Discusses the goals of French academic research policy in the field of information science, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of the field. Areas of research highlighted include communication, telecommunications, co-word analysis in scientific and technical documents, media, and statistical methods for the study of social sciences. (LRW)

This overview of the research process for the novice information retrieval (IR) researcher provides guidance on selecting a research question, choosing the type of test, defining variables, developing or using databases, finding and processing queries, assigning treatments to experimental units, collecting and analyzing the data, and presenting…

Describes a citation analysis of physics, engineering, and sociology literature which was designed to determine if there were any differences in conceptual referencing patterns. The research methodology is described and suggestions for further study are offered. (Author/LRW)

Describes study of manual and experimental automated circulation systems in a university library in Nigeria. Data were collected for eight circulation activities in order to calculate the direct labor costs of circulating a book on each system. Automated system's book circulation costs were higher although direct labor costs were less. (MBR)

Results of an investigation designed to determine whether the impact factor or the immediacy index--two derivative measures of citation analysis--provide useful insights into qualitative relationships among scientific journals indicate that neither measure is significant. (MBR)

The Cobb-Douglas model applied to value added as a function of labor, capital, purchases of information services, and purchases of other input is used to investigate the use of information by the industrial sector of Croatia, Yugoslavia. It is concluded that less than an optimal amount of information resources is being used. (13 references)…

Various methods for calculating and presenting results of information retrieval (IR) evaluation research are discussed, with illustrations from recent laboratory results. Highlights include measures for calculating recall and precision, user needs for high or low level of recall, and comparisons of Boolean and ranked output retrieval. (22…

Empirical comparisons are made of three statistical sampling methods evaluated for estimating total number of relevant documents in collection for given query: simple random sampling, random sampling which assigns unequal selection probabilities to individual documents in collection, and curve fitting and extrapolation. Nine references and…