Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine to what extent the context in which people interact with online information affects people’s credibility perceptions. In this study, credibility assessment is defined as perceptions of credibility relying on individuals’ expertise and knowledge. Context has been characterized with respect to three aspects: Context as user goals and intentions, context as topicality of information, and context as information activities. The data were collected from two empirical studies. Study 1 was a diary study in which 333 residents in Michigan, U.S.A. submitted 2,471 diary entries to report their trust perceptions associated with ten different user goals and nine different intentions. Study 2 was a lab-based study in which 64 subjects participated in performing four search tasks in two different information activity conditions – information search or content creation. There are three major findings of this study: (1) Score-based trust perceptions provided limited views of people’s credibility perceptions because respondents tended to score trust ratings consistently high across various user goals and intentions; (2) The topicality of information mattered more when study subjects assessed the credibility of user generated content (UGC) than with traditional media content (TMC); (3) Subjects of this study exerted more effort into making credibility judgments when they engaged in searching activities than in content creation. These findings indicate that credibility assessment can or should be seen as a process-oriented notion incorporating various information use contexts beyond simple rating-based evaluation. The theoretical contributions for information scientists and practical implications for web designers are also discussed.

Abstract

Reddit is a large user generated content (USG) website in which users form common interest groups and submit links to external content or text posts of user-created content. The web site operates on a voting system whereby registered users can assign positive or negative ratings to both submitted content and comments made to submitted content. While Reddit is a pseudonymous site, with users creating usernames but providing no biographical data, an informal survey posted to a large shared interest community yielded 734 responses including age and gender of users. This provided a large amount of contextual biographical data with which to analyse user profiles at the first level of Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA), articulated by Susan Herring. The results indicate that older Reddit users both formulate more complex writing and enjoy more success when rated by other users. Gender data was incomplete and as such only tentative results could be proposed in that regard.

Abstract

In recent years, several studies have proposed making use of the Twitter micro-blogging service to track various trends in online media and discussion. In this study, we specifically examine the use of Twitter to track discussions of food safety in the Korean language. Given the irregularity of keyword use in most tweets, we focus on optimistic machine-learning and feature set selection to classify collected tweets. We build the classifier model using Naive Bayes & Naive Bayes Multinomial, Support Vector Machine, and Decision Tree Algorithms, all of which show good performance. To select an optimum feature set, we construct a basic feature set as a standard for performance comparison, so that further test feature sets can be evaluated. Experiments show that precision and F-measure performance are best when using a Naive Bayes Multinomial classifier model with a test feature set defined by extracting Substantive, Predicate, Modifier, and Interjection parts of speech.

Abstract

This paper attempts to highlight quantitatively the growth and development of literature in the field of ecology in terms of publication output using the resource Web of Science®. The focus of this analysis was to study the literature on ecology published in three journals, viz., Ecology Letters, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and Annual Review of Ecology Evolution and Systematics. 2946 records were retrieved for 10 years (2003–2012). The study revealed that multiple authorship in the field with collaborations of two (30.31%) and three authors (19.89%) was dominant. The Degree of collaboration, Collaborative coefficient, and Collaborative index were calculated and the applicability of Lotka’s law was tested. The study identified five-year patterns in research trends, using the three studied journals, to see if the subjects of focus changed within a decade. The most productive institution was University Calif. Davis, USA, followed by University Calif. Santa Barbara, USA, and University Queensland, Australia, and the most productive countries were the USA followed by UK and Canada.

Abstract

This study investigated the information environment of lecturers in Federal Polytechnic, Offa, Kwara State, Nigeria, in relation to their information seeking behavior, extent of use of the polytechnic library, perceptions of the resources and services of the library, level of awareness and extent of use of the open access model of scholarly communications, as well as the challenges of accessing and using information resources. It adopted the survey research method, using a questionnaire for data collection, while the descriptive statistics method was used to analyse the data, using tabular presentation and simple percentages. From a population of 280 lecturers for the study, a purposive sample of 164 was drawn. The findings showed that the lecturers’ information needs are focused on online use; they hardly use the polytechnic library due to their perceptions of the resources and services of the library. They are, to a greater extent, aware of open access initiatives, but do not publish in open access outlets, while various challenges affect their access and use of information resources for teaching and research. A recommendation was made, among others, that the polytechnic management should pay more critical attention to the library especially in the areas of adequate, current and comprehensive collections on all the programmes of the institution, as well as the provision of wireless internet services on the campus through a public-private partnership arrangement.