We have used 199 million papers over 5 decades and 21 million patents to demonstrate that teams increasingly dominate solo authors in the production of knowledge Research is increasingly done in teams across nearly all fields Teams typically produce more frequently cited research than individuals do, and this advantage has been increasing over time Teams now also produce the exceptionally high-impact research, even where that distinction was once the domain of solo authors These results are detailed for sciences and engineering, social sciences, arts and humanities, and patents, suggesting that the process of knowledge creation has fundamentally changed

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The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge

Response representativeness is more important than response rate in survey research. However, response rate is important if it bears on representativeness. The present meta-analysis explores factors associated with higher response rates in electronic surveys reported in both published and unpublished research. The number of contacts, personalized contacts, and precontacts are the factors most associated with higher response rates in the Web studies that are analyzed.

A Meta-Analysis of Response Rates in Web- or Internet-Based Surveys

IFIRST MENTIONED THE IDEA OF AN IMPACT FACTOR IN Science in 1955. With support from the National Institutes of Health, the experimental Genetics Citation Index was published, and that led to the 1961 publication of the Science Citation Index. Irving H. Sher and I created the journal impact factor to help select additional source journals. To do this we simply re-sorted the author citation index into the journal citation index. From this simple exercise, we learned that initially a core group of large and highly cited journals needed to be covered in the new Science Citation Index (SCI). Consider that, in 2004, the Journal of Biological Chemistry published 6500 articles, whereas articles from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences were cited more than 300 000 times that year. Smaller journals might not be selected if we rely solely on publication count, so we created the journal impact factor (JIF). The TABLE provides a selective list of journals ranked by impact factor for 2004. The Table also includes the total number of articles published in 2004, the total number of articles published in 2002 plus 2003 (the JIF denominator), the citations to everything published in 2002 plus 2003 (the JIF numerator), and the total citations in 2004 for all articles ever published in a given journal. Sorting by impact factor allows for the inclusion of many small (in terms of total number of articles published) but influential journals. Obviously, sorting by total citations or other provided data would result in a different ranking. The term “impact factor” has gradually evolved to describe both journal and author impact. Journal impact factors generally involve relatively large populations of articles and citations. Individual authors generally produce smaller numbers of articles, although some have published a phenomenal number. For example, transplant surgeon Tom Starzl has coauthored more than 2000 articles, while Carl Djerassi, inventor of the modern oral contraceptive, has published more than 1300. Even before the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) appeared, we sampled the 1969 SCI to create the first published ranking by impact factor. Today, the JCR includes every journal citation in more than 5000 journals—about 15 million citations from 1 million source items per year. The precision of impact factors is questionable, but reporting to 3 decimal places reduces the number of journals with the identical impact rank. However, it matters very little whether, for example, the impact of JAMA is quoted as 24.8 rather than 24.831. A journal’s impact factor is based on 2 elements: the numerator, which is the number of citations in the current year to items published in the previous 2 years, and the denominator, which is the number of substantive articles and reviews published in the same 2 years. The impact factor could just as easily be based on the previous year’s articles alone, which would give even greater weight to rapidly changing fields. An impact factor could also take into account longer periods of citations and sources, but then the measure would be less current.

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The History and Meaning of the Journal Impact Factor

From the Publisher:
Some Web sites "work" and some don't Good Web site consultants know that you can't just jump in and start writing HTML, the same way you can't build a house by just pouring a foundation and putting up some walls You need to know who will be using the site, and what they'll be using it for You need some idea of what you'd like to draw their attention to during their visit Overall, you need a strong, cohesive vision for the site that makes it both distinctive and usable 
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web is about applying the principles of architecture and library science to Web site design Each Web site is like a public building, available for tourists and regulars alike to breeze through at their leisure The job of the architect is to set up the framework for the site to make it comfortable and inviting for people to visit, relax in, and perhaps even return to someday 
Most books on Web development concentrate either on the aesthetics or the mechanics of the site This book is about the framework that holds the two together With this book, you learn how to design Web sites and intranets that support growth, management, and ease of use Special attention is given to: 
The process behind architecting a large, complex site Web site hierarchy design and organization Techniques for making your site easier to search


Information Architecture for the World Wide Web is for Webmasters, designers, and anyone else involved in building a Web site It's for novice Web designers who, from the start, want to avoid the traps that result in poorly designed sites It's for experienced Web designers who have already created sites but realize that something "is missing" from their sites and want to improve them It's for programmers and administrators who are comfortable with HTML, CGI, and Java but want to understand how to organize their Web pages into a cohesive site 
The authors are two of the principals of Argus Associates, a Web consulting firm At Argus, they have created information architectures for Web sites and intranets of some of the largest companies in the United States, including Chrysler Corporation, Barron's, and Dow Chemical

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

User errors cause or contribute to most computer security failures, yet user interfaces for security still tend to be clumsy, confusing, or near-nonexistent. Is this simply due to a failure to apply standard user interface design techniques to security? We argue that, on the contrary, effective security requires a different usability standard, and that it will not be achieved through the user interface design techniques appropriate to other types of consumer software.

To test this hypothesis, we performed a case study of a security program which does have a good user interface by general standards: PGP 5.0. Our case study used a cognitive walkthrough analysis together with a laboratory user test to evaluate whether PGP 5.0 can be successfully used by cryptography novices to achieve effective electronic mail security. The analysis found a number of user interface design flaws that may contribute to security failures, and the user test demonstrated that when our test participants were given 90 minutes in which to sign and encrypt a message using PGP 5.0, the majority of them were unable to do so successfully.

We conclude that PGP 5.0 is not usable enough to provide effective security for most computer users, despite its attractive graphical user interface, supporting our hypothesis that user interface design for effective security remains an open problem.

We close with a brief description of our continuing work on the development and application of user interface design principles and techniques for security.

/pdf/why-johnny-can-t-encrypt-a-usability-evaluation-of-pgp-5-0-xlyap9x2p2.pdf

Why Johnny can't encrypt: a usability evaluation of PGP 5.0

Handbook of usability testing: How to plan, design, and conduct effective tests

We chronicle the use of acknowledgments in 20th-century scholarship by analyzing and classifying more than 4,500 specimens covering a 100-year period. Our results show that the intensity of acknowledgment varies by discipline, reflecting differences in prevailing sociocognitive structures and work practices. We demonstrate that the acknowledgment has gradually established itself as a constitutive element of academic writing, one that provides a revealing insight into the nature and extent of subauthorship collaboration. Complementary data on rates of coauthorship are also presented to highlight the growing importance of collaboration and the increasing division of labor in contemporary research and scholarship.

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A cast of thousands: coauthorship and subauthorship collaboration in the 20th century as manifested in the scholarly journal literature of psychology and philosophy

Web citations have been proposed as comparable to, even replacements for, bibliographic citations, notably in assessing the academic impact of work in promotion and tenure decisions We compared bibliographic and Web citations to articles in 46 journals in library and information science For most journals (57%), Web citations correlated significantly with both bibliographic citations listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index and the ISI's Journal Impact Factor Many of the Web citations represented intellectual impact, coming from other papers posted on the Web (30%) or from class readings lists (12%) Web citation counts were typically higher than bibliographic citation counts for the same article Journals with more Web citations tended to have Web sites that provided tables of contents on the Web, while less cited journals did not have such publicity The number of Web citations to journal articles increased from 1992 to 1997

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/13387/WebCitation.pdf;sequence=3

Bibliographic and Web citations: what is the difference?

We chronicle the use of acknowledgments in 20th century chemistry by analyzing and classifying over 2,000 specimens covering a 100-year period. Our results show that acknowledgment has gradually established itself as a constitutive element of academic writing--one that provides a revealing insight into the structural nature of subauthorship collaboration in science. Complementary data on rates of coauthorship are also presented to highlight the growing importance of teamwork and the increasing division of labor in contemporary chemistry. The results of this study are compared with the findings of a parallel study of collaboration in both the social sciences and the humanities.

Visible, less visible, and invisible work: patterns of collaboration in 20th century chemistry

The number and type of Web citations to journal articles in four areas of science are examined: biology, genetics, medicine, and multidisciplinary sciences. For a sample of 5,972 articles published in 114 journals, the median Web citation counts per journal article range from 6.2 in medicine to 10.4 in genetics. About 30% of Web citations in each area indicate intellectual impact (citations from articles or class readings, in contrast to citations from bibliographic services or the author's or journal's home page). Journals receiving more Web citations also have higher percentages of citations indicating intellectual impact. There is significant correlation between the number of citations reported in the databases from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now Thomson Scientific) and the number of citations retrieved using the Google search engine (Web citations). The correlation is much weaker for journals published outside the United Kingdom or United States and for multidisciplinary journals. Web citation numbers are higher than ISI citation counts, suggesting that Web searches might be conducted for an earlier or a more fine-grained assessment of an article's impact. The Web-evident impact of non-UK/USA publications might provide a balance to the geographic or cultural biases observed in ISI's data, although the stability of Web citation counts is debatable.

Debora Shaw

Papers

Handbook of usability testing: How to plan, design, and conduct effective tests

A cast of thousands: coauthorship and subauthorship collaboration in the 20th century as manifested in the scholarly journal literature of psychology and philosophy

Bibliographic and Web citations: what is the difference?

Visible, less visible, and invisible work: patterns of collaboration in 20th century chemistry

Web citation data for impact assessment: A comparison of four science disciplines