Editorial
Introduction
This is the first issue of the journal under its new owner, the University of Borås. The transition is at a very early stage, but already, the University library has appointed a new member of staff, Kristoffer Karlsson, part of whose job is to undertake the 'production' phase of the journal's publication. In other words, ultimately, he will be responsible for ensuring that the html of the papers follows the guidelines set out in the template, doing the author and subject indexing, and dozens of small jobs that are involved in the final stage of production. Many readers may not be particularly familiar with the work of the iSchool at Borås, so I have slightly edited a document prepared by my colleague, Dr. Nasrine Olsson, which describes the work of the School.
Until Kristoffer gets to grips with all these tasks we are working together to produce the journal, and, already, his help has been invaluable, as you can imagine when you learn that in this issue we are publishing more than seventy papers - involving 217 files! This comes about as a result of publishing the second part of the ISIC Conference proceedings, and, because papers were not ready for publication last December, all of the CoLIS Conference proceedings. Without Kristoffer being able to help, even at this early stage of his association with the journal, this would have been impossible.
As I was writing this Editorial, news came through of the death on 26th February, of Eugene Garfield, founder of the Science Citation Index, which may be said to have given new life to the nascent field of bibliometrics. Gene (as he was known to all) maintained his interests in information science long after his retirement and, in the early days of Information Research encouraged me to continue to apply for the journal to be covered by Science Citation Index, writing in support to the new owners of the service, who seemed to be reluctant to cover anything so novel as an electronic-only journal! I only met Gene personally on two or three occasions, at conferences, but he always maintained an interest in the journal, occasionally communicating with me on one issue or another. When someone leaves behind a legacy such as his, it is rather pointless to say that, 'he will be missed' - his accomplishments survive him.
In this issue
Apart from the conference proceedings, which I have already mentioned, we have an interesting clutch of papers for this issue, covering a wide variety of topics from the information behaviour of indigenous Australians to the management of information in law firms. Contrary to some opinions, we are not an 'information behaviour' journal, although the publication of the ISIC proceedings may give than impression and, in addition to the papers in that area, we have others on opinion mining, crowdsourced relevance judgements, social media use and its impact on the academic performance of students, the ability of PhD students in Lithuania to access most of what they need, freely on the Web, research methods used in Spanish information science research and reported in Spanish journals, and, finally (in Spanish), the analysis of metadata used in newspaper articles.
The authors of papers come from Australia, Brazil, China, Lithuania, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, and the USA, demonstrating the international scope of the information sciences.
Book reviews
We have (at the latest count), ten book reviews in this issue: I was interested to find from the recent user survey that we have one or two readers who use the journal almost entirely for the book reviews, in order to select material for their users. We try to ensure that the reviews are objective and fair and readers may have noticed that we don't always recommend a text! Overall, about 40% of readers read the book reviews often or very often; one wonders why 14% read them not at all!
Lastly
As the pressures in academe continue to increase, finding well-qualified referees to review papers becomes increasingly difficult. I know that Information Research is not the only journal in the field to experience this. When I spoke at the 'Meet the Editor' panel at ASIST in Copenhagen last year, it was one of the topics debated and everyone was experiencing the same problem. I know that our Regional Editors do find this difficult: fortunately, it doesn't happen with every paper, but authors are understandbly fractious when they hear nothing from us for a couple of months: the fact that the responsible Editor is on to his/her fifth attempt to find referees does not provide much relief, but all we can do is to assure authors that we are doing our best—and perhaps ask you to remember that everyone working on the journal is a volunteer, with a very busy academic life, working not for themselves, but to try to bring you the best advice available.
In previous issues of the journal I have thanked our colleagues in the University of Murcia, José-Vicente Rodriguez Munoz and Pedro Diaz who have prepared the abstracts in Spanish since we introduced that feature, so I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for all the work they have done for us over the years. José-Vicente, of course, continues as Regional Editor for the Luso-Hispanic region, and continues to advocate for the journal in that region.
I also have to thank our copy-editors, who do an excellent job, again entirely voluntarily: recently, one or two have been unable to continue and others are finding it difficult always to accept a particular task, so we shall be looking for more volunteers. If you, or anyone you know, are interested in working for the journal, do get in touch with me at wilsontd@gmail.com
Professor Tom Wilson
Editor in Chief
March, 2017