Develops a new model for a process that generates Lotka's Law. Topics include measuring scientific productivity through the number of publications; rate of production; career duration; randomness; Poisson distribution; computer simulations; goodness-of-fit; theoretical support for the model; and future research. (Author/LRW)

Argues that an examination of expert-novice relationships in unfolding interaction should not proceed from the static and unidirectional view that knowledge and status are distributed as functions of "a priori" categories such as age, gender, and hierarchical rank. Demonstrates that the constitution of expert-novice in dynamic interaction is a…

Discusses topical relevance and situational relevance, which takes into account the impact of the retrieval system on the user, in the context of medicine. Topics addressed include scientific validity; limitations of current evaluation methodology, including recall and precision; and a framework for future retrieval research based on an…

Applies a method for generating synopses of scientific fields to a co-citation cluster in field of cancer virology and describes the resulting specialty narrative. Implications of procedure for the cognitive processes involved in reviewing a field are discussed. Appended are lists of highly cited and citing papers. (35 references) (EJS)

Presents and discusses a model policy regarding faculty publishing in scientific and technical journals that was developed by the Triangle Research Library Network (North Carolina). Highlights include the current scholarly communication system, including incompatibility between the goals of academic researchers and the goals of publishers;…

Focuses on two aspects of the information requirements related to global change: (1) the changing information needs in the global change-research community, and (2) the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center as a model for institutions supporting interdisciplinary analysis of global change research. (MDH)

Discusses research on scientific communication. Topics include theory-less and formal technical/natural scientific models of scientific communication; social-scientific, power-sensitive models; the sociology of scientific communication; sciences as fields of competition; fraud and deception; potential surplus value across subject information…

Describes a research project conducted at the University of Oulu (Finland) that applied hypermedia in designing, delivering, and using technical documents in electronic form to create interactive electronic technical manuals. A practical model for computer-aided reading supports (CARS) for technical documents is proposed based on users' needs.…

Relies on grief literature to develop a heuristic model of patterned stages of national mourning. Applies the model to lend insight into print mediated accounts of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. (NKA)

Outlines procedures for selecting scientific journals for academic library collections and provides a model which ranks data sources according to their relative weights rather than ranking the journals themselves. Use of the model in scientifically less developed countries is discussed. (Author/LRW)

Discusses the relationship between scientific and technical information (STI), technology transfer, and local economic development, and reports the results of a feasibility study conducted in Syracuse, New York. A switching station design for information transfer is recommended. Service, staffing, administration, and critical success factors for…

Presents a synopsis of the results of the first phase of a study project sponsored by the National Science Foundation that examined trends, opportunities, and problems in the dissemination of scientific and technical information in the United States. Findings that are summarized concern the use of information, information technologies, and…

One hundred French children in grade five participated in an experiment to determine how the problem frame facilitates comprehension of a problem solution text. Results demonstrate the positive role of frames in macrostructure construction and support the model of T. A. van Dijk and W. Kintsch (1983). (SLD)

A working definition is proposed for "scientific text" in terms of text function, based on pragmatic criteria derived from various approaches to the sociology of science. The term "Language for Academic-Scientific Purposes" (LASP) is preferred because it allows for the inclusion of texts in the human sciences, at the same time implicitly excluding…

Theoretical and empirical work was conducted on the role of the "mental model," or how-it-works information, in learning to operate equipment. The original project was concerned with empirical and cognitive modeling studies of how people learn to operate equipment from the kind of information contained in technical documentation. The…