This paper presents the first systematic investigation into the search engine optimization practices of major contract cheating websites in the United States. From a business perspective, visibility in organic search engine results is considered one of the top client recruitment tools. The current understanding of student recruitment strategies by…

Purpose: Universities play an important role in the promotion and implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This study aims to examine the visibility of information about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on the websites of Spanish and major international universities, by means of a quantitative and qualitative analysis…

Citation indices providing information on backward citation (BWC) and forward citation (FWC) links are essential for literature discovery, bibliographic analysis, and knowledge synthesis, especially when language barriers impede document identification. However, the suitability of citation indices varies. While some have been analyzed, the…

Sourcing and intertextual integration skills are critical to the development of young students' digital literacy skills. Sourcing skills include identifying source parameters (e.g., recognizing the author, publication date, publisher) and analyzing the author's expertise. The objective of this study is to investigate which sourcing skills used by…

While geographic search filters exist, few of them are validated and there are currently none that focus on Germany. We aimed to develop and validate a highly sensitive geographic search filter for MEDLINE (PubMed) that identifies studies about Germany. First, using the relative recall method, we created a gold standard set of studies about…

As adolescents turn to online resources for health information, obstetricians and gynaecologists can play an active role in creating evidence-based resources for sexual health education. The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of a sexual health education website on adolescent girls' reproductive health knowledge and self-efficacy. It…

This pilot study explored effects of hearing loss on deaf children's reading comprehension in an online context. Eighteen deaf secondary students, ages 12-14 years (11 with British Sign Language as their dominant language, seven with English as their dominant language) engaged in an online research comprehension task. Six age-matched hearing…

People rely on the internet for easy access to information, setting up potential confusion about the boundaries between an individual's knowledge and the information they find online. Across four experiments, we replicated and extended past work showing that online searching inflates people's confidence in their knowledge. Participants who…

The control of information is embedded in the cultural politics and institutions that regulate access to information. In its most basic form, communication is a practice of enabling the exchange of information. Websites have become one of the primary ways that people access information; however, most of the access is mediated through search…

The Systematic Review Toolbox aims provide a web-based catalogue of tools that support various tasks within the systematic review and wider evidence synthesis process. Identifying publications surrounding specific systematic review tools is currently challenging, leading to a high screening burden for few eligible records. We aimed to develop a…

Inclusive education is a global rights-based response to educational exclusion. It is communicated through a range of modalities, but analysis predominantly focuses on discourses constituted in written texts. Systematic research is needed to understand the discursive ensembles constituted by the visual mode. Our interest is in images of inclusive…

Along with the spread of Web 2.0 technologies, individuals' habits such as learning, socializing, and getting information have changed rapidly. A lot of information, the accuracy of which cannot be trusted, is available in the web, and it becomes difficult to choose useful, relevant, and accurate information. This pollution is also present in the…

The internet constitutes an important platform for parents to find information. How online information searching is linked to parental self-efficacy (PSE)--defined as parents' perceptions about their abilities to have a positive impact on their children--is still unknown. This two-wave study examined cross-lagged associations between PSE and…

How does the presence of information, or lack thereof, affect consumer behaviors and firm outcomes in the context of digital economy? My dissertation examines this broad question in three different empirical contexts. In the first chapter, I study how providing brand information influences the performance of job ads on an online job search…

Background: A priori assumptions about specific behavior in test items can be used to process log data in a rule-based fashion to identify the behavior of interest. In this study, we demonstrate such a top-down approach and created a process indicator to represent what type of information processing (flimsy, breadth-first, satisficing, sampling,…