Scholars in major us research universities were surveyed to explore the normative bases of acknowledgement behaviour. Measures of agreement and divergence were established in respect of five issue sets pertaining to acknowledgement practice: expectations, etiquette, ethics, equity and...

Hypertext may transform the practice and culture of science by opening up texts for comment and verification in ways which have previously been impossible. A brief introduction is given to the technology of hypertext, and the effects are explored in contexts which range from the conceptual base...

The paper presents the results of the author's recent study of new media and productivity in a group of UK information scientists. The journal article was the primary focus of the study. Publishing was modelled in terms of stakeholder groups and analysed using a methodology from systems design,...

The authors offer a brief analysis of citation practice in twenty‐five American sociological journals, in an attempt to explore claims that citation may show gender bias. Their work follows previous surveys of gender and citation and publication in the social sciences which suggest that women...

Communities of practice have been identified as sites where knowledge is created in organisations. The author reviews studies of situated learning and situated action and suggests that these two activities may characterise the learning process in communities of practice where they are supported...

The difficulties of basing healthcare on literary warrant have been explained in different ways: busy practitioners have no time to read extensively, physical access is difficult, and adequate surrogates for texts like indexes, abstracts, systematic reviews are partial in their coverage. The...

Women‘s studies has emerged as a recognised academic specialty in recent years. We explored the social structure of the field by analysing bibliometrically all scholarly articles (n = 1,302) and acknowledgements (n = 595) appearing in three pioneering journals over a twenty year period. We...