Outlines the history of information visualization, the present state of the art, and the possibilities and challenges that lie ahead. Describes how the articles in this special issue (devoted to visualizing information) help explain the principles and practices of information visualization. Challenges technical communicators to expand their view…

Provides selected article titles and descriptive material drawn from the pages of the "Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS)" and its precursor title, "American Documentation," dating from the beginning of the journal in January 1950 until the spring of 1999. Descriptions are arranged by subject and…

Discusses research dealing with the cognitive aspects of formal systems of knowledge representation. Highlights include the origins and theoretical foundations of the cognitive viewpoint; cognition and information science; cognitivism, mentalism, and subjective individualism; categorization; mental models; and sociocognitive approaches to indexing…

Addresses concerns of museum informatics as an application domain and calls for new methods in information science as a whole. Topics include the design of museum spaces; information retrieval methods; multimedia integration; social interaction and the World Wide Web; tools of virtuality; and technology and the Americans with Disabilities Act.…

Introduces some of the considerations behind the teaching of research methodology at the Royal School of Library and Information Science (Denmark) at the masters level. Discusses information retrieval experiments; sampling problems; the concept of a model; and statistical analysis and its role in information retrieval experiments. (Contains 25…

Outlines the importance of chemical patents as an information source, highlighting the area of structural information and some of the special characteristics of the generic (Markush) type of description. Summarizes important research at Sheffield University (United Kingdom) performed from 1979 to 1995 by a team led by Mike Lynch. (PEN)

For the case of the distribution of papers across authors, the Success-Breeds-Success or Cumulative Advantage model is a popular candidate for informetrics. The method of time pattern of publication for individual authors can be used to discriminate between Cumulative Advantage and non-uniform giftedness models. The non-uniform giftedness model is…

Investigates the effect of journal self-citedness on "Journal Citation Reports" (JCR) rankings of library and information science and genetics journals using data from 1994 on CD-ROM. Results for library and information science indicate that the effect of self-citedness on both JCR impact factor and total citation rankings was minimal.…

Discusses the provision of Internet-based distance learning courses in the library and information science field and investigates the current market situation for online courses. Highlights include types of courses, including self-instruction courses, short credit courses, and full degree programs; Web site characteristics; technical issues;…

Discusses the state of library education in Australia and refutes a previous article that suggested a loss of quality. Topics include faculty staffing questions; information science education versus library education; theoretical versus practical knowledge; and offering opportunities for fieldwork. (LRW)

Suggests concepts related to information that would be valuable to library users, including the expenses related to information; unique qualities and characteristics of databases; limits of the Web; understanding differences between magazines and scholarly journals; search engine differences; and an appreciation for the amount and variety of…

Discusses information visualization and cocitation analysis and demonstrates the use of an integrative approach to visualizing and tracking the development of competing scientific paradigms. Assumes that a cluster of highly cited and cocited scientific publications in a cocitation network represents the core of a predominant scientific paradigm.…

Zipf's law states that if words in a text are arranged in decreasing order of occurrence, then the product of the rank of a word and the number of times it occurs is a constant of that text. Examination of the probabilities of occurrence of multi-word phrases in information retrieval in relation to the probabilities of occurrence of single words…

Proposes a model, based on a "maximum ranking method," for more simply estimating the frequency of any same-frequency words and identifying the boundary point between high-frequency and low-frequency words in a text. This model was used successfully with English and Chinese texts, demonstrating that the frequency of words and number of…

Term co-occurrence analysis of INSPEC classification codes and thesaurus terms used to index Medical Informatics literature reveals an information science and technology perspective on the field, to accompany the biomedical perspective previously reported. This study continues the search for a better understanding of the structure of Medical…