A recent letter from OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Inc.) notified SLIS faculty members Lokman Meho and Kiduk Yang that they had been awarded a significant research grant. The letter included these statements:
"It is my pleasure to inform you that your proposal, "Citation Analysis of Library and Information Science Faculty Publications: ISI Databases and Beyond," has been awarded an OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant for 2006 in the amount of $15,000.
The OCLC/ALISE LISRG Program was established in recognition of the importance of high- quality research within the fields of Library Science and Information Science. We hope this grant program will serve to encourage good ideas and quality research such as yours."
Acknowledgment of this award will be given at the "ALISE 2006 Annual Conference, All Conference and Awards Reception on Wednesday, January 18, 2006 from 6:30–8:00 pm at the Omni Hotel in San Antonio, Texas."
In recognition of this important research, SLIS is providing matching research funds of $15,000.
Javed Mostafa, SLIS Associate Dean for Research, commented that "This is fantastic news. Citation analysis, bibliometrics, and scholarly communication are core areas in the field of library and information science. Being recognized to conduct cutting-edge research in these areas highlights the high quality of scholarship taking place at SLIS with work that will likely influence other people. On the practical side, improving the ISI system which many people depend on will likely be an important contribution." He also noted, "It is the second OCLC research award that the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science has received."
Related research was presented by Lokman Meho and Kiduk Yang at a November SLIS Brown Bag Talk.
OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant Abstract:
When evaluated for hiring, tenure, or promotion, faculty members are judged in part by the influence and quality of their scholarly publications. While all academic institutions rely on the subjective opinions of peers and on assessments of publications to evaluate an author's work, many promotion and tenure committees additionally rely on citation analysis, especially because it provides a more objective indication of influence and quality. As a result, faculty members try to identify as many citations to their published works as possible to provide an assessment of the overall impact of their publications on the scholarly and professional communities. The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases—Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index—have for over 25 years been used as a starting point, and most often as the only sources, for locating citations. ISI databases, however, have several limitations that may leave gaps in the coverage of citations to an author's work. Using complete publication lists of 70 full-time faculty members randomly selected from American Library Association-accredited library and information science programs, this project will identify alternative and/or additional sources for locating citations to published works. The sources to be examined here include, among others: Full-text commercial databases (e.g., Academic Search Premier, Association of Computing Machinery Digital Library, IEEE Computer Society Digital Library, InfoTrac, JSTOR, Library Literature and Information Science Full Text, and Elsevier's ScienceDirect) and Internet sources (e.g., Google Print and Google Scholar). In exploring alternative and/or additional sources to ISI citation databases, we will answer such questions as: What sources and searching methods can and should one use to locate citations not covered by ISI? What differences do these sources make to citation counts and citation ranking for individual authors? Do these sources represent alternatives to ISI databases or do they complement them? How do citations in these sources compare to those identified through ISI databases in terms of, for example, subject coverage, language, country of origin, and publication year? In addition to answering these questions, we will develop a federated citation search system prototype that will enable users to easily obtain a comprehensive picture of an author's publication impact by automating the complex and time-consuming process of citation identification and analysis from multiple sources. The investigators will furnish OCLC with a final report following the completion of the project. The project will also result in a paper intended for presentation at national conferences and publication in the . The researchers will include recognition of the OCLC/ALISE LISRG grant in all publications and presentations of the research results.
Posted December 13, 2005