This two-part dissertation centers on a re-examination of the role of book indexes in information retrieval research on full-text digital book collections in digital libraries. Early research focused on information retrieval and book indexes (in addition to other parts of books) in the 2000s when the Google Books corpus was first released to the…

The slowdown in economic development caused by traffic accidents in Spain, together with the disparity in the risk of death or injury due to traffic accidents in its provinces, makes it necessary to evaluate their road safety performance. Therefore, the objectives of the present research are, on the one hand, to find out the level of road safety…

The technological capacity that now exists to gather and store large amounts of data has improved access to information related to the academic performance, demographic profile and welfare needs of young people in a school. Improvements in data management techniques, statistical data analysis and software packages have made retrieving and…

This article outlines a procedure for examining the degree to which a common factor may be dominating additional factors in a multicomponent measuring instrument consisting of binary items. The procedure rests on an application of the latent variable modeling methodology and accounts for the discrete nature of the manifest indicators. The method…

The journal "Education in Rural Australia" (now the "Australian and International Journal of Rural Education") has been in existence since 1991. During the Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) period, the journal maintained a B ranking, indicating that it was a quality journal within a specialised field. With the abolishment…

University rankings are key drivers in national and institutional strategic planning. The increase in the number of university ranking systems and the diversity of methods and indicators used by these systems necessitate the development of an index that can measure a university's performance in all these systems at once. This article presents…

The importance of school readiness to both the future of an individual child and society as a whole has given rise to several state-specific indexes designed to measure county-level risk for starting school unprepared to learn. One such index is the Oklahoma School Readiness Risk Index (OK SRRI), comprised of indicators known to be associated with…

The literature on bibliometric indices for assessing scholarly impact, in particular the "h" index (Hirsch, 2005) and its many variants, is extensive, but nevertheless Ruscio and colleagues (this issue) succeed in making a valuable contribution. They have made the effort of collecting publication and citation data for no less than 1,750…

Ruscio and colleagues (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) have done a great service by systematically comparing indices of scholarly impact. Three aspects of their work are particularly valuable: (1) Their assessment of the proliferating collection of metrics, whose development has become something of a cottage industry,…

Limited time and budgets have created a legitimate need for quantitative measures of scholarly work. The well-known journal impact factor is the leading measure of this sort; here we describe an alternative approach based on the full structure of the scholarly citation network. The Eigenfactor Metrics--Eigenfactor Score and Article Influence…

Ruscio and colleagues (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) provide a thoughtful empirical analysis of 22 different measures of individual scholarly impact. The simplest metric is number of publications, which Simonton (1997) found to be a reasonable predictor of career trajectories. Although the assessment of the scholarly…

Ruscio et al. (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) write of a thing with which scientists and scholars are all too familiar, the assessment of published research and of its authors. The author was startled to discover how little the agenda of the paper seems to engage with factors one relies on for salary and promotion…

Inspired by a white paper produced by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, this study uses different measures of calculating the cost of a college degree at an upstate community college in New York. Departmental cost per credit hour, direct instructional costs, and full costs are all explained. A…

Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, and Mahalchik (this issue) evaluate 22 bibliometric indicators, including conventional measures, like the number of publications, the "h" index, and many "h" index variants. To assess the quality of the indicators, their well-justified criteria encompass conceptual, empirical, and practical…

The increased use of effect sizes in single studies and meta-analyses raises new questions about statistical inference. Choice of an effect-size index can have a substantial impact on the interpretation of findings. The authors demonstrate the issue by focusing on two popular effect-size measures, the correlation coefficient and the…