Purpose Research objects, such as datasets and classification standards, are difficult to be incorporated into a document-centric framework of citations, which relies on unique citable works. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorder (DSM)—a dominant classification scheme used...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify criteria for and definitions of disciplinarity, and how they differ between different types of literature. Design/methodology/approach – This synthesis is achieved through a purposive review of three types of literature: explicit...

Purpose – The issue of duplicate publications has received a lot of attention in the medical literature, but much less in the information science community. This paper aims to analyze the prevalence and scientific impact of duplicate publications across all fields of research between 1980 and...

Purpose – Scientific abstracts reproduce only part of the information and the complexity of argumentation in a scientific article. The purpose of this paper provides a first analysis of the similarity between the text of scientific abstracts and the body of articles, using sentences as the...

This paper summarizes the findings of a recent survey of user reactions to the abstracting services produced by The Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux (CAB). The study was carried out by the Aslib Research & Consultancy Division and funded entirely by the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux.

I remember an occasion a few years ago when I needed some advice on questionnaire design and a colleague suggested that I get in touch with the Centre for Research on User Studies at Sheffield University. ‘But of course’, I replied, quick as a flash, not wishing to betray the fact that I had...

The aim of this short paper is to draw attention to the growing importance of online retrieval of non‐bibliographic information, and to summarize the salient features of what are commonly referred to as databanks.