpose of the present study is to investigate the conformity of the writing behavior of the authors and users of the Persian scientific databases to guidelines of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature in terms of writing words continuously, semi-spacely and separately.

This study is an applied one, and the research design is survey and content analysis. The population consists of two groups, available documents in three Persian scientific databases (i.e. Magiran, Regional Center and SID), and the Postgraduate education students of Shiraz University in the academic year of 2013-2014. The research instrument consists of two researcher-made checklists, each of which consists of 12 items of the selected rules among the approved guidelines of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, which include the occurrence of writing words continuously, semi-spacely and separately. 

The findings showed that the writing behavior of users in 23.25 percent of the cases was in line with the ten rules of the guidelines approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature; however, 75.76 percent of users ignored these rules. The highest rate of the Conformity was observed between the writing behavior of users with the ten rules in rule of nine (compound words containing the suffix) and the lowest of it in rule of six (Genitives Construction) and ten (Subjective and Adjective). Also, although the writing behavior of the authors was contrary to the ten rules of the guidelines of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature in only 40 percent of cases, 60 percent of authors followed these rules. The highest rate of the resemblance was observed between the writing behavior of the Authors with the ten rules in rule of eight (compound words containing the prefix) and the lowest of it in rule of six (Genitives Construction). Moreover, the findings showed that even though 62.6 percent of the users knew how to insert semi-spacely words through the computer keyboard, most of the users ignored this.

This research and similar studies could make the Academy of Persian Language and Literature aware of the writing behavior of the authors and users in electronic environments while confronting words with several writing forms. Thus, they may assist the academy in prioritization and policy-making to improve the guidelines on the Persian script. As a result, it is possible to take a standardized and unified script accepted by most of the users.

The purpose of this research is to determine the status of Iran's national newspaper websites based on the search engine optimization measures. This is an applied research and has been done by computer content analysis method. 110 Web sites of Iran's national newspapers was reviewed through the SEO analytics web site (SEO) in terms of general SEO, website speed, website security and total three measure. The findings of this study showed that the SEO average total score of Iran's national newspapers websites (54.08) had a significant difference from the optimal SEO score for Web site (75%). Only five newspapers named Pirozi, Forsat, JameJam, Amin and PayameMa had a score above 75. Fifty seven websites scored between 51 and 75, and 48 websites scored between 0 and 50. Also, the results showed that there is a significant difference between 3 category of Seo measures (SEO general measures, loading speed and SEO security) of Iran's national newspapers website. The mean scores of the above-mentioned categories were significantly different and the general SEO measures are more important than speed loading and security measures.

Scientific recommender systems have been developed to provide users with resources that are close to their information needs. The main objective of the present study was to compare the effectiveness of the related articles recommender systems in Google Scholar and Web of Science databases from the users’ perspectives.

This is an applied research with comparative approach. The samples included both human and paper ones. The human samples consisted of 120 Ph.D. candidates at Shiraz University. From among each field, thirty students (i.e., totally 120 students) participated in the study. The paper samples consisted of 2,400 related papers, 1200 of which were retrieved from Google Scholar, and 1,200 of which were retrieved from Web of Science database. The data were collected by a questionnaire and software.

The results showed that users considered both Google Scholar and Web of Science databases as effective in retrieving the related articles. There were significant differences between each of the four areas of humanities, basic sciences, engineering, agriculture and veterinary science in terms of the effectiveness of the related articles function. In addition, both databases represented the least number of related articles and the largest number of unrelated articles in the area of humanities.

Despite the importance of related articles recommender systems, there was no evidence that measures the effectiveness of related articles recommender systems in Web of Science and Google Scholar.

Perception of icons is one of the most important elements of graphical user interface in information systems that is affected by personal and environmental factors, including user's mental models. The present study tended to investigate factors affecting on the user's mental models of icons in digital library software. This is an applied research using qualitive and quantitive approach. Gathering data tool in quantitive section is researcher-made questionnaire and in qualitive section is semi-structured interview. The participants consisted of B.A. and M.A. students of knowledge and information science in Shiraz University and Shiraz University of Medical Sciences and Shiraz University librarians, 174 persons. According to the results, " experience", "icon's functions", "external characteristics of icon", and "context" are four main categories affecting on user's mental models of icons. "Experience" includes user's former familiarity and experience and " icon's functions " includes compatibility of icon function with its picture, referring the icon to unknown and uncommon function rather than common function, common function in different applications and special functions of some of icons. " appearance characteristic of icons" includes color, size, clarity, context and complexity of icon. It hasn’t been any research that investigate factors affecting on user's mental models of icons in digital library software. Recognition of factors affecting on user's mental models can help digital library software designers to design the icons that have more consonancy with users’ mental models and eventually provide users satisfaction.

The present study tends to investigate the relation between the complexity and semantic distance of Icons and their Effectiveness in searching module of Simorgh, Azarakhsh and Nika applications. Following a correlational survey, the participants of this research consisted of two groups: specialists and end-users. The former consisted of 30 PhD in Knowledge and Information Science, and the latter included undergraduate students of Shiraz University. First, the effective and non-effective icons were identified by end-users. Then, their complexity and semantic distance was investigated by specialists. The results of the study showed that there was a statistically significant difference between effective and non-effective icons; effective icons have less complexity and semantic distance than non-effective icons. Furthermore, it showed a significant strong relationship between the complexity of icons and their semantic distance. The more complexity, the more semantic distance it was, and vice versa. Despite the importance of the studies on the relation between the complexity and semantic distance of icons and their effectiveness, little attention is paid to it in the area of digital library applications. Investigating the studies on the relation between the complexity and semantic distance of icons and their effectiveness may clarify effective icons’ features. It also helps designers to design effective icons and build better and easier interaction between users and digital library application.

The present study intended to investigate the librarians’ mental model completeness scale of the icons in the circulation and cataloging modules of Azarakhsh, Simorgh and Nika digital library applications. Following a survey research design, The population of this research consisted of the librarians who were familiar with at least one of the digital library applications. Since the number of them was limited (174), they were selected using census. According to the results, in both circulation and cataloging modules, the librarians’ mental model of the icons was more complete in Simorgh application than those of Azarakhsh and Nika. Furthermore, a list of icons in the circulation and cataloging modules of the three applications, in which the librarians’ mental model of the icons’ functions was complete and incomplete, was provided. Since the users’ mental models of the icons in both circulation and cataloging modules might be incomplete or incorrect, one can determine the required instruction for the librarians by investigating the mental models’ completeness scale. Furthermore, providing a list of icons in which the librarians’ mental model of the icons’ functions is complete helps designers to design user interface in such a way that it corresponds to the users’ mental models as much as possible.

One indicator to assess the journals in international studies is the quality of guide for authors. The aim of this study is to determine the quality of guide for authors in Iranian journals.The population consisted of 755 Persian journals approved by Ministry of Science, Research and Technology in March 2013. Using a checklist, authors reviewed separately the content of guide for authors of 501 journals that provided access to their guide for authors through the web.according to the results, a total of 40% of the observed items were met. In addition, of the four studied sections, including generalities, legal and ethical issues, article structure and appearance, legal and ethical issues (18%) and appearance (56%) had the worst and best status respectively. In terms of the severity of problems, "violation of individuals or group rights"," how to write abbreviations and acronyms", "accepting journal requirements and laws", and "writing manuals used by authors" had the highest severity rankings.

This paper has two main goals: first، to evaluate the position of Geological Survey of Iran Library through the assessment of internal (strengths and weaknesses) and external (opportunities and threats) environment; and then، provide solutions and strategies to help library managers and administrators to achieve their goals، missions and visions. Among the existing models، David، Fred & Hunger''s model and strategic factors analysis technique (SWOT) was applied. Data were collected by analyzing library documents، interviews with stakeholders and a questionare developed by the researchers. Interveiw questions and questionnaire were constructed based on Iranian Special Library Standards. By analyzing the data، internal and external strategic factors were identified and ranked according to their importance and weight. The results show the score of 2. 999 and 2. 275 for internal and external factors evaluation، respectively; in other words، based on the evaluation of internal and external factors، the library stands in a middle position. Based on the findings، sixteen main strategies concerning with services، management، human resources، and equipments، with priority schedualing، was proposed. Originality: This research can be regarded as the first study which has evaluated an important special library in Iran using internal and external factors analysis. This study developed a set of guidelines and strategic factors in various categories that can be applied by the library and other libraries for the future planning and actions.

this is a pilot study tends to investigate correlation between centrality measures with bibliographic coupling as a well-known citation-based document similarity measure. using citation analysis method، 40 research articles belonging to four engineering/pure disciplines (Physics، Chemistry، Biology، and computer) and four Humanities and Social disciplines (Economics، Education، Psychology، and Sociology) published in 2011 and indexed in Web of Knowledge Database besides their citation links with 4000 other article (100 citation per article) were randomly selected as research population. Data were extracted and analyzed using UCINet and Bibexcel programs. findings demonstrated that there are high significant correlation (Z=0/01) between centrality measures and bibliographic coupling; and so، centrality measures have potential features for further analysis in order to apply them as new citation- based similarity measures. Originality/Value: this research suggested new citation-based similarity measures which can be applied in databases and search engines algorithms to measure similarity of documents more accurately.

This paper presents the results of a heuristic-based user interface evaluation of Iranian Information & Documentation Dissertations Database. Five library and information specialists were used as evaluators in two different stages of the research. At the first stage, they are asked to review each element of the interface and judge its compliance with a checklist principles; and at the second stage, they were asked to rate the severity of each problem found at the first stage. The results of the study indicate that 35.63 percent of the checklist principles were observed. In addition, among seven areas covered by the checklist, bibliographic information, with considering 100 percent of principles, stands at the top; and operational control with 10 percent is at the bottom. Furthermore, in a 0 to 4 rating scale, the highest and the lowest severity rating of difficulties belong to access points (3.71) and screen display (2.50) respectively. The total severity rating of all areas came to 3.17. The results also demonstrated that there are, not only numerous problems in the user interface of this database, but also most of them (about 3/4) are major and catastrophic problems.